Sexual harassment has made its way onto the playground of an Albuquerque grade school. Last Thursday a five-year-old boy allegedly kissed and fondled a five-year-old girl during recess. He also told her she was sexy. The school district says the incident fits their definition of sexual harassment and is now conducting an investigation. Meanwhile, the boy has met with a counselor and the girl has been pulled out of school by her mother.

Two things:

1) The incident shows the infinitely expansive character of the category "sexual harassment." From the early days of comparatively narrow and precise definitions of quid pro quo harassment, to the massive expansion of the term to include comments, looks, and jokes via the category of "hostile environment," and onward to the even greater expansion of the category via the concept of "peer harassment," this is a term whose utility is predicated on its applicability to just about any and every situation where gender is nominally involved.

2) The incident exposes the politicized tin ear of the Albuquerque school district for what it is. To call a kindergartner who kisses and fondles a fellow kindergartner a harasser is to allow ideology to trump reality in a way that is damaging to all involved. The little boy becomes just another example of how all men (now expanded to all male children) are potential sexual predators. He becomes confirmation of the hateful vision of men propagated by the sexual harassment industry, and he becomes a walking justification for "sensitivity training" in schools. You can never get 'em too early! The little girl, on the other hand, becomes a "victim." She enhances and expands the victimology that runs through the rhetoric of sexual harassment by becoming its most perfect poster girl: Who could be more innocent or blameless than a girl who does not even know what sex is? Women who play up their victim status (as in the case of former Boalt law student Jennifer Reisch) are infantilizing all women. But you can't infantilize an infant: little girls are the sexual harassment industry's most perfect embodiment of helpless virtue, and as such are its best argument for expanding its purview.

What do we have here, really? Most likely we have imitation and play (albeit disturbing imitation and misguided play). Little boy watches TV, sees men kissing and fondling women while plying them with erotic compliments. Little boy may even see Daddy doing the same with Mommy, or big brother doing the same with his girlfriend. (More disturbingly, little boy may have been the object of such advances himself.) And little boy does as he sees. Most likely, he does not know his behavior was "wrong," he has no predatorial intent, he merely does what he thinks it behooves him as a boy to do. This does not prove that he is "naturally" a harasser, as some would certainly want to argue here, but that he is "naturally" a curious kid who learns the way all primates do: by experimentally copying the behavior of others to see what it is all about. That doesn't make his behavior okay--the little girl's mother has good reason to worry if her daughter is getting felt up by her schoolmates, and has genuine cause to be upset by the school's lack of supervision. But if changing our perception of what went on between the boy and the girl doesn't excuse the incident, it does suggest that there are more constructive ways to approach it than to label the boy a harasser and the girl a victim.

But it's so much more fun, and so much more useful, to exploit the incident as one of harassment. Apparently, experimental fondling is something of a tradition at this particular school. The spot where the boy kissed and fondled the girl is known among the schoolchildren as "the secret hiding place where kisses happen." If this little boy is a harasser, than perhaps other boys in his class are, too. And if this little girl is a victim, there are probably plenty of other silent, suffering victims in her class as well. Probably this is not an isolated incident. Probably sexual harassment has reached epidemic proportions at Zia Elementary--and this is probably in turn just the tip of the iceberg (after all, we all know how much schools oppress girls). Probably this is just the sort of finding that would make the school district's Title IX enforcers drool with anticipatory bureaucratic lust. An epidemic of this nature would require such policy review! Such policy expansion! Such educational programming! All of this, in turn, would require so much funding, so many studies, and the creation of so many more jobs.

Playing lover is just a variation on the old, old game of playing doctor. It's a predictable one, given what kids see all around them. And, from the perspective of the sexual harassment industry, it could be a very profitable one.

UPDATE: Tightly Wound has more.