3 67 our research, the St. Louis Public School District has been unable to perform successfully enough to receive full accreditation from the state. In 1999, the district’s total accreditation score was just 23 points out of 100, far shy of the 66 needed for an accreditation rating.4 In addition, the city school district has suffered from decades of falling enrollments.5 It continues to face chronic problems with teacher hiring and retention and must rely on a large population of substitutes. During the period of our study, nearly 8 percent of the district’s teaching positions remained vacant, and a similar proportion of “teachers, guidance counselors and librarians [did] not have proper state certification.”6 Teachers cited low pay, lack of parental and administrative support, and discipline problems as primary among their concerns. In fact, at the time of our research, “St. Louis teacher salaries ranked 73rd out of 76 school districts” in the region.7 In chapter 1, I note that the majority of the youths we interviewed (87 percent) attended one of the St. Louis Public School District’s then alternative high schools. These schools, which served youths expelled from mainstream public schools, had the highest dropout rates in the region (82 percent), with a graduation rate of just 6.5 percent.8 From 1998 to 2002, not a single student at these schools finished at or above the state standard in test performances. The student body was more than 90 percent African American and around 70 percent low income. One of these schools, described by state evaluators as having “cracked walls and ceilings, broken windows, asbestos problems and dim lighting,” was slated for renovation prior to its closure.9 And just prior to our investigation, this school’s principal was one of four district principals terminated after a St. Louis Post-Dispatch inquiry revealed their lack of certification.10 The ten youths in our sample interviewed at a local community center also attended schools with poor outcome measures, though not quite as severe as those at the alternative schools.11 One of these schools was in such infrastructural disrepair at the time of our research that it was later rebuilt on a new site in the early 2000s. However, it “continues to be plagued by gang-related problems and has failed to overcome its reputation as an academic abyss.”12 As a consequence of these myriad problems, school offered little respite from the many problems the youths in our study faced in their neighborhoods. This includes violence. Though serious incidents remain 68 | Playing’ Too Much rare, “youths are at elevated risks for victimization when they are in school.”13 In fact, recent analyses of the National Crime Victimization Survey reveal that over one-half of youths’ experiences with victimization occur at or on the way to and from school. This includes one-half of all violent victimization.14 Moreover, as with other school indicators, school violence is geographically patterned: “Schools in urban, poor, disorganized communities experience much more violence and other forms of disorder than do schools in rural or suburban, affluent, organized communities.”15 The St. Louis Public Schools are no exception. Discipline problems rank as one of the “top concerns” of the teacher’s union, and the School Board has convened multiple task forces in an attempt to address violence and other disciplinary concerns.16 Each of the district’s middle and high schools have metal detectors and uniformed security officers, in addition to the district’s mobile security unit.17 Table 3-1 provides a count of officially reported incidents of school crime in the St. Louis school district during the time of our research. Weapons offenses and violence were even more common than drug offenses. And, as with official statistics generally, it is likely that these figures are just the tip of the iceberg since they represent only offenses that received formal response. So what does all of this have to do with gender-based violence and sexual harassment? There has been a great deal of scholarly and popular attention to the issue of school violence in the last decades. Unfortunately, the school violence literature exhibits a limitation parallel to that I raised in chapter 2 concerning urban violence: it is frequently conceptualized and studied in gender-neutral terms or assumed to be a primarily male phenomenon. Thus, young women’s gender-specific risks for violence and abuse are often not fully considered.18 Playin’ Too Much | 69 table 3-1 Reported Crime in St. Louis Public Schools 1998/1999 1999/2000 Assault/battery 179 161 Drug offenses 78 87 Rape/sexual acts 0 5 Weapons possession 96 105 Weapons used 17 12 Total disciplinary infractions 6,342 5,211 Source: Pierce, 2000 (St. Louis Public Schools data). In contrast, there has been a great deal of research outside of criminology on the problem of sexual harassment in schools. In fact, scholars in psychology and education often lament the fact that our conceptualizations of school violence often overlook the gendered dimensions of these challenges. As Nan Stein and her colleagues explain: School reform efforts which address school safety have focused on the prevention of physical violence, particularly related to the presence and use of weapons in schools. . . . This construction of school safety as zero tolerance, first for guns and now also for drugs, eclipses other more pervasive aspects of school safety, including daily threats to psychological and social safety, especially sexual harassment. . . . The omission of gender from the dominant construction of school safety and violence contributes to the disproportionate focus on the most extreme forms of violence while the more insidious threats to safety are largely ignored.19 In fact, there is a burgeoning literature on sexual harassment in schools, despite the fact that it is rarely conceptualized within the broader framework of youth violence. This research has examined the extent and consequences of sexual harassment for young women, and some scholars have paid particular attention to how the organizational and ideological contexts of schools shape sexual harassment. A significant finding of this research is that sexual harassment in school has tangible negative consequences for its female victims, including harmful effects on school performance, the curtailment of social networks, peer rejection, and negative emotional outcomes.20 Thus, it does pose, as Stein and her colleagues contend, an “insidious threat” to girls’ wellbeing. Unfortunately, though, much of what we know about sexual harassment in the educational setting has not specifically examined how disadvantaged community and school contexts shape young women’s experiences. There is strong evidence that schools in impoverished urban communities are faced with more severe violence and disorder, as well as institutional difficulties addressing these problems. Combined with the evidence I presented in chapter 2 that the visibility and cultural support for violence against women is heightened in disadvantaged community contexts, there is good reason to suspect that sexual harassment and its consequences may be especially acute in this school setting.21 70 | Playin’ Too Much Gendered Conflicts at School: Sexual and Gender Harassment During the survey portion of our interviews, we asked youths a series of questions to gauge the prevalence of behaviors researchers classify as harassment.22 Tables 3-2 and 3-3 indicate their responses to these questions. The vast majority of young women (89 percent) reported experiencing incidents of gender or sexual harassment, with most (77 percent) reporting that such events occurred in school.23 The most common incidents girls reported were those involving inappropriate sexual comments (71 percent), while just under 50 percent reported being grabbed or touched in ways that made them feel uncomfortable. Young men were most likely to admit to calling girls names or putting them down (70 percent), while just over one-half (53 percent) reported that they had either made sexual comments (48 percent) or grabbed or touched girls inappropriately (38 percent). Two factors likely account for the small differences in young women’s and young men’s reported prevalence of experiencing versus perpetrating such incidents. There were young men in our sample who expressed disapproval of sexual harassment and defined these incidents as such. Thus, it is likely that some boys are disproportionately responsible for Playin’ Too Much | 71 table 3-2 Girls’ Prevalence of Sexual Harassment Experiences (N = 35) Have boys ever called you names or said things to make you feel bad about yourself? 18 (51%) Have boys ever made sexual comments to you that made you feel uncomfortable? 25 (71%) Have boys ever grabbed or touched you in ways that made you feel uncomfortable? 17 (49%) Girls who answered “Yes” to one or more of these questions 31 (89%) Girls who reported such incidents happened to them at school 27 (77%) table 3-3 Boys’ Prevalence of Sexual Harassment Perpetration (N = 40) Have you and your friends ever called girls names or said things to put them down? 28 (70%) Have you and your friends ever made sexual comments to girls that might have made them feel uncomfortable? 19 (48%) Have you and your friends ever grabbed or touched girls in ways that might have made them feel uncomfortable? 15 (38%) Boys who answered “Yes” to one or more of these questions 32 (80%) sexually harassing multiple girls. In addition, as discussed in more detail later in the chapter, young women and young men also brought different interpretive lenses to sexually suggestive or explicit encounters. Girls routinely described such incidents as offensive and troublesome, while boys were more likely to characterize them as harmless “play.”24 Youths’ survey responses provide baseline information about the prevalence of sexual and gender harassment. Even more telling, however, is that many youths told us such events were a frequent occurrence around school. Michelle explained, “way I see it, it happen often.” Ramara concurred: “Every day . . . all through the day.” And Raymond said, “all the time.” In fact, the following dialogue with Alicia was typical: Interviewer: How often would you say that girls and guys argue at school? Alicia: I guess every day. . . . If a boy touching a girl where she don’t wanna be touched or something. [Or] it’s something the boy say to the girl or something. . . . Interviewer: How often would you say stuff like that happens at school, where a guy touches a girl inappropriately? Alicia: Every day. Interviewer: What about saying inappropriate stuff to a girl? Alicia: Every day. Young women also noted that such incidents occurred in a variety of locations around the school, including, as Tisha summed up, “classroom, hallway, cafeteria, gym, it could happen anywhere.” Likewise, Jackie explained, “like in class and in hallways. It could happen any place. They [boys] don’t care.” And Jamellah noted, “Like when you walking down the hall, that’s where it normally happen at. . . . Basically, or when you out in the yard out here . . . going home from school, or coming to school.” Youths also described a range of incident types, including forms of gender harassment, as well as verbal and physical sexual harassment. Several girls suggested that these behaviors were systematic and indicative of young men’s devaluation of young women. Anishika said, “most of the boys is disrespectful. That’s all. Like call the girls B’s [bitches] and stuff. And then like, if you don’t, if the girl don’t want them to touch ’em, they get mad and all that stuff. They basically always want to mess 72 | Playin’ Too Much with the girls, touch on ’em and all that stuff.” Asked to clarify what she meant when classifying young men’s actions as “disrespectful,” Jamellah explained, “call her out her name, grab on her butt, you know what I’m saying, something like that. That is disrespectful. Pull her hair. Anything. They think of anything to do to irk a girl.” Raymond concurred: Dudes period have attitudes, all of ’em, no matter what. All dudes got a attitude. . . . Some guys need to know how to treat women with respect and don’t put they hands on them. [But you] can’t [change them. They] look at ’em like she looks like she like that, so I can start an attitude with her. That’s how it be going. Youths’ comments demonstrate that sexual and gender harassment were not rare events but, instead, were an everyday feature of the cultural milieu at school. In addition, these events were highly public in nature, occurring in nearly every location within the building and grounds. They typically occurred in the presence of other students, and sometimes in front of school staff as well. These were important contextual features of school-based sexual harassment that shaped youths’ interpretations of the events, their likelihood of escalating, and the range of informal and formal responses available to young women. Basically, these problems appeared to be systemic, not just at the alternative schools where we interviewed (which could be expected, given that the youths were expelled from mainstream schools for behavioral problems) but also at the other schools youths attended. The youths we interviewed who attended other schools in the district told us parallel stories, and the alternative school students reflected back on their experiences before transfer. Gender Harassment Scholars use the term “gender harassment” to refer to comments and behaviors that are not explicitly sexual in nature but nonetheless convey disrespect toward women. Psychologists J. Nicole Shelton and Tabbye M. Chavous define it as “generalized sexist remarks and behaviors that convey negative and degrading attitudes about women.”25 Boys and girls described such incidents as routine and said that particular derogatory terms were guaranteed to lead to anger. Walter explained, “a girl get mad if a dude call her a bitch and all that stuff. That’s the main Playin’ Too Much | 73 word the girls get mad on.” Likewise, Terence noted that such conflicts were typically “like lil’ petty stuff . . . you know, they call a female a B [bitch] or whatever. You know, ain’t no girl gon’ stand for it, so they get amped. ’Fore you know it, they trying to fight ’em.” Conflicts between young women and young men were triggered in a number of circumstances, some of which were instigated by the boy, some by the girl, and some by other peers. Youths typically classified these broadly as “he say/she say.” Tisha explained: “It works both ways. . . . Some of the girls, they be playin’ with boys too much. Then they’ll start playing rough with ’em, then they wanna get mad, stuff like that. Or either [the boys]’ll be saying something to upset the girl, stuff like that.” Arthur concurred, “I mean, it’s just bickering. . . . I mean, anybody can get in an argument right, you know, quickly.” And Raymond explained, “he say/she say stuff [can happen] when dudes or girls be in each other’s business.” And Larry noted, “She’ll call him a scrub, he’ll call her a pigeon.26 . . . Somebody playing too much. Anything for real [can lead to conflicts between girls and dudes].” Despite the focus in this chapter, it is important to acknowledge that disputes between girls and boys could emanate from multiple sources and situations, and they were not always and clearly unidirectional. Age, popularity, physical attractiveness, friendship networks, economic and social resources—all of these, in addition to gender, come into play in determining who will have conflicts with whom, and to what consequence. Put another way, gendered power does not exist in a vacuum but overlaps with other sources of status and power.27 Nonetheless, gender inequality, and the powerful social ideologies that support it, provided young men the social advantage of “masculine power” in these circumstances. This is why feminist theorists conceptualize gender harassment as a powerful “form of social control that reifies women’s lower rank . . . [and] reinforces dominance over women.”28 The young men in our sample described having and using an expansive repertoire of gendered terms with which to assail young women when conflicts emerged. As Raymond explained, “I call girls names . . . everything . . . B’s [bitches], ho’s, rats, triflin’ tramps. . . . [Those names] be the first thing that come out my mouth to a girl who make me mad.” Likewise, Walter said: If a girl say something about me and then I don’t like her, I call ’em like bitches and ho’s and stuff like that. . . . I don’t got a problem with girls, 74 | Playin’ Too Much it’s just when girls come to me . . . and they say something to me I don’t like, that’s when I get mad. . . . [For instance,] the first couple of days [of the school year] here, this girl, she just kept staring at me. And then she say, “What the hell you staring at?” Then I be like, “Your dirty ass” and stuff like that. Like a girl say something to me I don’t like, I turn around and say something back. Then I put it in a more feeling hurting way. . . . I be calling ’em all, like all that I can think of. Thus, young men had an arsenal of derogatory gendered terms at their disposal when in verbal altercations with young women, with the weight of gender inequality in their favor. In addition, this language system was particularly pernicious because it went hand in hand with other forms of gendered mistreatment, including sexual harassment. Though scholars distinguish gender harassment as conceptually distinct from various forms of sexual harassment, in practice the two are often intertwined. Verbal Sexual Harassment In broad strokes, sexual harassment refers to unwelcome sexual conduct. It can take on a range of forms, which researchers classify roughly into categories such as verbal, physical, and visual, and can be more or less threatening or coercive in its execution.29 The youths in our study described a variety of forms of verbal sexual harassment, ranging from sexual comments or propositions, comments intended to ridicule a girl’s appearance or sexual attractiveness, and sexual threats, as well as bragging, spreading rumors, or taunting a girl about her alleged or actual sexual activities. Kenisha explained, “boys sayin’ stuff out the way, like saying stuff like about sex or something, and the girls’ll react.” Rennesha said it’s “mostly about sexual acts. Like he’ll make like a nasty comment and she’ll get mad.” And Destiny complained that “the boys get to talkin’ about your butt, talkin’ about this, talkin’ about that. They get on your nerves.” Alicia described a young man telling her, “ ‘yo’ booty big.’ ” She explained, “ain’t nobody wanna hear that, saying it all loud in front of other people.” Sometimes such comments were intended to ridicule the girl. Rennesha described a recent incident she witnessed: “This one boy told this girl [that] she’s got a fat butt but she can’t have sex good. And she got Playin’ Too Much | 75 mad . . . they was arguing back and forth.” Bobby said when he was with his friends, they would see a girl they found unattractive, “and it be like, ‘Dang, you ugly girl!’ or something like that. And you get to talkin’ about her.” Alicia told of an incident she witnessed in class on the day she was interviewed: This girl, she kinda big or whatever, and he was talking about her weight and she got mad and they started arguing and cursing and stuff. . . . People be laughing, encouraging the boy on, and making him keep doing it and doing it. So my teacher had sent them down to the office. . . . She sent the girl [too] because the girl was cursing. There are notable themes in Alicia’s account, including the role of peers in escalating harassment and problems with how teachers sometimes responded to such incidents. I revisit these issues later in the chapter. In addition to comments and ridicule, several young women reported experiencing or witnessing verbal harassment that was threatening in its intent. Destiny told us, “just yesterday this boy was talkin’ about [my friend], tell me his friends were gonna haul her down and freak all over her. And she like, ‘No you all not!’ And she got mad and she went to tell the principal.” Similarly, Katie was in class when a classmate came over and “was like, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna get you over to my house’ or whatever.” His insinuation, she noted, was that he would get her to his house for sex. Katie said her classmates heard the exchange and simply laughed at the boy’s comments. When she threatened to tell the teacher, the boy “left it alone,” but she also believed the teacher overheard the interaction yet said nothing: “He just sat there. He act like he ain’t listening to us talk but I know he do. . . . He probably just waitin’ for one of us to come and tell him.” As the following conversation reveals, Nicole was directly threatened by two boys at school, and she did not believe her experience was unique: Nicole: [Boys will] go tell a girl, “I’ma rape you.” That’s what they’ll tell a girl, for real, up here, they will. I’m like, “Naw, we takin’ that to the court. That’s gon’ get you locked up.” I know two boys up here said that to me, and I went straight to the principal. I was like, “You said you was gon’ do what to me?” 76 | Playin’ Too Much Interviewer: Two boys said that to you? Like what happened? Nicole: ’Cause one of ’em wanted my number and the other one, he was going around lyin’ sayin’ I go with him and we had sex or whatever. I was like, “I don’t like you, I never did like you and I can’t trust nan one [none] of y’all.” . . . When I got to the office, I said, “You said you was gon’ rape me.” And they was like, “We ain’t say that.” I said, “I got witnesses,” and I told [the principal]. I said, “Hold on, I’ll be right back with witnesses.” So all the girls was like, “They did say that, they did.” Interviewer: Did you think the boys would actually carry that through? Did you think they meant it? Nicole: [Nod]. And I brought my brother up here, my 23-year-old brother, and he said, “You put yo’ hands on my baby sister, we gon’ have some problems, and I mean I’m killin’ both of y’all.” . . . Interviewer: How often would you say boys threaten girls like that? Nicole: . . . They don’t hardly threaten us but they’ll say they lil’ words just to try and get us scared. But I ain’t scared of them. Not me. ’Cause I’m goin’ to tell. Nicole’s dialogue illustrates another important theme: Often conflicts between young women and young men were ongoing, with individual incidents situated within a longer pattern of interactions. A final form of verbal sexual harassment youths described as common involved young men bragging or spreading rumors about sexual encounters with young women. Nicole explained: “The boys, they just play too much. . . . They talk about ’em, they dog ’em: ‘I did this to her and she gave me head behind the building.’ I’m like, ‘What is you tellin’ us for?’ ” Lisa told us that the semester before we interviewed her, her friend was repeatedly taunted “every day at 5th period. . . . This boy was like tellin’ everybody [that my friend] had sex in the alley, she do this, she had sex with all these boys.” Lisa said such incidents were commonplace, explaining that usually: The boy, he’ll say something about the girl or they’ll start a rumor about the girl. A boy’ll be talking to [dating] one of the girls that go here and then he’ll come back and bring it back to the school, whatever they did outside of school and then it’ll just be a big ole’ argument and turn into fights. Playin’ Too Much | 77 Asked to describe such an incident, she continued: “This boy did something to this girl, he said that she did this and that to him or whatever. He brought it back to school, and she was feeling real bad about it or whatever. . . . He was sayin’ he had sex with her and that she sucked his stuff.” Young men also said it was commonplace for boys to tell stories about sexual encounters with girls at school. Tyrell explained, “dudes, they always talk about when they have sex with a girl or whatever. . . . That’s all dudes talk about when they talk about girls.” Ronald said one of his friends routinely tormented a girl in his class. Ronald described the girl as “like a freak,” because “she went over to his house [and had sex] with him one day . . . and half the people in that school she been with.” He continued the story in the following exchange: Ronald: He call her all kinds of names. . . . It be funny sometimes. It’s jokes he be making about her, it be funny. . . . He just say something, then she get an attitude and say, “That’s not true.” Then all the boys in the classroom who been with her look at her like, “You ain’t gotta lie.” Interviewer: Like what might he say and she says that’s not true? Ronald: She faced ’em up [had oral sex with them]. . . . Interviewer: And he does this in front of the whole class? Ronald: Yep. . . . Nobody like her in that class. . . . He just walk up next to her and I start laughin’. Interviewer: Does the teacher . . . know that he’s saying stuff like that about her? Ronald: Teacher don’t care. All he do is just give us our work. He just sit there and do nuttin’. Interviewer: And the other students around don’t normally say anything? Ronald: Nope. Girls be laughin’ at her [too]. . . . It be funny. At its most insidious, the escalation of such stories had devastating consequences. They tended to be targeted, as Anishika explained, at “the girls that got like bad names . . . the girls that’s disrespectful to theyself.” She described the most serious incident of this nature that we came across: 78 | Playin’ Too Much This one girl that use to go here, she dropped out or whatever. She was . . . going here, doing fine and stuff. She a real pretty girl, she had a whole lot of talent, rap and everything, I mean, wasn’t nothin’ wrong with her. It’s just the simple fact [she had sex with] like almost all the boys. . . . She’ll like ’em, and then they’ll make her think that they like her, but they got a girlfriend and stuff like that. . . . They’ll do it to her then she’ll just suck they stuff. And she’ll admit that she do that stuff, but I don’t know what for. . . . I think she just do it for attention and she has low self-esteem or something and she just don’t love herself ’cause she just doin’ it like that. . . . [Then] she just dropped out ’cause everybody be like, “You a dick suckin’ girl,” callin’ her all [kinds of] stuff. . . . They [even] took pictures of her doing it in a van. . . . They took pictures, they brought [them] to school. Anishika felt sorry for the girl, and chastised the boys who abused her: They was like, “I’ll bring [the pictures] and show you.” And I’ll be like, “Why y’all gon’ do that?” you know what I’m saying. . . . I mean, “Why would you do it? Because y’all know her self-esteem is so low.” She just doin’ it so people could like her. . . . [The boys] should just make that girl feel confident and build up her self, not lower her selfesteem more. But I mean, it just some boys that don’t care and don’t think. . . . I use to be tryin’ to encourage her and stuff, and then she just dropped out of school. . . . That’s why I think she stopped comin’. Sexual rumors were particularly troubling because they caused damage to girls’ reputations. Girls who had sex with boys outside the context of a well-delineated relationship, or were known to have had past sexual encounters with boys at school—especially oral sex—were defined and talked about by others as “nasty.” Sexually based rumors, regardless of their validity, facilitated the continuation of the sexual harassment of the particular girl about whom the rumors were based and often were perpetrated by more boys than the original source of the rumor, and even by some girls. In fact, as Anishika’s account illustrates, spreading sexual stories about particular girls could lead to even more exploitative sexual behaviors, such as taking and circulating photographs. Such incidents also illustrate the extent that school interactions were Playin’ Too Much | 79 intertwined with youths’ activities in the community. In Lisa’s language, boys “bring” their neighborhood exploits “back to the school.” Thus, girls’ neighborhood reputations—or presumed reputations—followed them to school. The following exchange with Ronald is illustrative: Ronald: Like let’s say a new girl come to the school and like one of my friends know her, they be like, “She a freak man,” and then they like, somebody talk to her and they just tell ’em that she a freak. Put it on front like that. Interviewer: And how do your friends usually know? Ronald: Nine times outta ten, they used to be with that person. Interviewer: They used to be with her? Do you ever think your friends are lying about the girl? Ronald: Sometimes I do. ’Cause I hang with a whole bunch of liars, lie about everything. . . . Like little petty stuff, like them going to a concert, they’ll lie about that. Or they’ll lie about them playin’ on a basketball team, lie about stuff that don’t even matter. Sometimes, it seemed it took only one young man to pass on a story. True or not, it had the potential to take hold. For the girl, social ostracism and ridicule followed. Physical Sexual Harassment Aside from the sometimes devastating consequences of sexual rumors, most young women believed that physical forms of sexual harassment were more egregious than verbal harassment. Destiny explained, “when they be talkin’ about my butt, I don’t like it, but I don’t trip off of it ’cause it’s stupid to me. Lookin’ and feeling are two different things, and they can look and they say what they wanna say, long as they ain’t touchin’ me I don’t care.” Likewise, of comments, Tawanna said, “I don’t pay them no attention. . . . I don’t pay it no mind.” But she distinguished this from touching: “I don’t like that. I hate when they do that. . . . They know better not to.” And Marcus explained, “you can talk all you want, but as long as you don’t touch ’em.” In fact, physical forms of sexual harassment often led to escalating conflicts between boys and girls. Nonetheless, such incidents occurred with some frequency. Cherise 80 | Playin’ Too Much complained of young men “trying to touch on you or your breast or something, trying to play it off.” And Yvonne explained that she was especially bothered by young men’s touching and stuff. Trying to touch on your boobie or your breasts or whatever. And how they come at you, you know what I’m saying, it ain’t cool. . . . It seem like we always gotta be on their head because, you know what I’m saying, you wouldn’t want nobody treating your daughter like that. If you had a daughter, you know what I’m saying. Show me respect. Some young men were open about engaging in such behavior, as the following exchange illustrates: Interviewer: Have you ever like touched girls when they’re like, you’re standing in the hallway and girls come by, you touched her? Lamont: All the time. All the time. In gym I do. . . . ’Cause I mean, that’s fun. Interviewer: What do the girls say about that when you do that? Lamont: Most of the time they keep walking. . . . I mean, sometimes I get in trouble for it, but I really don’t be trippin’ off it. Likewise, Frank said, “it happen a lot. I do it myself.” Asked why, he explained: “Oh man, I don’t know. Hey ’cause, these girls, they got big butts. Just, I’m like, damn, you just out there, guess they want somebody to touch [’em.]. . . . Pow, be smackin’ them booties and all that [laughs].” Frank also emphasized how being in the company of other young men facilitated such behaviors: We be up in the hallway, we be like, we see a good looking girl walk past, we be like “Damn!” Be like, “Man, I’m goin over there.” So we like go over there, I’m gonna hit it and quit it. Hit it and quit it, that’s all we be doing for real. I be like, “I dare you to touch her butt.” Like, “Man you go, you go touch her butt.” Bobby gave a similar account: “Say you walkin’ with one of yo’ friends or whatever and uh, they was like, ‘I bet you can’t go over there and touch her butt’ or something like that . . . and then [you] go over there [and do it].” Playin’ Too Much | 81 Despite their recognition that some girls found touching quite troubling, young men often excused the behavior so long as it wasn’t explicitly coercive. Walter said, “I’ve seen some boys try to grab or touch ’em, but they ain’t never really force them or nothing like that.” And Travis explained, “I see it happen, but man, I ain’t ever seen it happen to where it’s the point to where, boy touch a girl and the girl says ‘stop’ and he keep on doing it.” However, he clarified that this was also due to the school context: “Boys, some boys know what backing off means. If a girl say ‘No,’ that means no. You need to leave ’em alone. Especially in school anyways. School will get you in trouble.” Gender and Interpretations of Sexual Harassment As Walter’s and Travis’ comments suggest, young men rarely took sexually harassing behaviors as seriously as young women did. In fact, numerous studies have found that girls believe sexual harassment is more harmful than boys do, and this gap is especially pronounced among adolescents.30 Comparing young women’s and young men’s accounts, there were both important disparities and notable overlaps across gender