A 14-year-old middle school girl was raped after school officials used her as bait in an attempt to catch a male student "in the act" of sexually harrasing her, like he had done earlier that day, Christian Science Monitor reported on Thursday.
A civil lawsuit making its way through the appeals claims that Sparkman Middle School in Madison County, Ala., had a policy of not punishing sexual harassment unless students admitted to it or there was an eyewitness to the event.
The boy approached a 14-year-old girl with special needs, who had already declined his "recent, repeated propositions" for sex, according to court documents, on Jan. 22, 2010, according to CNN.
The girl was encouraged to "meet (the boy) in the bathroom where teachers could be positioned to 'catch him in the act' before anything happened," by a teacher's aid, according to the brief.
Instead of meeting in the boys' bathroom in the corridor on the special needs students' floor, where teachers were present, the girl meet him in the sixth-grade boys' bathroom, in another part of the school, where the boy told her to go, according to the brief.
"No teachers were in the bathroom to intervene," the brief states.
The girl was taken to the National Children's Advocacy Center in Huntsville, where a rape kit was taken after police arrived at the school.
Among students in grades 7 - 12, 48 percent reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment over the course of a school year, according to a 2011 AAUW report. The report was based on a nationally representative sample of nearly 2,000 students. Only 9 percent reported the incidents to an adult at school.
With mounting opposition to how college campuses have been handling complaints of sexual harassment, assault, and domestic violence, the case serves as a reminder that such problems begin in childhood and the teenage years as well.
