the law of the school yard : JANE DOE, A PETALUMA STUDENT, STARTED A RUMOR THAT CAME BACK TO HAUNT HER. NOW SHE’S AT THE CENTER OF A NATIONAL DEBATE OVER KIDS AND SEXUAL HARASSMENT.

When Jane Doe heard the smutty story, she acted like any normal sixth-grader: She giggled, got “grossed out” and passed the rumor on to her friends. Then, in the fall she entered seventh grade, where she became the target of the very same rumor. Boys and girls from her Petaluma junior high taunted her between class, during class, after school: “Hey, I hear you had sex with a hot dog” or “I wonder what kind of hot dog she prefers” or just plain “hot dog.”

The abuse made Jane grow up fast, too fast. By the middle of eighth grade, she had stopped riding her bike to friends’ houses or designing dresses for her paper dolls, instead locking herself in her bedroom while she listened to Ugly Kid Joe belt out “I hate everything about you” over and over. By then, her depression and anger had grown so deep, the only way her parents could think to rescue her was to relocate. They moved 30 miles up the highway, leaving behind their schools, their friends, their church.

When Richard Homrighouse first heard the hot dog rumor, from Jane and her father, he acted as he believed a competent guidance counselor should: He listened sympathetically, told them the behavior was unacceptable, and warned one of the boys. Four years later, Homrighouse would find himself sitting before a legal reporter, racking his brain for every detail of that and other encounters with the straw-blond girl he had befriended in 1990.

What Homrighouse said or didn’t say, did or didn’t do, during his encounters with Jane Doe, as she is known to protect her anonymity, is at the heart of a lawsuit she has filed against Homrighouse and the Petaluma schools. Doe’s lawyers say there is a name for the kind of bullying Jane endured: “sexual harassment.” And by failing to stop it, they contend, the school violated Title IX of the federal Education Amendments of 1972.

Terms such as sexual harassment are increasingly entering the lexicon of the schoolyard, and in this post-Anita Hill era, adults are hastily borrowing from their own experience to explain--and cope with--childhood breaches of civil behavior. We know that sexual language and innuendo are common to children, particularly junior high students as they stumble awkwardly into puberty. The question is: Should we be using legal action, rather than families or school mediation and education, to try to socialize young people? And what will happen if we do?

The Petaluma case has become a cause celebre for feminist groups and could have far-reaching consequences on how educators address a discipline problem as old as co-ed schools. Ever since 1988, when another Petaluma mother complained to the federal government about her daughter’s abuse, the U.S. Department of Education has quietly pressured school districts to treat tawdry teasing, even among elementary-school children, as illegal sexual harassment. Defense lawyers in the Doe case will challenge that practice, contending that the department broke its own rules when it construed Title IX, historically used to attain equity in girls’ sports programs and the like, to outlaw schoolyard name-calling.

Women’s rights groups, meanwhile, see this issue as the latest front in their battle for gender equity. They hope the judge in the Doe case will clearly delineate a school’s obligation to protect students from vulgar verbal assaults. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights “has been investigating and resolving complaints but without clear guidance,” says Ellen Vargyas, senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center. “People at all levels are struggling with the issue. We know what the model is in employment. But we also know the workplace is different from schools.”

Feminist legal experts like Vargyas contend that a school has an even broader obligation to stop harassment than an employer. If the court upholds that interpretation, school districts will rush to cover their legal backsides with policies designed to treat sexual teasing differently than other discipline problems. “What responsibility do the schools have, versus the parents?” asks Scott N. Kivel, attorney for the Petaluma schools and formerly a school principal. “Are we trying to protect our children from every wrong? If every offensive comment is going to bring litigation, we’re not giving children a sense of reality that they have to deal with these situations.”

Petaluma, the quiet farming-turned-bedroom community of 47,000 north of San Francisco, is typical of the towns across America where “peer-on-peer sexual harassment” is being played out. Gangs and guns in school are still remote, and, mostly, the kids here get in trouble for alcohol and cigarettes and fights. What added to the horror of last year’s kidnaping and murder of local girl Polly Klaas was precisely the ordinariness of the place: Wide sidewalks and huge supermarkets and affordable houses in developments sprawling east of the 101 freeway. Even the town’s underlying social drama seems almost quaint: Eastsiders newly ensconced in their tract houses feel they can’t get a fair shake from an Establishment controlled by the westsiders living across the railroad tracks, smug in their lovely Victorian homes and spending their old money in the antique stores now dotting Petaluma’s vintage downtown. Kenilworth Junior High, which Jane attended, is an eastsider school tucked under the shade of the freeway.

Jane Doe’s dad is a firefighter, and her mom worked as an office administrator until a bad back forced her to quit. The defense attorneys want to portray Jane as an angry underachiever who has had to live in the shadow of her older sister, a track star and honor student. They question the motives of parents who hired an attorney to consider legal action after reading about the earlier Petaluma case, which resulted in a $20,000 settlement--an agreement, they hasten to add, that was made by the school’s insurance company without its consent.

Doe’s attorneys, meanwhile, depict Homrighouse as a middle-aged man who still subscribes to the outdated notion that “boys will be boys.” Feminist groups say Homrighouse, 53, and his school are examples of how America’s education Establishment has dropped the ball on sexual harassment. “Why did they throw their hands up in the air and remain passive?” asks Doe attorney Maria Blanco, staff lawyer at San Francisco’s Equal Rights Advocates. “Or did they believe it was not that serious?”

Doe’s side faces an admittedly steep legal hill: Under an earlier ruling in the case, they must prove that the school intentionally discriminated against Jane because of her gender. They also must make a case that girls can sexually harass other girls, something Blanco says has already been established in the workplace. Jane’s lawsuit focuses on the behavior of boys, but it is clear from her own words that the most vicious bullies were the Kenilworth girls who wore Raiders jackets and too much makeup and ran together as the tough crowd. “The girls were more spiteful,” Jane recalls, in an interview granted after much negotiation with her lawyers. “If a girl wanted to get into a fight with me, she’d call me a ‘hot dog’ or something like that.”

But her $1-million lawsuit could have implications far beyond any new legal ground it may hoe. Its mere filing poses troubling questions about how we should admonish childhood aggressors. Do we tell them their behavior is wrong, or that it is illegal? What do we want to teach them about the role of the courts and the government in settling interpersonal disputes? What will be the impact of attaching an adversarial adult label such as “sexual harassment” to broad categories of childhood behavior? Are we helping our children connect across the gender divide, or are we drawing new battle lines?

To the feminist attorneys and educators leading the crusade on schoolyard sexual harassment, the issue presents a tempting opportunity to shape the behavior of boys before they turn into abusive men. Nan Stein, project director at Wellesley College’s Center for Research on Women, calls today’s schools “training grounds for domestic violence.” There are plenty of horror stories for Stein to draw on: the Spur Posse’s game of sexual conquests in Lakewood; newspaper descriptions of “whirlpooling” in New York City pools, where boys surround girls to rip off their bathing suits; the trial of boys in a New Jersey suburb accused of gang-raping a mentally disabled girl.

The everyday sexual teasing that goes on outside the glare of news cameras can be equally disturbing. First-graders on a bus in Minnesota shout about sexual acts they couldn’t possibly understand. Fifth-graders in Missouri rub their penises through their pants to embarrass the girls. In Maryland, elementary-school girls try to kiss boys’ genitals; the boys, in turn, jump on the girls’ backs, crotches pressed against the girls’ buttocks, in a stunt called “nutting.” Teen-agers at an elite Los Angeles high school use their computers to publish a newsletter filled with lurid descriptions of the supposed sexual habits of the popular female clique.

In interviews with nearly a dozen parents and children around the country, a consistent story emerges: Watching a child tormented daily by peers, parents go to the school for help. The discipline meted out by school officials doesn’t stop the abuse. The parents transfer their depressed child out of the school and into therapy. Increasingly, they then call on the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights to discipline the school district. As of 1993, the office was investigating 78 cases of schoolyard sexual harassment, up from 10 in 1988, though some of those recent cases involved teachers accused of abusing children.

Across the phone lines, the voices of these parents and their children crack with anger and sadness. From Linda Wolfs in Iowa: “I understand why she can’t trust people. She’s lost friends. It’s just not fair. Jenny will be in therapy for a long time.” From Mary DeRosa in Massachusetts, whose daughter had to finish her last two years of high school at home: “It breaks your heart thinking what they go through.” From Lisa Bye of Maryland, a junior high-schooler who was the target of a boy who grabbed at her shirt and crotch: “I felt so sick and ashamed. My counselor said I should just get on with my life.”

“We’re beginning to realize this behavior is unacceptable and dangerous to females,” says Diane K. Shrier, clinical professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at George Washington University Medical Center in Washington, D.C. She notes that research studies show girls have high self-esteem until adolescence, “where you see increased depression and self-esteem problems. Some of that may very well have to do with how they are treated sexually.”

But before feminists and judges and lawmakers reach into the adult arsenal of language and tools to combat the problem, it’s important to keep a few things in mind. First, the studies that purport to prove that sexual harassment is rampant on schoolyards cast a wide net. The most widely quoted research, a 1993 survey of 1,632 eighth-to-11th grade students by the American Association of University Women, included dirty jokes and gestures, spying in the showers and “mooning” alongside forced kissing, grabs or pulling at clothes. In that report, 81% of all students--boys and girls--reported that they had experienced sexual harassment at least once in their school experience.

But, says James Garbarino, director of Cornell University’s Family Life Development Center, even as some adolescents are acting more abusively toward each other, others are treating the opposite sex in a spirit of casual egalitarianism. And John Schowalter, director of training at the Yale Child Study Center, sees the rise in peer-on-peer sexual harassment cases as the fallout of an inevitable cultural change. “Young women are much more aware of their rights, of people trying to invade their space and person. They’re much quicker to say: ‘I’m not going to put up with this.’ ”

Second, the feminist groups pushing this issue usually portray the problem exclusively as another example of female oppression. As Jane Doe’s case shows, though, the truth is more complex. In the AAUW survey, nearly as many boys (76%) as girls (85%) reported being harassed, and girls were commonly the accused.

At its root, sexual harassment is about the abuse of power. But it’s not clear whether that should apply to the schoolyard. “Sexual harassment has a power differential, an exploitative component,” says Celia B. Fisher, director of the graduate program in developmental psychology at Fordham University and a paid expert witness for the defense in the Jane Doe case. “It’s difficult to see the power differential between a 13-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl,” she continues. “Boys do not have more power. Adolescent boys are just as insecure as girls. There is no evidence that girls see boys in a more powerful position.”

Third, research suggests that this is a normal, if ugly, stage of development. The AAUW survey found that first incidents of sexual harassment peaked in the seventh grade, a year when pimple-faced students are awkwardly discovering and testing their own sexuality and, not surprisingly, the year that Jane Doe’s torment began. Academic surveys show that bullying in general drops off dramatically after age 12 or 13.

Children tease and flirt and touch and fight--all behaviors widely considered off-limits in the workplace. And even the teasing has shades of meaning. A child may be experimenting with new sexual language or awkwardly expressing interest in someone or being cruel, researchers say.

Brad Brown, professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin, says that sexual teasing is particularly prevalent among junior high-schoolers because they have just emerged from late elementary school, a period where children have a strong tendency to segregate themselves by gender. “One important task of that (junior high) age is to reacquaint oneself with the opposite sex,” Brown says. Teasing at this age, he adds, is “clumsy. They don’t know how to be playful, rather than hurtful.” A child’s perspective on the impact of that name-calling, researchers say, isn’t fully developed until late adolescence.

All of this nuance is lost on the Education Department’s staff, which, after all, is paid to write and enforce regulations, not analyze child development theory. Officials at the department’s Office for Civil Rights see more similarities than differences between the workplace and schools. “In employment, victims of harassment complain of lost income, lost promotion opportunities and unfair working conditions,” says Norma V. Cantu, President Clinton’s assistant secretary for civil rights. “In education, victims complain of hostility, inability to concentrate, poor grades, depression. So the stakes are very high. The control by the (school) administration is identical to the control in the workplace. You are in a controlled classroom setting where there are disciplinary practices in place to create an environment where students can learn. The administration has been held responsible for what happens within the four walls of the classroom, just like the employer is responsible for how the employees are treated.”

Before the words “sexual harassment” entered any school district’s vocabulary, many schools were guilty of ignoring this kind of behavior. But others treated it as they would any other discipline problem: with warnings, written apologies, detention and suspension. Now schools, responding to pressure from the Education Department and women’s groups, are putting this behavior in a separate category. Off-limits to most school officials in this charged political environment are such common strategies as mediation efforts (a victim shouldn’t have to face her abuser) and dress codes (that would suggest the school is blaming the victim). There is also an emphasis on punishing the abuser, even though many researchers say it is far more effective to first educate children about the hurt they are inflicting.

Even among some feminists leading this charge, there is deep concern about courts and legislatures applying an adult standard to children--particularly when it doesn’t take into account age and childhood development. Wellesley’s Stein employs terms such as “bullying” and “teasing” in the curriculum she is designing for elementary schools, reserving the words “sexual harassment” for junior high and above. And, notes Eleanor Linn, associate director of programs for educational opportunity at the University of Michigan and a paid expert witness for Jane Doe’s side, education efforts should be cautious about branding misbehaving children as criminals because of the frightening images the word “illegal” would conjure up in the mind of a young child.

But the agencies and legislatures now drawing the lines on schoolyard sexual harassment have never been particularly adept at subtle distinctions. A 1993 California law permits children as young as the fourth grade to be suspended or expelled for sexual harassment. And the Office for Civil Rights operates under the assumption that all sexually explicit taunting is sexual harassment, regardless of the age.

When elementary school boys on a bus in Eden Prairie, Minn., hurled dirty words at the girls, school officials employed the usual artillery of discipline--detention, suspension and transferring a student to another bus. But an Office for Civil Rights official called to town in 1992 to investigate concluded these actions weren’t enough: The matter should have been handled as “sexual harassment,” adhering to the procedures and disciplines set forth under the district’s own policies.

At the federal level, Jane Doe’s lawyers saw an opening for a lawsuit in 1992 when the Supreme Court ruled that students could seek damages from schools under Title IX. Kim Jamieson, deputy superintendent of the Petaluma City School District, contends that these cases could be financially devastating for struggling schools. But Ruth Jones, a staff attorney for the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund and one of Doe’s volunteer lawyers, sees lawsuits against schools and their officials as a necessary evil: “I feel really strongly that girls have a right to go to school without this happening. The way we establish the rules and lines of behavior is by litigation.”

With its shifting alliances, power struggles and raw brutality, the seventh grade world that spawned Jane Doe’s lawsuit is complex and subtly savage. A 12-year-old can be summarily exiled for crimes not apparent to the adults in her life, teased and tormented mercilessly while her parents look helplessly on.

It’s unclear even to Jane why she became the target of the hot dog rumor. She didn’t develop early. She wasn’t a slow student. She’s always had lots of friends. One former Kenilworth student said in a deposition that Jane became a target simply because she had started the rumor about someone else the year before. In her deposition, Jane acknowledged hearing the rumor from an out-of-state friend and passing it on to her girlfriends.

Photos from that period, on the upstairs bureau of the Doe’s new red-tile-roof house to the north of Petaluma, show a petite blond girl with a wide smile. The rebellious James Dean posters plastered in her room are softened by the surrounding dried flower bouquets, mementos from her dance performances in high school musicals. The story the walls don’t tell is that, like any family, Jane’s has had its share of internal strife--marital and other conflicts that led to family therapy when Jane was in sixth grade, fights with her parents that once prompted Jane to leave home and stay with a friend overnight. All of these sensitive details are now the prerogative of lawyers who have license to pick over Jane’s family life like hungry gulls. The girl who opens the door this August morning is a matured version of the thin 12-year-old her mother pointed out in a photo the week before. At 16, she’s 5-foot-6, with the curves of a grown woman and the same pretty, wide- brimmed face of a Midwestern farm girl under her blond bangs. As Jane settles into the BarcaLounger, curling her stockinged feet under her jeans, two personality traits begin to emerge.

The first is the tough, nonchalant exterior she has so carefully constructed. The previous week, Jane’s mother had described her daughter well: “She’s very strong willed. You never have to guess what she’s thinking, and yet she’s this really soft person inside who gets her feelings hurt easily.” On this day, Jane’s responses to questions about the teasing and taunts she endured are languid: “I didn’t care ‘cause he was a jerk anyway,” she says of one incident.

Only toward the end of the interview does she hint at her level of depression during that period. In describing an encounter with a friend at church camp, she says: “I was having a hard time because everyone in my group was feeling like God is there for you, that He feels everything. But I had a really hard time with that because I didn’t think that if He could feel all the pain I was going through, He would have kept me at Kenilworth.”

The second trait is her exceptionally strong streak of distrust toward the adults in her life: Her mother, her therapists, her attorneys. “I don’t believe in counseling. I think it’s stupid,” she says at one point. “There’s something about people being paid to listen to me, it doesn’t comfort me.” Later, she says she found the deposition process good sport, saying she enjoyed playing “mind games” with the opposing attorney. “I would make sarcastic retorts, and he would turn and do it back to me, except he was getting really mad and I wasn’t,” she says. “I guess it’s kinda mean, but I’m glad I did it.”

Jane’s troubles started in the fall of seventh grade, when a boy came up to her and said, “Hey, I hear you have a hot dog in your pants.” Shortly after, another boy made the same comment. When she realized that she had become the target of the hot dog rumor, she told Homrighouse, and one of the boys involved was warned.

Although the boys were the first to start the name- calling, girls would use the hot dog taunts as a way to try to provoke Jane into physical fights. Jane complained to Homrighouse about a girl who was threatening her. The following year the school suspended another girl who slapped Jane in the face while she was waiting in line for her yearbook. When the harassment was at its peak, Jane says she was most afraid of riding her bike past one particular girl’s house: “She was just psycho. She’d harass me. She was just mean.”

Much of the court’s decision in the case is likely to turn on contested facts about how often Jane actually sought help. Jane says she complained to Homrighouse as many as two to three times a week during this period, and that the counselor--concerned about her plight--allowed her and her friends to eat lunch in a school office so they wouldn’t be bothered.

One of the defense’s child development expert says that Homrighouse took an appropriately “holistic” view of Jane’s problems, disciplining provocateurs when necessary but also working on Jane’s self-esteem and continued conflicts with both teachers and peers. Homrighouse, who declined to be interviewed for this story, recalled in depositions that during the seventh grade, he met with Jane about the hot dog rumors only once--which resulted in the warning. In other meetings with Jane, he says, they discussed her conflicts with a girl, problems with a history teacher and his recommendation that she attend a self-esteem-boosting leadership camp. He says he doesn’t recall allowing Jane to eat lunch in the school office.

When Jane entered the eighth grade, she came to him to discuss the stress she was enduring because of the hot dog rumor, Homrighouse recalled. He told her at the time that the behavior constituted illegal sexual harassment and added that as a counselor, he was not authorized to suspend students, though he described alternative punishments. He stressed that Jane hadn’t provided the names of any students and seemed mostly to want to talk to someone about it. “My understanding was that since I had invited her to return and she hadn’t, then (the teasing) had stopped,” Homrighouse added.

The Does--particularly Jane--had viewed Homrighouse as a friend and ally, but gradually changed their minds. “He acts like a very concerned person,” says Jane’s mother. “But you walk out the door and forget it--he doesn’t have time.’ ” The school’s attorneys respond that if Jane was so miserable, she and her parents should have immediately taken their case to the assistant principal, Linda Noll, who was in charge of both discipline and Title IX.

Jane knew that Noll was the school disciplinarian, but says she was more comfortable with the more amicable counselor. She adds in her deposition: “I thought of it more as whenever people got into fights, they were sent to Mrs. Noll.”

In any case, once Noll did get involved--during the second semester of Jane’s eighth-grade year--heads began to roll. Noll suspended the girl who slapped Jane. Later, she suspended a boy who stood up in class and asked Jane why she had had sex with a hot dog. The day after that incident, Jane’s father marched into the school, met with the principal, vice principal and Homrighouse, and demanded that they put an end to the abuse.

By then, Jane was deeply distraught. She didn’t want to go to school, or even leave the house, and got into angry fights with her mother, saying she wanted out of Kenilworth--and Petaluma. “She’d have screaming fits,” recalls her mother. “She refused to go to school in the morning. I was the bad guy because I made her go to school. Our relationship just kind of fell apart at that point. She realized we wouldn’t move, we wouldn’t take her out of school. In her eyes, we weren’t doing anything to help her.”

The last straw came just one week after Jane’s father met with school officials. Jane was eating her lunch when a new girl at school demanded they make a date to fight after school. When Jane refused, the girl and her friends began obscene name-calling. A playground supervisor rescued Jane, who was taken to Noll’s office.

“After that last incident, she just said, ‘I can’t stay here anymore, Mom,’ ” Jane’s mother recalls. “I went and picked her up, and she fell into my arms sobbing. I said, ‘That’s it,’ and I pulled her out that day.” The following week, Jane was enrolled in a Santa Rosa school, 25 miles away. When that commute became untenable, and the harassment in their Petaluma neighborhood continued, the Does moved to a town half-an-hour north.

Jane now attends a private high school and says she’s happy with her new life. “I’ve changed so much in the past few years,” she says as she describes with enthusiasm the church summer camp that has helped her blossom. Then she laughs at how her newfound confidence sometimes surprises her: “I feel so well-rounded!”

Her parents say the move was the best thing ever to happen to Jane, but they remain bitter that the school’s unwillingness or inability to stop their daughter’s torment forced them to uproot their family and incur the costs of private tuition and therapy. “It was a big disruption in our lives,” says her father. “I’m a basic person with real basic values. You can mess with me, but once you treat my wife or kids unfairly, then you have to deal with me, and we’ll do it through whatever legal avenues we have to do it.”

This story has a deeper history, and it can be found in the clutter of file boxes crammed inside Louise Brawdy’s formal dining room. Louise’s daughter, Tawnya, attended eighth grade at Kenilworth Junior High in 1987. Her mother is convinced the experience almost killed her.

The full-sized chest that Tawnya inherited from her mother came early in puberty. Tawnya was also a special education student. To the school’s insensitive jocks, that combination was irresistible. The chanting--”moo, moo”--began every morning and followed Tawnya throughout the day. “Every day she would walk into the classroom, people would make obscene gestures, say disgusting things, mooing,” recalls one girl, Jennifer Childs.

“I’d try letting her off at different spots,” Louise Brawdy says. “I’d just say, ‘Don’t pay any attention. They’ll realize it’s not getting a rise and it’ll go away.’ ” Louise complained to school officials. The principal was alerted at least four times, by school employees as well as Louise. He warned the students that they would be suspended if the abuse didn’t stop. But the name-calling continued.

Then one day, when she was cleaning Tawnya’s room, Louise found a will. “She had written who she was leaving her stuffed animals and her tapes to,” Louise recalls one August morning as her eyes brim with tears. “This was a 13-year-old kid and these were her most prized possessions. I was devastated.” Louise sighs as she tells her story. By now the tears have washed clean her eye makeup and she no longer bothers to hide them. “I didn’t know what else to do, who else to turn to. I didn’t know how else to explain or say it. I had been watching her with the headaches, the stomachaches, not wanting to go to school, the grades dropping. But I didn’t even realize the depth of depression she was in.”

In December, 1988, after learning about Title IX from an acquaintance knowledgeable about education law, Louise took her daughter’s case to the Office for Civil Rights, filing the first peer-on-peer sexual harassment complaint under that law. A federal investigator in 1989 concluded that the Petaluma schools had engaged in sexual discrimination under Title IX by failing to stop the abuse. The schools promised to clean up their act with new policies, procedures and training.

So by the time Jane Doe brought her complaint to Homrighouse, the school had in place a sexual harassment policy. Indeed, on Feb. 24, just a week before Jane’s mother pulled her out, Kenilworth teachers received a memo urging them to review the policy and distribute it to students if necessary, “in addition to taking disciplinary action.” The memo was prompted in part by the meeting with Jane Doe’s father.

The Does didn’t apply the words “illegal sexual harassment” to their own daughter’s abuse until reading about a lawsuit that the Brawdys subsequently filed. They got in touch with the Brawdy attorneys and began considering legal action.

Meanwhile, with the help of an experienced civil rights activist named Linda Purrington, a Petaluma copy editor raising a young daughter on her own, Brawdy founded a group called “Parents for Title IX” to support families going through similar experiences, publishing a newsletter for more than 400 subscribers.

The boxes crammed into her living room contain the details of cases around the country. Whenever she starts to wallow in grief about her own daughter--who, she says, still suffers from depression and troubled social relations--Louise Brawdy grabs on to the lifeline of language from her newfound political cause. “This is a cycle that has to be broken,” she asserts, as she puts her emotions in check. “If we don’t start teaching our girls about equality in the system, it’s not ever going to change.”

Teaching girls--and boys--to stand up for themselves. teaching boys--and girls--to stop hurtful behavior. In the 1990s, parents and educators and policy-makers need to decide whether the legal system is the best vehicle to teach those lessons.

No one should minimize the emotional toll on children like Tawnya Brawdy and Jane Doe, who, researchers say, are at risk later in life for all sorts of problems. The lesson from these children is that even with all our strides toward tolerance and equality, we are still inept at teaching our youth how to respect each other and their bodies. “We are fumbling and learning,” says the University of Wisconsin’s Brown. “There’s a discomfort with many adults over what qualifies as normal and what doesn’t. Because we as adults are confused, we are not very effective at instructing children. There is a lack of consistency among adults in their lives.”

“Kids are so confused about their own sexuality,” says Vargyas of the National Women’s Law Center. “We sort of pressure boys to experiment with their behavior, and somehow girls are supposed to know what’s welcome or unwelcome, what’s appropriate or not appropriate. Then there’s the whole issue of how do you communicate the unwelcomeness?”

Popular culture is no ally in this. America’s children are being raised in a culture of wholesale commercial sex and in-your-face displays of wrath. They mindlessly mimic rap lyrics referring to girls as “hos” and “bitches” or scratch graffiti on bathroom walls with imaginative descriptions of the barely concealed body parts they see sprawled across the tube. The sexual liberation of the ‘60s and ‘70s obliterated the old rules of etiquette between the sexes, leaving adults at a loss to provide the language and social skills to replace them.

But labeling the abusive behavior “sexual harassment” may take us down a road we don’t want to go. “Maybe there should be a moratorium on touch,” one feminist educator said during a national strategy session last spring. Another sexual harassment crusader, author Susan Strauss, suggests: “How about asking if a hug is OK before giving it?” Keith Geiger, president of the National Education Assn., warns that just as teachers and coaches have had to affect a more distant physical relationship with their students, so too will children with each other. “It saddens me,” he adds.

This is a litigious society, and sexual harassment is a legal term. It takes judgment calls out of the hands of educators and gives the accuser a powerful tool over schools, teachers and even other parents. The law punishes rather than educates, and it draws lines of behavior in black and white, rarely capturing the gray nuances of childhood life. It doesn’t distinguish between the name- calling of an elementary-schooler (which probably doesn’t deserve suspension) and breast-grabbing by a high-schooler (which probably does).

A better answer instead may lie in the schools’ latest response to a different problem, violence. Conflict resolution programs, adopted by more than half of the nation’s schools in the past five years, teach children how to rely on themselves and other peers to resolve disputes.

Another answer must come from home. Because most bullying takes place outside the view of adults, adult role models can be particularly important, especially, says Geiger, because too many parents encourage a “macho attitude.”

Acutely aware that schools alone aren’t equipped to deal with all interpersonal disputes, the National PTA now urges its local units to “encourage parents not only to look at what they are teaching, but also what models they are providing in their own relationships, and what they are saying to children in response to what they see on TV or in other media,” says Ginny Markell, chair of the group’s Health and Welfare Commission.

Since the Doe and Brawdy cases came to light, the Petaluma schools have adopted a new “sexual harassment” policy that provides for punishment ranging from counseling to expulsion. They may have missed the point: An earlier policy growing out of the Brawdy case, brimming with legalese about sexual harassment and Title IX, didn’t prevent Jane’s abuse. What school districts here and across the county still need is widespread teacher training and a curriculum designed to teach children how to treat one another with respect.

Before filing their lawsuit, the Does suggested to Petaluma administrators that the school discuss the issue of sexual harassment at student assemblies and that a policy be sent home for parents to sign. “They need to educate those children and they’re not doing it,” says Jane’s mother.

Now, though, it’s too late. The issue is in the courts, and the Does have no intention of backing down. “This has been real hard for me,” Jane’s mother adds. “But it’s important for us to be aggressive in following it through to show our daughter that we believe in her, and what was done was wrong. And that we’ll do whatever needs to be done to protect her now.”