The Snapchat documented incident in a Florida high school involving a 15-year old and multiple partners in a single night may be forcing a bigger issue out in the open. Are educational institutions failing from protecting students, so to speak, against wrongful sex in school?
New York Daily News reports that the trauma that the Florida high school incident dealt is not only on the participants of the incident. Students who were exposed to the Snapchat videos and those who came to know about the incident by hearsay also share in the trauma of the situation.
Students and school authorities alike reacted over how the 26 students involved could have even gotten the incident off the ground with the securities set up for the school. The disbelief that ensued after the exposure of the incident was understandable.
The Florida high school incident is not an isolated case. It is simply one of the more shocking exposures of an ongoing problem.
The issue of sex in school is not limited to students with other students. Various reports of school authorities and school personnels engaging in sex with minors in schools surface each year.
IOL reports about explicit Whatsapp videos making the rounds involving two underaged high school students and a school security guard on school grounds. The girls involved in the videos were not from the school where the video took place, but the guard was.
These situations beg a few questions, one of which is this: How effectively do educational institutions set up security measures against sexual acts within school facilities?
School district Vice Chairman Mary Fischer promised that the Florida incident will never be repeated. "It's not going to happen again at our schools because we are really going to make sure that our supervision is fail-safe," the vice chairman said. Why was this not fail-safe before the incident happened?
On a bigger scope, how well are schools helping students understand and cope with the continuous barrage of sexual exposure from the media, the internet and their surroundings? How effectively are schools enabling students to protect themselves and to help protect others from being victimized as participants or spectators in such situations?
