Writing for Young People in the Age of #MeToo
When I was in sixth grade, my middle school held a tornado drill. We lined up along the gymnasium wall on our knees with our arms over our heads. While we crouched, waiting for the alarm to stop, a boy in the row behind me touched me inappropriately. He and his buddy laughed about it while I froze, unsure of why he had done it or what to do. That was my first #MeToo experience, and sadly, it is consistent with what many young people experience now.
(Writing About Consent in Contemporary Fiction.)
A 2016 study from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that 43 percent of participating Illinois middle schoolers had experienced verbal sexual harassment, such as sexual comments, jokes, and gestures, within the previous year. That is nearly half of all middle schoolers. In addition, 21 percent of students reported “having been touched, grabbed, or pinched in a sexual way,” and 18 percent of students said “peers had brushed up against them in a suggestive manner.”
Much like me, the students in the study were “dismissive of these experiences, even though they described them as very upsetting.” The study’s lead investigator, Dorothy L. Espelage, concluded that “students failed to recognize the seriousness of these behaviors—in part because teachers and school officials failed to address them.”
In 2017, the American Association of University Women (AAUW)’s Crossing the Line report found that 48 percent of the participating students in grade 7-12 experienced some form of sexual harassment, while only 21 percent of public schools with grades 7-12 reported incidents of sexual harassment. This massive discrepancy raises the question of whether schools are doing enough to acknowledge the incidents that are happening to their students. The lack of reporting sends a clear message that sexual harassment is not an issue, as is reflected by 44 percent of harassers saying their actions were not a big deal and 39 percent saying they were trying to be funny.
Some schools offer ways for students to anonymously report issues with self-harm, bullying, and harassment, but these services are expensive and many public schools don’t have money for such safeguards even if they want them. The question persists, though, as to what happens to all of these young people experiencing harassment whose experiences go unreported? It’s unlikely they aren’t telling anyone, and yet the instances of harassment reported by schools are alarmingly lower than the numbers self-reported by students.
This data shows why it is important that we name sexual harassment when we see it. Books like Crushed offer a safe way to introduce and discuss sensitive topics such as social media use, consent, and sexual harassment. By raising these topics and starting the dialogue, parents can ensure that their children are aware of the importance of personal boundaries and able to identify when problematic behavior takes place. More importantly, raising this topic with our children shows that we will take reports of sexual harassment seriously.
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For writers, this means presenting an honest account of what young people’s lives are really like in the Information Age. Today’s students don’t get a break from peer pressure once they make it home. The presence of social media in our lives makes it possible for negative social interactions to persist twenty-four-seven, giving young people no safe haven from the pressures of social expectations and the serious issues of bullying and harassment. They are inundated with the opinions of others at all times and left vulnerable to attack in ways and means that parents struggle to keep up with as the growth of technology far outpaces what it is reasonable to monitor or even comprehend. Yes, young people are being asked for nudes. Yes, young people are being propositioned. Yes, young people are being sexually harassed.
It can be scary to put some of these realities on the page, as it’s easy to fear that a publisher might not want to risk backlash from adult readers who prefer not to talk about these uncomfortable realities. In my experience, the more scared we are to write about a topic, the more urgently we need to write about it. Young people are living these lives every day. If we say that a particular topic is too risky to write about, we’re saying that their lived experiences do not deserve representation. We are denying their realities.
That’s not what we do in children’s literature. Writing books for young people is an honor. We have a moral imperative to represent young people’s lives accurately, unflinchingly, and with total disregard for what book banners may think of our work. Stories are how we make sense of the world, and especially in children’s literature, stories give us the opportunity to examine our life experiences and challenge both our perceptions of it and the social mores that bind us.
Books can give our young people a safe space to learn about crucial topics such as consent, boundaries, and staying safe in a digital world that they must often navigate on their own. Now more than ever, it is critical that we offer these safe spaces for our young people to make sense of their lived experiences and provide both comfort and hope for the future.
Check out Melanie Conklin’s Crushed here:
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