This article by Tom Sharpe was published in the Evening Standard on 16 March 1992.
As someone who once got 12 strokes in the space of 24 hours in three lots of four for talking in prep twice, all administered by three thoroughly athletic 18-year-old prefects, my heart bleeds for Ms Olson and Ms Lyle of Minnesota. Their school lives have been made utterly miserable to the point where they have gone to law and sued the educational authorities on the grounds of sexual harassment.
Now as a young Marine I was once chased round the chain locker of HMS The Duke of York by a sex-mad ex-Commando brownhatter and I think I can claim to have as much detestation of sexual harassment as the next man.
But in awarding Katy Lyle, aged 19, $15,000 in damages against the Duluth Central High School I am inclined to think that the courts have been over-generous.
Ms Lyle is evidently so fetching that some lovelorn lad scrawled her name on the wall in the boys’ toilets. Nothing, I’d have thought, particularly reprehensible or injurious about that. Unfortunately for the principal, some less sensitive boys had added comments on Ms Lyle, in particular alleging that she indulged in “sexual antics” and was “a slut”.
REPORTS have not spelt out the nature of the “sexual antics” which may, for all we know, have been of the mildest sort. But as a result of the allegations the court awarded damages against the school, whose library fund suffered accordingly.
The case of Ms Jill Olson, aged 16, a pupil at the Chaska High School is less easy to decide. She was persuaded to bring her case against the school authorities because she had been awarded “an honourable mention” near the top of a list of “the 25 most ***able girls” in her class.
She was quoted as saying: “I felt really degraded,” though it was not made altogether clear which part of the accolade had offended her.
The point about these two cases is that they have set such a precedent that the names Olson and Lyle will undoubtedly go down in legal history. The judges in the United States Supreme Court have declared that pupils and students may sue their schools and universities “if they believe they are victims of sexual harassment”.
I would draw attention to that “believe” because, if the judges of the Supreme Court really used that word, they must have been looking for inspiration to the Case Law of the late Mr Justice Cockle-carrot or — in plainer terms — they’ve opened up one helluva legal can of worms.
What those judges have done is to pave the way for what must surely be designated “mischievous legislation”. Not only in America but, by the awful osmosis of the New Puritanism and Political Correctness so rampant in the world of academe, in Britain as well.
No doubt the learned judges were motivated by the very best intentions but we all know where good intentions lead.
Let us consider the effect on British life of a legal loophole that allows anyone to claim damages for sexual harassment. Even Sharpe, aged six, could have legitimately argued that the three girls who dragged him behind a bush on Croham Hurst and debagged him for investigative purposes were sexually harassing him. And what about the private in the Shropshire Light Infantry who was ambushed by some ATS girls with a milk bottle in 1942 and had to explain it to the casualty department in Church Stretton next morning before they would call the fire brigade?
Such goings on evidently haven’t come within the compass of the learned judges in the US. Instead, like any set of bureaucrats, they have made work for themselves by creating new laws for people to break.
NOT that I am arguing for twanged bras or goosed bottoms. Far from it. But the consequences of our importing this latest legal fad from the US could be disastrous for precisely those it is intended to protect.
From the moment she enters the hell of the playground in her primary school, through all the agonies of puberty, the British girl is subject to sexual insults, sexual innuendos, indelicate physical examinations and unwelcome sexual attentions.
Most endure, withstand and grow strong as a result. And though my mother used to swear that African tribeswomen had it good by comparison — I think she was overdoing their good fortune myself — without the constant battle between them, my father would not have been half the man he was.
British women can cope. For centuries, nay millennia, the brutal British male has been cosseted, fed, worked for, pandered to, slept with and washed before burial — not to mention born by — the stalwart British woman, product of a regime of sexual harassment from birth to death that would drive lesser creatures to the insane asylum.
Yet without the constant battle between the sexes, and with a legal system in the hands of a judiciary as unwilling to stare an obvious fact in the face as Lord Chief Justice Lane, the strength that comes from sexual antagonism in Britain would have gone forever.
Instead of the satchel-swinging Furies, the formidable Aunt Agathas and the indomitable Mrs Thatchers, we will be left with the snivelling litigants, the cruise-liner widows and the Nancy Reagans of the United States.
Perish the thought.
Britannia never learnt to rule the waves by allowing herself to be harassed sexually or otherwise.