It's all quite normal, or at least it's become the norm. This aberrant behavior is now as much a part of the daily curriculum, the things children learn, as math or social studies. Or their worth in the world.
This is the searing message of another survey that came spilling out of the schoolhouse door last week. This one, commissioned by the American Association of University Women confirmed the grim fact that four out of five public school students between grades 8 and 11 - 85 percent of the girls and 76 percent of the boys - have experienced sexual harassment.
That's if sexual harassment means - and it does - "unwanted and unwelcome sexual behavior which interferes with your life." That's if sexual harassment includes - and it does - sexual comments, touching, pinching, grabbing, and worse.
The girls in schools are the more frequent targets of the more serious verbal and physical assaults. They suffer more painful repercussions in their lives, their grades, their sense of well-being.
But the notion that "everybody does it" is not far off the mark. If some 81 percent of the students in the AAUW survey were targets, here's another figure to remember. Some 59 percent - 66 percent of the boys and 52 percent of the girls - admitted that they had done unto others what was done to them.
In public spaces in public schools, nearly every student is then a target or a perpetrator or a bystander - or all three in turn. The vast majority have been up close and too personal, with sexual harassment. Yet we are still grappling with how it happened and how to change the school house and hallway.
In Minnesota, the agent of change has been a fistful of lawsuits. In California, a new law was passed that allows expulsions. Elsewhere, schools are looking for a magic bullet, a one-day workshop, a 10-point program.
