Who should bear the majority of the responsibility for this sexual attack on a 5 year old girl in a school bathroom?

Society is to blame.
In a perfect world, which this is not, there are perfect answers to every question. Not so, in actual society, where placing blame IS THE major game.

I mean in THIS specific instance, what do you think should be done?

What else? Shoot him. Problem solved.

Neither of your comments addressed this specific issue of this specific girl and that specific gender fluid boy.
One answer is waxing philosophic.
The other answer is ridiculous.

I would suggest an investigation, as a child that young should have no sexual urges or knowledge. Sounds like a set up against the trans kid and bathroom issue.

An investigation into the boy or the girl?

Well. Ultimately, a school is responsible for the safety of it’s students.

I guess my problem with this story is that assault doesn’t have to happen in a bathroom. Or it could be that a child went into a restroom not specified for their gender.

To me, the offender’s gender identification, is irrelevant to the point. This almost suggests that a gender fluid person is more likely to commit sexual assault, and therefore shouldn’t be allowed around any other children, ever.

Or, this suggests that people are somehow more vulnerable to sexual assault in a restroom.

If I had to pick one of your scenarios, I would say people are more vulnerable to sexual assault in a restroom, compared to other types of room, except for maybe an elevator.

My impression from the article was that the the bathrooms were marked, “Boy” and “Girl,” but the school allows kids to use any bathroom they want. So what I don’t understand is why they even have them marked at all.

I also agree that being gender fluid has nothing to do with the assault, just like being male has nothing to do with raping a woman. That person is an animal, period.

@KNOWITALL I’m going to adress your comment ”…a child that young should have no sexual urges or knowledge” without knowing if you’re referring to the boy or to the girl. I will assume you’re referring to the boy.
First we don’t know how old the boy is. If he was in 5th grade he could have been anywhere from 10 – 12 years old.
Second, I agree that they shouldn’t have sexual knowledge that young, but abuse in their own lives gives them that knowledge. So does not monitoring what they see on TV. They could be watching a Playboy Channel with their parents every night for all we know.
Kids practice and mimic everything that they learn, whether they know why they’re doing it or not. Sexual “urges” wouldn’t even come into the picture. It’s just something he knows how to do, so he does it.

An investigation should be done. It might come down to asking the 5 year old in a roundabout way who hurt her. If it was a male student then you need to stop the insanity of the open bathrooms. If it was the mother or another family member(s) then you need to remove the child from that environment.

But on a logical side, the school district’s story doesn’t make sense. If the mother were abusing her daughter, why make it a public thing? Why bring it up at all? The mother’s story seems to make more sense…the daughter identified her genital discomfort and the mother asked about why it might hurt.
There are parents and family members that abuse kids all the time…but they don’t like publicity. This parent kept pushing for action. If she were the offender, that makes no sense.

I agree with you.
And it sounds like the child did identify her attacker.
I just hope this doesn’t turn out to be some hoax that the mother made up, using her daughter as a pawn, to protest the bathroom issue. It’s happened before.

Does anyone really think that a kid willing to attack a little girl would be deterred by the knowledge that they’re not allowed to enter a certain bathroom? If they were that mindful of the rules, they’d probably also recognize that hurting five-year-olds is wrong.

Both children need help, and the adults should not use this for their own agenda.

@longgone if the attacker followed the child in, your argument has merit. But we don’t know if it was a planned attack, or an attack of convenience—they both happened to be in the bathroom at the same time.

In my experience, kindergartners never went to the bathroom alone. We’d take them as a class for scheduled breaks. The fact that the child was alone sounds a little off to me.

There is a huge problem with the underlying assumptions in both articles. In particular, that there is a connection between bathroom sharing and sexual assault. There’s not. We didn’t invent boys & girls bathrooms to keep the boys from raping the girls. Further, there is a disgusting insinuation that gender-fluids are sexual reprobates.

If the little gender-fluid kid really did sexually assault another kid, it should be treated just like any other sexual assault. Should the bathroom rules be changed to prevent this sort of thing? Maybe, maybe not. But it shouldn’t be a knee-jerk reaction to satisfy some politician’s constituents. It needs to be based on actual data. And if the actual data were to be examined, I guarantee this: sexual assault in universal bathrooms is a mosquito bite. If people really cared about kids being sexually assaulted, they’d pay more attention to the kids being preyed upon by their straight, cis, traditional-gender parents and close relatives.

In a perfect world you can find a perfect answer. But this is not a perfect world. Your best guess is as good as any other, so why ask us???

@SaganRitual That is all true. But the arguments against allowing people to use the bathroom of the sex they “identify” with really isn’t against transgenders. It is against allowing some perv guy to claim he identifies as a woman so he can get his jollies. And yes, it is perv guys and straight ones that people worry about. Think about it. If you are a woman, going into the woman’s bathroom and a transgender comes in to use the rest room, you will both be in separate stalls and a true transgender probably won’t want to peak nor attack the woman. Likewise if a guy is in the bathroom and a transgender comes in, again…it isn’t a big deal. If it is pre-surgery, the trans will use a stall, if it is after, they might use the urinal. Either way, you don’t worry too much about someone sneaking a peak or attacking a patron. The problem comes in, and has been seen on multiple occasions, that when you try pushing the common bathrooms or changing rooms, it is the perv guys that are the problem. They have tried secretly filming women, they have attacked women…they are the problem. That problem is compounded by the radicals that try forcing this issue.

My POV is that whether the kids are allowed in the opposite gender bathroom or not, the kids can fairly easily go into the other bathrooms anyway.

This isn’t really a trans problem, it’s an assault problem. I’d want a counselor to talk to the kid who did the assault and try to find out why he did it. Maybe something is going on at home.

I hope they don’t blow it so far out of proportion that the children get more traumatized, but it needs to be addressed with both kids to make sure they are ok not only now, but in general.

Is it possible it was an I’ll show you yours if you show me mine, and it went awry?