“Right off the bat, before freshman year even started, I was at field hockey preseason, and the senior boys used to pick a freshman girl they thought was the hottest and claim her as theirs,” a female Parker senior said. “So they chose me.”

As declarations of #MeToo take the national media by storm, the Parker community has not seen the same movement inside its own walls, not seen public accusations and reckonings. But just as places all over the globe are coping with instances of harassment and assault, the culture of partying and toxic masculinity at Parker, as with other high schools, has led to a space that is not always safe in terms of sexual encounters.

“I had just gotten Facebook freshman year, and I posted a photo of my face as my first profile picture,” the senior continued. “It was very exciting–I was very happy about it. And they commented on it. About 50 comments–all claiming me as ‘theirs.’ Very creepy. And I was so scared. This was before I knew how to handle my anxiety. I was so scared–I felt nauseous for weeks.”

Upper School counselor Binita Donohue would like to see more attention placed on sexual misconduct. “Obviously we have a policy–no one, child or adult, should be at the receiving end of sexual harassment,” Donohue said. “But we just did this big survey that indicated what seems to me as a pretty big gender gap between what males experience and what people who are not male experience. Clearly that’s something we have to address and look at.” This survey, conducted in 2017 by DEI consultant Dr. Derrick Gay, was a climate assessment that more than 300 high school students filled out.

While the survey indicated a gap in experiences, women at Parker appear to be uncomfortable speaking out without the shield of anonymity. Some community members feel that the social environment at Parker encourages women to keep their stories hidden. “I don’t know that a woman here would feel as comfortable standing up and knowing that she had women at her back,” Upper School English teacher Cory Zeller said. “There’s not a clarity about what the reaction would be. If you’re going to call out the boys, are you going to lose your social status and not get invited to parties? If you call out the boys, what are the social repercussions for you?”

Others say that it’s not the risk of social isolation or lack of female-to-female support but the lack of male denunciation of assault that keeps them silent. An anonymous freshman girl explained that she was assaulted outside of school by an older boy this school year. “It’s so weird to me that they’re still friends with someone who would do that,” she said, referencing the boys that are still friends with her assailant. “I decided not to tell the school just because I didn’t want to have to deal with all that. But all of the guys didn’t do anything. It’s not that they support it, but they don’t stand up against it.”

The Parker senior who spoke about her freshman-year harrassment, like the freshman girl, also decided not to report her experience to the school, but for a different reason. “The administration is the worst,” she said. “I would never feel safe talking to anyone. Not just the administration–teachers, anything.”

Assistant principal Ruth Jurgensen said that she had never heard about the anonymous senior’s incident of being harassed freshman year. “No one I know had any knowledge of this,” Jurgensen said. “That’s really awful. We have a very distinct harassment policy. That’s terrible.”

Some boys in the high school place responsibility on the administration to actively disrupt sexual misconduct. “I think the administration and faculty do nothing about it,” a senior boy who wished to remain anonymous said. “Especially when it happens in the hallways.”

Donohue suggested that teachers do not have the education to intervene when it comes to sexual harassment. “The one other area that I think we need to do more of is teacher training,” Donohue said. “That is not something we do. Specifically for teachers to know–when something gets hot in a classroom, how do we talk about it.”

No new actions have been taken to combat sexual misconduct at the school this year, according to Jurgensen, but she hopes to make changes in the coming years. “We have been in conversation to make sure that faculty and staff are reminded of what the policies are,” Jurgensen said. “As you can imagine, when MeToo was happening, there was a trickle-down effect. You have Hollywood, then you have corporations and businesses, then it’ll go to universities and all the harassment that happens there, and then independent schools will be next. ”

The senior boy and several others, including Zeller, said that part of the problem is that there has been a lack of education of students around sexual misconduct. “The student body lacks a concrete definition of what assault and harassment mean,” the senior boy said, “and that creates a lot of issues.”

Sexual assault is often used as an umbrella term, Zeller said, and the student body needs to be educated about all kinds of harassment and assault, from microaggressions to physical aggressions.

Even without explicit education, Donohue thinks students already know and understand the big picture of sexual assault. “I think teaching consent is an easy thing,” Donohue said. “I think the issue is some believe that there will be zero instances of sexual harassment in our culture, and I’m not sure that will ever happen. I think what we can teach people to do is how to forgive, how to say sorry, how to take responsibility.”  The tricky part of sexual assault, according to Donohue, is in the smaller interactions, not in rape cases.

The freshman year required health class addresses rape culture, Donohue said.  It also gives definitions of consent and sexual harassment, runs through scenarios of possible sexual misconduct, and screens a movie about two women who have been sexually assaulted.

In the required Senior Seminar health class, seniors spend about three classes devoted to talking about their own experiences with sexual harassment at the school. But consent education, Donohue said, should start at a much earlier age.

The sexual misconduct problem is not unique to Parker. Jones College Prep High School senior and former Parker student Grace Adee made observations similar to those of current Parker students about her own school. “I haven’t found it to be overwhelming, but you do hear comments that are inappropriate,” Adee said, in regards to sexual harassment at Jones. “You hear the talk that’s just between guys. In terms of parties, I’ve definitely heard of instances of rape occurring, and instances of encounters that were just uncomfortable for one or more parties.”

While sexual harassment and assault might not be Parker-specific problems, Zeller has observed her students’ actions in class and noticed that boys and girls in Parker’s high school have a hard time being just friends.

“I am unpleasantly realizing that even in my senior classes, males and females sit separately, which indicates to me that this is not a culture that promotes healthy male-female relationships,” Zeller said. “Does it say something about the culture? Are guys and girls encouraged to be friends, or the minute you’re friends, do guys get crap from other boys saying, ‘Are you trynna?’ That’s a phrase that I learned this year. It makes it almost impossible for a boy to just talk to a girl without getting harassed by other boys about trying to ‘hit that.’ That would impede male-female friendships.”

Adee said that her friend groups at Jones are mixed-gender and absent of sexual tension, though she acknowledged that being a JK through twelfth grade school might have influenced the friend landscape at Parker. “This is just me speculating, but thinking about how at Parker you’re with the same group of people from when you’re really young, and those friend groups really stick,” she said, “so maybe if you’re friends with just your gender when you’re young, that follows through to high school.”

Lack of genuine friendships between guys and girls is just one instance of unhealthy interactions between males and females at the school. The Parker senior who spoke about her preseason experience four years ago still faces treatment similar to that of her freshman year. “I’m still afraid sometimes,” she said. “I’ve had younger boys come up to me, thinking I’m too drunk at a party, and they touch me. I’d say at least three or four times a party. It still happens a lot.”

Three other female students in the high school interviewed for this article related instances of being inappropriately touched at parties or otherwise outside of school.

The country at large is in a moment of reckoning in regards to sexual misconduct, and many have proposed different solutions. Some in the Parker community have said that the solution is education and conversation about the issue from a younger age. “By age four, children can certainly understand that concept of hurting each other and how to respond,” Donohue said. “When children are curious, you don’t want to send them the message that it’s not okay to talk about this. What you’re communicating is that this is a taboo topic, and there should be nothing taboo about sexual harassment. The act should be taboo, but not talking about it.”