slapping bottoms

3. Slapping bottoms

In some cases, the children had slapped each other's bottoms, just as a funny game - as the children interpret it. Not so the adults: they interpret the same as sexual harassment. What the children viewed as a non-sexual funny game, was seen by the adults as sexual, thus inappropriate behavior, sexual abuse or harassment.

For Little Children, Grown-Up Labels As Sexual Harassers; Brigid Schulte, Washington Post, April 3, 2008
During recess at his Woodbridge school one day in November, when he was 6, he said, he smacked the classmate's bottom. The girl told the teacher. The teacher took Randy to the principal, who told him such behavior was inappropriate.

See comment by columnist Mark Steyn:
Zero Tolerance For Six Year Old Predators; Apr 27 2008

Unruly schoolboys or sex offenders? Susan Goldsmith, The Oregonian, July 22, 2007
The two boys tore down the hall of Patton Middle School after lunch, swatting the bottoms of girls as they ran -- what some kids later said was a common form of greeting. [...]
After hours of interviews with students the day of the February incident, the officer read the boys their Miranda rights and hauled them off in handcuffs to juvenile jail, where they spent the next five days.

Swat somebody's butt, and yours belongs to the the D.A. ^-Mark Steyn, www.ocregister.com, July 28, 2007
Mashburn and Cornelison were recently charged with five counts of felony sexual abuse, and District Attorney Bradley Berry has pledged to have them registered for life as sex offenders. Oh, by the way, the defendants are in the seventh grade. Messrs Mashburn and Cornelison are pupils at Patton Middle School. They were arrested in February after being observed in the vestibule, swatting girls on the butt.
Butt-swatting had apparently become a form of greeting at the school - like "a handshake we do," as one female student put it. [...]
A world that requires handcuffs and judges and district attorneys for what took place that Friday in February is not just a failed education system but an entire society that's losing any sense of proportion.

Young Sex Offenders; John Stossel - JFS Productions, Inc., NY Sun, October 17, 2007
What had the boys done?

"It was just a game," Cory said. "You'd slap somebody, they'd slap another person, you got slapped, and you slapped somebody else."

The "victims" of the felony sex abuse don't consider themselves victims.

"Every Friday, we would have Slap Butt Day, and pretty much we would just go around slapping people's butts," said Megan Looney, one of the girls involved.