Over the past few months, Hollywood and Washington D.C. have been under fire, discovering case after case of sexual harassment and sexual assault that has been ignored for years. Finally, those victims are getting their justice.  

But what if sexual harassment or sexual assault were to happen at De Soto High School?

“Certainly right now, nationally, it is a topic we have needed to address for a long period of time and we have not, so it is good that we are. Hopefully we are creating more awareness for individuals about what appropriate behavior is,” Associate Principal Sam Ruff said.

Every DHS student is given a student handbook, more commonly known as an agenda. At the beginning, the agenda states all the rules of the school. This includes information about tardies, dress code, student rights and other school related things. It also has a list of Acts of Behavior Considered Unacceptable.

“5. Intimidation/harassment, threats by words or deed,” page 13.

Above the list there is a statement about punishment for any of the 23 items on the list.

“Examples, without specific limitation, of those specific acts of misbehavior by students in respect to school activities or at any school activity which are deemed to be grounds for disciplinary action, including suspension and expulsion,” page 13.

By turning a couple more pages, the reader of the school handbook is at the subheading of “Sexual and/or Racial Harassment.”

“The board of education is committed to providing a positive and productive learning and working environment, free from discrimination, including harassment, on the basis of sex, race, color or national origin. Harassment shall not be tolerated in this school district. Harassment of employees or students of the district by board members, administrators, licensed and support personnel, students, vendor and by any others having business or other contact with the school district is strictly prohibited. … All complaints of harassment will be thoroughly investigated … Violations of these policies will be treated as serious disciplinary infractions. All school complaints should be reported to a counselor or administrator. All complaints of harassment with be confidential,” page 17.

The school policy for sexual harassment and other offences like bullying can be found on the district website, under “About Us” under “Policies.”

According to the school’s policies, sexual harassment is defined as “Sexual harassment is the unlawful discrimination on the basis of sex … Sexual harassment shall include, but not be limited to, unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors and other verbal or physical conduct of sexual nature when: submission to such conduct is made either explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of an individual’s employment; submission to or rejection of such conduct by an individual is used as the basis for employment decisions affecting such individual; or such conduct has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s work performance or creating an intimidating, hostile or offensive work environment. Sexual harassment may include, but is not limited to: verbal harassment or abuse; pressure for sexual activity; repeated remarks to a person, with sexual or demeaning implication; unwelcome touching; or suggesting or demanding sexual involvement accompanies by implied or explicit threats concerning an employee’s job status.”

The school policy also states, “School administrators who fail to investigate and take appropriate corrective action in response to complaints of sexual harassment may also face disciplinary action.”

While bullying and sexual harassment can be confused for the same thing, there are some slight differences.

“There is a difference between harassment and bullying. So bullying is repeated, targeted and repeated and harassment, can be that, so if somebody harasses multiple times then it becomes bullying, but harassment can also be a one time thing where as bullying is not,” Ruff said. “If somebody says something mean to you once, that is verbal harassment, it is not necessarily bullying. Bullying is when there is a power dynamic being created by students or individuals and that it is repeated with the intent of trying to make someone feel a certain way, whereas harassment can be just a one time thing.”

DHS wants their students to always feel safe and like they have someone in their corner. Here is what to do in case of something like sexual harassment or sexual assault were to happen at DHS.

“[If sexual harassment were to happen at DHS] we would look into it and talk to individual students or potential victims or witnesses to it and then act in an appropriate manner to discourage that behavior. It [punishments] can include things such as parent meetings as the way to long-term suspension and expulsion, because there is a wide range of behaviors that can be considered to be sexual harassment,” Ruff said.

If a student falls victim to sexual harassment they first should tell an adult they trust at DHS. It might seem like a daunting task, but the faculty at DHS are there to help.

“They [students] are more than welcome to come to an administrator or a counselor. They are more than welcome to go to a teacher, but the teacher probably would refer them to a counselor or administrator,” Ruff said.

Counselor Chrissy Johns agrees.

“It is probably more appropriate to go to a counselor, and then it will eventually make its way up to administration, because that is kind of our protocol is the administration would deal with it and the counselors would be there for support and to help [the student(s)] get through the situation and where as the administration would do more of the looking into it and getting students stories or if other people have proof or if other people had heard thing,” Johns said.

While the administration handles the investigation, counselors help the student involved.

“We [the counselors] are more of a triage type. I do not want to call it a quick fix, but it is kind of like what can we do to get you through this now so that you can get back to class. But if a student is exhibiting severe issues with it [harassment] or the trauma and it can depend on the degree of the harassment, we would want them to seek out therapy with an actual licensing practicing counselor,” Johns said.

Students’ privacy is also protected and respected throughout investigations and the people involved, who are on a need-to-know-basis, as said in the district policies.

“We do not talk about other kids to parents. I’m not going to have a conversation about you with anybody other than your parents. A little bit of the challenge is that if you wanted to speak with me and I pulled you out of class, then you are in a class with 28 other kids and they see you get called to the office so then they are like ‘something is up’ so sometimes that can create a little bit of a challenge. But we try to honor people’s privacy with regards to that. Again it is a super sensitive subject matter,” Ruff said.

Authorities will also get involved if needed.

“It [getting the school resource officer or local authorities] is really going to depend upon the nature of the harassment. On one hand, you can have a student say something inappropriate and we have a parent meeting and the student gets a consequence and that is not necessarily a situation where we want to include the SRO immediately, certainly if there is continuing to be issues, but there are other circumstances where absolutely we want to involve the SRO right from the get-go with regards to the investigation,” Ruff said.

Additionally, it is important to have consent to prevent any sexual harassment cases from happening.

“One of the things I think there is a challenge with is how do we go about educating students, not just one sex or the other, but both as to what an appropriate personal relationships look like. The topic of consent is really important and then how to do that within the framework of other stakeholders like parents and the community and those are all things that we are super sensitive to and the privacy of students as well, we would not want to violate that,” Ruff said.