Unruly School Boys or Sex Offenders?
Monday, July 30th, 2007By SUSAN GOLDSMITH
The Oregonian Staff
The two boys tore down the hall of Patton Middle School after lunch, swatting the bottoms of girls as they ran — what some kids later said was a common form of greeting.
But bottom-slapping is against policy in McMinnville Public Schools. So a teacher’s aide sent the gawky seventh-graders to the office, where the vice principal and a police officer stationed at the school soon interrogated them.
After hours of interviews with students the day of the February incident, the officer read the boys their Miranda rights and hauled them off in handcuffs to juvenile jail, where they spent the next five days.
Ok, so where is the balance here? Granted bad behavior in middle schoolers needs to be dealt with. Especially, when it comes to how they treat their peers. But these are middle schoolers who are guaranteed to make mistakes and it is up to us as mature adults to guide them — in a balanced manner. One could see that if the circumstance had been dealt with more even handedly that there was a real opportunity to educate both the boys and girls about physical boundaries. Thusly avoiding putting multiple families in debt, spending our tax dollars to prosecute and unfortunately stigmatizing all of these children around issues of not only sexuality but gender. The pendulum continues to swing to the right…
