Boys will be boys? As Kavanaugh debate rages, teens are saying some adults still don't get it
Cheryl O’Connor hadn’t planned on telling her teenage daughters about that night during high school, decades ago.But then Christine Blasey Ford told her story about a house party in the early 1980s, alleging that Brett Kavanaugh had drunkenly attempted to sexually assault her.
“I had a situation like this happen to me,” O’Connor told her 16-year-old daughter, Brynn, as they sat together in their Bethesda kitchen this week. She had also been a student at an all-girls prep school in the 80s when she had been at a party picking up her belongings and the door unexpectedly locked behind her.
“I didn’t think it was a crime,” Cheryl O’Connor said. “We weren’t taught that.”
Unlike her mother, Brynn has been taught that attempted sexual assault between teens is a crime. The 16-year-old has learned about affirmative consent in her health class at Walt Whitman High. But as with many teens coming of age during the #MeToo era, there’s a gap between what she is being taught and her rising awareness, and what still happens around her.
She’s been to parties in the the D.C. suburbs. Parents still turn a blind eye to booze. The lines still become blurred. “This is just as much of a problem now as when my mom was in high school,” Brynn said.
But she and other teens wish the adults commenting on Kavanaugh and Ford would take the problem as seriously as they do.
Interviews with teenagers from across the country this week reveal frustrations with high school experiences being dismissed by politicians and others as a phase, a time when young boys can make belligerent, even harmful mistakes and overcome them. What Ford says happened to her could still happen to a 15-year-old girl at a party today, high schoolers say. Of women who say they have been raped, more than 40 percent experienced their first rape before age 18, according to survey findings from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.
Yet teens have listened as some of Kavanaugh’s defenders have said the attempted assault, if it happened, took place “under the blurring influence of alcohol and adolescent hormones,” as a Wall Street Journal column put it. The 1980s were a different time, they said. Teenage boys will, of course, be teenage boys.
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