Fed up with online sexual harassment perpetrated by their male peers, a band of Regis Jesuit High School girls wearing white confronted their administration Friday then walked out of school.
Two boys from the gender-separated private, Catholic school are on “indefinite suspension” resulting from the social media harassment — originally reported by the Aurora Sentinel — that school spokeswoman Charisse Broderick King characterized as “gender-based injustices.”
The harassment, students said, included tweets and videos directed at female students that mocked rape and women’s rights and told the girls to kill themselves.
“We don’t know the full scope of what they were tweeting,” Broderick King told The Denver Post. “Much of that has been removed. That’s the challenge of things that happen on social media. It is very complex and hard to determine who is involved.”
Junior Jewell Humphrey and her friends made their way off campus — protest signs in hand — to speak to the community and media who were not allowed on school grounds Friday afternoon.
Humphrey wants the administration to take the online harassment seriously and be more transparent about the consequences for the boys who were involved.
“That’s not what we want our school to stand for,” Humphrey said.
According to students and recent alums, the uproar stems from a boys’ division and girls’ division class that met to talk about women’s rights and gender inequality.
“It got a little immature afterward when some boys made some references and jokes about rape and sexual assault, which the girls, obviously, got offended and fired up about,” said Riley O’Connell, who graduated from Regis last year and has been in touch with many of the involved students.
A back-and-forth Twitter war erupted, O’Connell said, in which some boys claimed they “won” the “debate” about gender inequality and girls countered, adding that equality was not a competition. A Twitter account, which has been deleted, was made by male students that offended female Regis students, O’Connell said.
The argument culminated in a video made by a male student featuring a compilation of female students’ tweets set to music that repeatedly said “kill yourself.”
Senior Emily Weis said her freshman sister was sent the video and came home from school in tears.
“It’s dangerous,” Weis said. “These are not jokes. These are serious issues.”
Broderick King said the school was handling the situation.
“We do not tolerate this kind of language,” Broderick King said. “We have an ongoing investigation, and we will be taking follow-up steps to convene a task force of students and faculty and parents and recent alumni to help us with further education and initiatives around gender issues.”
Humphrey, who gave a letter to the school administration with requests asking for an emphasis on rape culture education and for the boys involved to be punished, felt her voice and those of her peers were heard. “I think this has been a success,” she said.
Allec Brust, who graduated from Regis last year, said the school’s gender division has, at times, fostered an environment unwelcoming to female students.
“There’s been a lot of sexism happening because of the divided schools,” she said. “There’s been a lot of built-up angst about that.”
