Teen’s Sexual Harassment Claim Engenders Apathy

Picture a teenage girl working after school in a fast-food restaurant. Now imagine her complaining that three male cooks engaged in a sexual harassment campaign that went unchecked for months. Fed up, she quit several months into the job and now works at a grocery store.

It began with pats on the backside. It escalated to even more intimate touching. It involved simulated sexual acts.

If your daughter--if anyone’s daughter--was subjected to that, you would be incensed. We would all be outraged right along with you.

What if the teen was a boy?

Would you still be angry? Or would you tend to say the cooks were just horsing around? Would you tell the boy to take care of the problem on his own?

That, according to an Orange County woman, was the situation last year facing her then-16-year-old son.

He began working at a Huntington Beach restaurant last spring.

“Almost immediately the three cooks started, every time they’d go by, to tap him on the rear end,” she says. “Then it got more and more aggressive.”

Last November, he quit.

“What made me so mad is that the manager didn’t do anything,” she says. “I wanted to go down there, but he [her son] wouldn’t let me.”

She urged her son, however, to talk to police about it, which he finally did last month.

That, she says, also went nowhere.

“They interviewed [him] and dropped it,” she says. They decided they weren’t going to pursue it because they said there wasn’t any sexual intent.”

Huntington Beach police spokesman Chuck Thomas says the file isn’t closed. The detective assigned to the case hasn’t interviewed any of the three cooks, because he hasn’t located them, Thomas says. Police were told they no longer work at the restaurant, but when I asked him Thomas concedes they might work there part time.

The restaurant manager says the cooks still work there. Asked about the claims, he says, “I was here at the time it all happened, but I really don’t think I should i say anything.”

The teenager says he initially wanted to forget the whole thing. The offending cooks worked part time, he says. But virtually every time they did work, they harassed him, he says, with his complaints to the manager falling on deaf ears. He says he was more angry than fearful.

Attorney Mike Johnson says he thinks police have dropped the ball and says he’s preparing a lawsuit against the employees. He thinks the case shows that police view harassment against males less seriously than that against females.

Johnson concedes that not even the teenager was gung-ho about pursuing the case.

“It’s hard in our society for boys of that age to acknowledge this type of activity occurs, because it’s humiliating,” Johnson says. “That kind of thing happens to women, not men.”

Police spokesman Thomas says his department doesn’t distinguish between male and female victims.

In the current issue of Teen People magazine, editors surveyed nearly 1,000 teens about sexual harassment and reported that “a shocking number of teens have to deal with it at work.” One in five, the magazine reports, either have seen or been victims of sexual harassment.

The magazine surveyed only girls.

Historically, boys have been taught to fight harassment by putting up our dukes. I confess that one of my questions to the teenager in this case was whether he considered the cook’s actions to be horseplay.

Utterly irrelevant, Johnson, the attorney, says, and he’s right.

“If he were a woman,” Johnson says, “we wouldn’t even ask that question.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821, by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa CA 92626, or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com.