Sophomore Lauryn Rauschenberger thought it would be a normal day.

A normal bus ride on the 74.

A normal walk from the bus stop.

A normal stroll into the athletic club.

And it was a normal day–until four words echoed, it seemed, across Bucktown. Four seemingly innocent words uttered by a middle-aged man with missing teeth and disheveled grey hair.

“How are you doing?” he asked from his bike.

Rauschenberger decided to ignore the stranger. Just keep walking.

He was behind her. Walking. Talking. “Do you know how rude it is when people don’t answer your questions?” he said. “It just makes me so angry when people don’t answer my questions.”

She kept walking. He didn’t stop.

She reached into her pocket. He didn’t stop.

She pulled out her phone. He didn’t stop. Finally, she shouted into her pitch-black screen, “Mom, can you call the police? There’s someone behind me!”

For Rauschenberger, as for others in the Parker community, sexual harassment is a reality. “I’ve been cat-called in my neighborhood, I’ve been cat-called at school,” Rauschenberger said. “There’s no safe place in Chicago. I don’t care how nice the neighborhood is. It’s just constant.” This “constant” harrassment in Chicago, combined with the allegations of sexual misconduct in the news, has put Rauschenberger in a reflective state.

In the party scene at Parker, sexual misconduct has become a pressing issue, according to English teacher Cory Zeller. “I think it’s tricky being a boy and knowing about consent, especially if there’s alcohol involved,” Zeller said, “so I think that things at parties have gone awry in terms of actual consent versus implied consent.”

When “The Washington Post” reported on senate candidate Roy Moore’s alleged sexual assault of a minor, the word “consent” increased in popularity on Google search. The exposé on Moore was released alongside sexual assault allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein, actor Kevin Spacey, comedian Louis C.K., and actor Dustin Hoffman, among others. Soon afterward, Senator Al Franken was accused of sexual misconduct.

Zeller has a theory about the proliferation of sexual assault allegations. “I think in Hollywood there is momentum that has been gained,” Zeller said, referring to the aftermath of the Weinstein allegations. “There’s a community now of women who feel like, ‘If I step forward, I know I have women who have my back, and the tide has turned enough that this will have less repercussions for me.’”

11th and 12th Grade Learning Resources Teacher Bridget Walsh–who leads a junior-year Civic Lab group on women’s issues in Chicago—postulates that the wave is a result of the fact that a powerful man was accused. “Weinstein seemed to be in a position of power, whereas Al Franken was a counterpart to the woman,” Walsh said. “It doesn’t make it right. I think that that’s kind of what I’m talking about–the distinction between a person of power abusing versus a lateral abuse.”

Spanish teacher Yadiner Sabir has not been following the news. “As a family, that’s something that I stopped doing,” she said. “Two years ago, we stopped just putting the news on. It’s hard for me as a parent to address all these issues with my kids.”

Nonetheless, Sabir has heard about the Harvey Weinstein scandal. “I was in shock,” Sabir said. “I have followed that one a little bit closer, and I’m in shock that all those people came out around the same time, but that it took them so long. I am glad that people speaking out have given others the courage to say, ‘This also happened to me.’”

The social media equivalent of “this also happened to me” is #metoo, a hashtag condemning sexual misconduct.

At Parker, girls too often experience objectifying language, according to Rauschenberger. “Even guy friends of mine that I like and respect use the same language, and they think it’s fine, but the tone or the manner they use is the same language that a lot of men who sexually assault women use,” she said. “Like thinking of them as an object more than a person.”

Examples of these objectifying phrases, according to Rauschenberger, include “Did you hit that?” and “Did you get with it?”

But sexual misconduct at Parker exceeds words. Last year, a group of eighth-grade boys composed a list ranking the girls in their grade from most attractive to least attractive. “It felt like they were squishing you down,” freshman Zoey Blickstein said. “It didn’t make you feel good.”

Both Blickstein and freshman Aziza Mabrey-Wakefield believe that the situation was significant–and not handled as such by the administration or by parents. “My family, when they got the email,” Mabrey-Wakefield said in reference to an email sent by the administration to parents, “they’re like, ‘Oh it happens in high schools like this is normal.”

Blickstein’s parents had a different response. “My mom and I were crying for two hours about this,” Blickstein said. “We got on the whole tangent of how this happens in the real world and how it shows you that—even though Parker feels like such a safe place—things like this still happen. You don’t always realize that this stuff is happening. But it is.”