“I don’t like it because it just makes me feel like an object and that’s all I’m good for,” she said. Sometimes, she went on, “random boys will come up to me in the hallway and say something.”

She and her father, Robert Carlson, have brought the issue up with Davis School District officials, and they’ve been responsive and sympathetic. Ana Jain finished last May at Legacy Junior High in Layton, where the unwelcome come-ons occurred, and will soon start 10th grade at Clearfield High School.

Still, both think more can be done.

As they see it, school officials, while not dismissive of what Ana Jain has gone through, have treated the incidents she faced more like bullying than sexual harassment. More to the point, just as educators take proactive steps to prevent traditional bullying, they think schools need to sound a louder and more specific message against student-on-student sexual harassment.

Tim Vandenack, Standard-Examiner

“I mean, these comments and actions that are happening are a form a bullying, but their approach to resolving the harassment wouldn’t even be acceptable in the common workplace,” the elder Carlson said. He maintains that the sort of talk his daughter faced — she wasn’t touched, notwithstanding the discomfort she felt — would potentially result in firing in a work setting.

Davis School District spokesperson Chris Williams wouldn’t delve into specifics of Ana Jain’s case given privacy considerations. But he said school policy forbids sexual harassment, per the dictates of Title IX of the federal Education Amendments of 1972. The same goes in the Weber and Ogden school districts, and any other educational institution that gets federal funding.

Broadly, officials aim to make sure Davis School District schools are safe spaces for students, who are encouraged to report any objectionable activity they face. “If they can’t grow and thrive and feel, ‘This is a place I want to be,’ we need to do a better job,” Williams said.

He said district schools will hold assemblies and other activities to educate students about its “safe schools” policies covering sexual harassment, bullying and other issues. However, as sex can be a touchy subject, he acknowledged that school officials don’t have free rein to speak too frankly. “We have to be careful. We don’t want to put ideas in peoples’ minds,” Williams said.

Ana Jain, for her part, says school officials have been loud and clear in conveying an anti-bullying message. “But they don’t go over sexual harassment at all or enough,” she said.

Like her dad, she thinks there are ways school officials could broach the issue of sexual harassment without offending the sensibilities of parents leery of such matters getting attention in a school setting. “There are ways to get around it, and I don’t feel they’re even making much of an attempt about it and they should,” she said.

Apart from his daughter’s experiences, the issue hits close to home for Carlson because of the sexual abuse a family member suffered. “Why aren’t the boys (and girls) educated on what is acceptable or not acceptable at school?” Carlson wrote in an email to the Standard-Examiner.

Carlson supplied the text of a series of email exchanges — from last March — with Davis School District and Legacy Junior High administrators on the harassment his daughter has faced. In one message, he suggested that the issue should get attention as a matter of course, not just when there’s a transgression, to prevent incidents from happening in the first place.

“I get that you might try to address this individually, but that seems like a ‘hindsight approach.’ I would hope that you try something to pre-empt these issues,” he wrote. “I do it at my work, and every (job) I’ve been at, they do sexual harassment education sessions.”

One of the Legacy Junior High administrators responded, indicating, like Williams, that educators have limits on how deeply they can discuss the topic. “As for specific sexual harassment trainings, I will find out what we can discuss at the (junior high) age. We have shared the general idea of sexual misconduct with students at the beginning of the year, but we haven’t delved into specifics like they do at the workplace because of age restrictions, etc.,” the administrator wrote.

The administrator told Carlson that school officials have addressed the incidents his daughter faced — three of them — and dealt with the students involved, though he didn’t provide details.

‘IN THE HALLWAYS, AT LUNCH’

Ana Jain said she faced harassment as an eighth- and ninth-grader — “from small things to big things” — at varied locations, from only a few boys and “friend groups.” As for where the harassment took place, she mentioned hallways and at lunch, “usually not in the classroom where there’s a teacher.”

Sometimes the boys would say something directly to her or point at her and laugh. On occasion, she talked back, letting the students know their comments weren’t wanted. It never seemed to make much of a difference, though, and she subsequently took the approach of ignoring unwelcome remarks.

According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, or NSVRC, sexual harassment at schools can come in many forms — verbal, physical and more.

“Sexual harassment is an umbrella term for any unwelcome comment, action or behavior of a sexual nature. Harassing comments include catcalling, inappropriate/unwanted comments about a person’s body or sexual orientation, slut-shaming and explicit and unwanted jokes,” reads an NSVRC blog post. Targets of harassment can suffer anxiety, depression, a loss of “bodily autonomy” and more.

Davis School District officials, Ana Jain said, agree that what she faces isn’t OK. But as she sees it, they aren’t doing nearly enough to prevent harassment.

Her experiences notwithstanding, Williams said a survey of Davis School District students by the Utah State Board of Education indicates that what Ana Jain faced isn’t the norm, though it’s not unprecedented. Of 1,600 district students surveyed, 22% said they had faced sexual harassment.

Nationally, though, the numbers are higher, with 56% of girls in grades 7-12 reporting they have experienced sexual harassment, according to the NSVRC. A 2007 National Women’s Law Center report about sexual harassment in high schools said 83% of female students and 79% of male students reported experiencing harassment.

In Ogden School District schools, officials recorded 91 student-on-student sexual harassment incidents in the 2022-2023 school year. Some of those may have been recategorized after they were investigated, according to spokesperson Jer Bates.

In Weber School District schools, spokesperson Lane Findlay said there were 18 reported cases of student-on-student sexual harassment in the 2022-2023 school year and another six sexual assault cases.

Numbers aside, Findlay can see where Carlson is coming from in his contentions that school officials shy from addressing sexual harassment. “I think that’s a fair assessment. It’s just an area that’s very sensitive,” Findlay said.

Carlson, meantime, sounded a stern message in the email exchange with the Davis School District officials.

“You may keep thinking you don’t have a problem, but if I were any of you on this thread and thinking that, you are kidding yourself,” he wrote. “If you don’t do something, and soon, you are setting yourself up for something bigger than what is happening with my daughter.”