Sexual Harassment in Schools: Issues of Identity and Power — Negotiating the Complexities, Contexts and Contradictions of This Everyday Practice

Abstract

Over the past three decades educational researchers in Australia, United States, United Kingdom and Canada, in particular, have provided an extensive overview of the practice of sexual harassment in high schools and its impact on the students and teachers who experience and/or witness this behaviour (Brown et al., 2007; Epstein, 1997; Gruber & Fineran, 2007; Halson, 1991; Herbert, 1992; Howard & England Kennedy, 2006; Jones, 1985; Keddie, 2007; Klein, 2006; Larkin, 1994; Leach & Sitaram, 2007; Mahony, 1985, 1989; Renold, 2002; Robinson, 1996, 2000, 2005c). Much of this research reinforces that sexual harassment is an integral part of schooling cultures, experienced on a daily basis, and is often dismissed or rendered invisible through its ‘normalisation’ within hegemonic discourses of gender and sexuality, especially heterosexuality. However, the ‘everydayness’ of this widespread practice in schooling and its foundations within socio-cultural relations of identity and power continue to be eclipsed by the dominant discourse of sexual harassment as stemming from the psychopathological behaviours of problematic individuals. Further, in more recent years sexual harassment in schools has tended to be viewed within the more general framework of bullying, which is also constituted within psychopathological discourses. Within this context, sexual harassment becomes both depoliticised and increasingly more invisible (Brown et al., 2007).