| Summary: | Abstract The research focused on physical sexual harassment as a mistreatment that threatens the realisation of full citizenship, safety, dignity and equality of girls and boys at school. There were 1738 children aged 11 to 12 years from 36 northern Finnish and 22 northwest Russian school classes who answered a group of questions concerning their experiences on physical sexual harassment at school or on the way to school. While analysing the data, critical qualitative content analysis, and critical and reflective reading, and contextualisation were used. On the basis of the children’s answers to the question whether they had been groped, and on the basis of the analysis of the case-descriptions the children wrote, it was considered that at least every fifth of the Finnish and every fourth of the Russian girls had experienced physical sexual harassment at school or on the way to school. More than every tenth of the Russian boys and a little less than every twentieth of the Finnish boys had partly corresponding experiences. Typically groping occurred in hallways, in front of the restrooms, in the gym, on the school-bus and bus stop, or on the road to school or from school. But it also occurred in classrooms. Girls constituted the vast majority of the victims of physical sexual harassment and boys constituted the vast majority of perpetrators. A girl was groped in nine cases out of ten by a male classmate in both the Russian and Finnish data. But, the boys’ harassers were not very commonly girls. The harasser of the Finnish boy was more often another boy than a girl. In the Russian data, the perpetrator was in six cases out of ten a girl alone or with somebody else. In the cases where a girl was perpetrated by a boy classmate, it was often possible to infer messages of heterosexism — the exercise of, or an attempt to exercise masculinist power over girls. Heterosexisist messages could also be seen from some of the cases where a boy or a girl had experienced groping by a classmate of the same gender. In boys’ mutual ...
|
|---|