Here's something communitarians of all persuasions can seize upon in blaming everyone except the guilty:

Shocking sex acts in schools

Philadelphia students as young as 5 are being caught in a variety of situations - even the rape of classmates. The district has hired abuse counselors to intervene.
By Susan Snyder

Inquirer Staff Writer

At one Philadelphia public school earlier this month, two boys were caught alone in a rest room, one atop the other, their underpants off and their groins in each other's faces.

They were kindergartners.

And it was no isolated case.

Dozens of Philadelphia School District police reports over the last year detail instances of youngsters' ordering classmates to perform sex acts, grabbing private parts, simulating sex acts on one another, and writing sexually explicit notes that sound like something out of a pornographic movie.

It's happening in classrooms and hallways, in rest rooms and on playgrounds.

While the number of morals offenses declined in Philadelphia's schools in the last year, high-profile - sometimes violent - incidents involving the youngest of students have emphasized the problem anew. The cases have prompted the district and the city's Department of Human Services to hire a private counseling agency to screen children and provide help if necessary.

Last school year, of the 462 morals offenses, 145 cases - nearly a third - occurred among the district's 71,370 students in kindergarten through fourth grade. Through Nov. 30 this school year, 36 incidents were reported in those grades.

What years ago used to be natural curiosity that manifested itself in "playing doctor" or "show and tell" has taken on a more aggressive and sexual tone in some children, who are exhibiting acts that should be far beyond their knowledge.

Experts say Philadelphia's experience is part of a growing problem nationwide as youngsters are exposed to more explicit material on television and the Internet and in their homes.

"The stuff available at their fingertips - that is really going to change the development of a whole generation of youth," said Jill Levenson, a professor of human services at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla., who researches sexual violence.

While some acts constitute assault, others appear consensual, such as the kindergartners' case at Willard Elementary in Kensington.

Students are acting out what they have seen or experienced in an abusive relationship, experts say.

"The more children are exposed to adultlike sexual behaviors, the more likely they are to try some of that on," said Thomas Haworth, director of child and adolescent services at the Peters Institute. "The children with their faces in each other's groins, that's not something you would come upon in normal childhood. That's adult sexual behavior."

The incidents have upset and shocked staff and parents.

Viviana Sweeney has yet to send her 5-year-old son back to school after a Nov. 8 incident in which a kindergarten teacher at Drew Elementary in University City discovered the boy and a classmate in a rest room, their underpants down. The other boy was lying atop her son, simulating sex with him.

Sweeney is upset that the boys were allowed together unsupervised in the rest room, which is in the classroom. Her son, she said, knows nothing of sexuality and was instructed by the other student.

When I was a kid all the kids took bathroom breaks at the same time, and the boys peed in a long trough. Now it's One. At. A. Time.

Any wonder why there's no time to learn anything?

It would never occur to anyone that the tiny minority of kids who behave this way might not belong in school. For whatever reason, they're wildly dysfunctional, and I don't see why the other kids should be made to tolerate sexual abuse at their hands, any more than they should have to tolerate violent behavior. Schools are more and more like prisons -- with more and more prison-like behavior occurring.

I realize that the communitarian approach is to blame "society" -- which includes me. But just because I live in the same world and my taxes pay for the same slop that goes into the same trough, how am I in any way responsible for where some kid sticks his little peepee -- any more than I am to be blamed if he had a gun? It is this conflict -- a basic inability to see the same set of facts in the same way -- which drives the "Culture War." It is as self apparent to me that I am not responsible for the conduct of others as it is to some people that I am. This is not rational, nor is it easy to debate, because people lose their rationality when they are blamed for conduct with which they had nothing to do. In "Bowling for Columbine," Michael Moore blamed entertainer Dick Clark (I am serious, folks) for the fact that a six year old girl was shot to death by a little boy in school. I know Moore is an abject demagogue and an extreme case, but there were all sorts of attempts on all sides by people to blame their favorite enemies for the Columbine shooting. Like we're all involved in a vast national Lockheed U.S. military Gay Goth Trenchcoat Mafia plot, or something. (I guess it would have been worse had Harris and Klebold been in the first grade....)

What is it about children which invites hysteria? Their alleged innocence? Even if we assume for the sake of argument that there is such a thing as childhood "innocence" (something which didn't really stand out as memorable when I was a child), clearly a five year old who sticks his peepee in the face of another five year old has crossed the line separating the innocent from the not-so-innocent. What sort of egalitarianism is it which allows the already-damaged to harm the yet-undamaged, then blames "society"?

What sort of egalitarianism puts bureaucratic screening programs in place which (by factoring in sexual abuse as something assumed as a lowest common denominator) might end up treating innocent childish curiosity as a sex crime? I can remember an incident in the second grade when another boy peed on me, and I "returned fire." He went and "told" on me, but fortunately the teacher yelled at both of us, then reminded the whole class of our civic responsibilities. With today's screening and testing, I don't like to think what might happen.

Why, I could even imagine some of the bored, smarter kids figuring out how to game the system by pushing society's hot buttons. Hardly a new idea; kids have been engaging in such antics since at least 1692.

Of course, Salem had no Ritalin. Or Paxil.