It happens all the time,you just don't take any notice

This article discusses research undertaken with a group of ten adolescent school girls about their understandings and perceptions of sexual harassment. The research took place 2 years after the Department of Education, Queensland, had developed and disseminated its Sexual Harassment Policy and Grievance Procedures (1994). In a series of interviews, the research participants revealed their understandings of sexual harassment and the factors they considered when making the decision to report sexual harassment and/or to utilize existing grievance procedures. The research indicates that the elimination of sexual harassment must take into account the complexities and ambiguities at work in the school lives of adolescent girls. At present it would appear that schools are driven by the legal imperative to implement policy, and have yet to focus on the educative responsibility attending the policy. Schools’ educative responsibility for the effective implementation of sexual harassment policy requires that students have opportunities to examine in the formal curriculum a range of discourses that expose the contradictory ways in which gender, power, sexuality and desire are constructed in education and schooling. The findings of this research therefore have significant implications for school communities, curriculum developers and policy makers