Good Intentions Obscenely Distorted

Every now and then a trickle of justice seeps through the cracks and we can’t help but get a little excited. Last week, eight young girls in Pennsylvania got a taste of vindication and we, the befuddled public, a faint reminder of sanity.

The story began three years ago in East Stroudsburg, Pa. You may recall reading a bizarre story of sixth-grade girls having their genitals examined by a school-hired pediatrician at J.T. Lambert Intermediate School.

The girls, ages 11 and 12, didn’t know they were going to be examined - nor can anyone suggest a good reason why they should have been - and were forced to disrobe and submit despite protests.

This was the first such exam for many of these girls, who were traumatized by the event. Most women recall their first gynecological exam with a certain horror, even if conducted under the best of the circumstances - fully sensitized to the event and with a trusted physician.

To be surprised - at school no less - by a strange doctor demanding to examine your most private parts is tantamount to sexual abuse.

Stories of girls crying, begging to call their mothers and tales of subsequent nightmares and crying spells have been heartbreaking. Nevertheless, the Pennsylvania departments of health and education defended the exams. A statement issued in 1996 by the East Stroudsburg district administration office went like this:

“It is the position of the district administration and the board of education that the physical examinations, as conducted, were as required by applicable laws and regulations.”

Those laws and regulations, buried within the monolithic Goals 2000: Educate America Act, call for health care for all students and, apparently, leave ample room for interpretation. That is, until last week when a federal court decided that the pediatrician in question and the East Stroudsburg Area School District violated the civil rights of eight sixth-grade girls.

In all, 59 girls were examined but the parents of only eight filed a lawsuit. The ruling came in two parts: A jury determined that neither the girls nor the parents gave their consent to the exams and U.S. District Judge A. Richard Caputo ruled that, absent a medical crisis, the exams violated the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting unreasonable search.

School officials maintained that they sought parental permission through take-home consent slips, some of which never were returned. But attorneys for the families argued that silence cannot be construed as consent. Sixth-graders, meanwhile, are not the most reliable couriers of paperwork, as parents and teachers well know.

It seems ridiculous that we need a federal judge and jury to tell us what should be obvious to anyone with an ounce of sense. In more reasonable times, schools provided nurses to tend to skinned knees and cut fingers. Now, under the ever-expanding guise of “protecting the children,” we employ doctors to perform the most intimate procedures, with or without regard to parental wishes.

From whom are we protecting the children? Abusive parents? The ubiquitous sexually deviant live-in boyfriend? The pedophiliac stepfather? We’ve created so many societal demons lurking around every child’s wash basin that we’ve become demons ourselves.

Yes, children need protection from abuse and training teachers and school nurses to be vigilant is a good idea. But our good intentions have become outrageously intrusive and dangerous when routine health checks can be construed to require genital inspections of schoolchildren.

Jurors reconvened Thursday and awarded $7,500 to each of the eight girls. Although both sides considered the verdict conservative, let’s hope it is sufficient to keep educators mindful that parents, not bureaucrats, are best suited to protecting the children.