Thursday, December 21, 2006

School Accuses 5-Year-Old of Sexual Harassment

From the I Couldn't Make This Stuff Up file, this story via The Raw Story:

A kindergarten student was accused earlier this month of sexually harassing a classmate at Lincolnshire Elementary School, an accusation that will remain on his record until he moves to middle school...

According to a school document provided by the boy's father, the 5-year-old pinched a girl's buttocks on Dec. 8 in a hallway at the school south of Hagerstown.

I'm curious what led the kid to do this, but does a 5-year-old have the mental capacity to sexually harass someone?

I'm not trying to downplay the inappropriateness of the boy's behavior, but it seems to me that branding this "sexual harassment" both dillutes the seriousness of real harassment and inflates the numbers of children who are sexually harassed in school.

Cross-posted at Common Sense Political Thought.