If you haven’t already, go read the article “#MeTooFWP” on page ten. Read it because you need to hear from students that walk down our hallways every day, so you understand the factual basis behind this editorial.

Like just about every school, Parker has problems with sexual harassment. It’s likely that most girls, at one point or another, whether inside of Parker or out, have been in an uncomfortable sexual situation that shouldn’t have occured. And it comes as no surprise that we rarely have conversations about those moments.

Luckily today, no one can avoid the #MeToo movement that went viral over social media in 2017 when Alyssa Milano tweeted the phrase in support of her friend Rose McGowan’s allegations against Harvey Weinstein. The hashtag first began in 2006 with activist Tarana Burke, who was named one of Time Magazine’s people of the year as a silence breaker.

#MeToo is a movement that encourages women to stand in solidarity with each other as more and more women come forward with their own experiences of sexual harassment. In many ways, #MeToo has started conversations that otherwise were brushed under the rug. Just as the public has begun to start talking about the number of women who face harassment, so too should Parker.

Other than the Gender Dialogues that the class of 2018 participated in when Cookies were canceled in the 2014-15 school year, the high school has not sufficiently created, or attempted to create, a space in which students can share their thoughts on sexual harassment at Parker. It’s wrong that the school allows the majority of the high school to leave Parker without having had these conversations.

Students in the high school don’t know what consent really means. Other than the occasional cartoon video in a health class that talks about consent in very abstract terms, students are left to themselves to determine their own definitions. Unfortunately, most students are not going to sit around one day after school studying what consent is. If we’re not taught and given space to have conversation on the significance of consent, students will simply choose not to think about it.

Consent is more than just a yes or a no answer. It’s complicated.  It can mean different things to different people. The school needs to teach this to students from a young age and continue those lessons through high school.

As with any movement, #MeToo has its problems. The hashtag is often thrown around too casually. It’s important to differentiate harassment from assault and both from situations that are neither. At Parker, the silencing of girls in classrooms is a problem but not a matter of sexual harassment. While gender discrimination is still a problem, calling something harassment that is not diminishes those who come forward with the courage to tell their stories.

That being said, all students at Parker need to respect the important stories of their peers. Too often people say that a female student who sexualizes herself in a social media post or in the clothes she wears to school is “asking for it.” Whether said by male or female students, this kind of rhetoric only perpetuates rape culture. No person is every asking for any kind of harassment. If a male student ever finds himself in a situation in which he thinks a female is in fact “asking for it,” he should have the dignity and respect to back away from the situation.

The school needs to take the initiative to teach these values more concertedly to its students. There’s a reason that many female students feel uncomfortable sharing their stories with faculty members.

And it is not too complicated to start. The students are sitting here with opinions and ideas for how we can starting talking. So just listen. Stop brushing it under the rug, talking about harassment in abstract terms, and waiting until the problem escalates to an unmanageable degree.

This is not to say that Parker is unlike any other high school, or that the school has done nothing, but those are not reasons for status quo. Parker has the needed resources and the students who would take the initiative, so let’s not resist.