ABSTRACT
Communities of children both reflect and transform into communities of adults, so it should come as little surprise when the pathologies of one generation are also manifested in the other. Sexual harassment, once thought to be a social problem exclusive to women in the workplace, is now recognized as a common experience for both girls and boys in school. As revealed by the AAUW's well-known Hostile Hallways surveys, four out of five students in eighth through eleventh grades have experienced some form of sexual harassment in their school lives (American Association of University Women [AAUW], 1993, 2001). Sexual harassment is an intimidating challenge for school service providers, who have just begun to scratch the surface of the too often aggressive, coercive, destructive behavior patterns between boys and girls in the early adolescent years. The repercussions of school-based harassment are severe: harassment leads to children staying home from school, not talking as much in class, and decreasing their attention to their classwork (AAUW, 1993). For girls, harassment has additional detriments, most prominently to their self-esteem (Murnen & Smolak, 2001).
