Help with public school providing sexual content to students

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My daughter is a sophomore in high school. She attends a local public high school. (No Catholic High School in area.)

Her literature teacher assigned a book that has a lot of objectionable content. I saw it when she was doing homework and idly picked it up so I’d have something to do while she was finishing up a math problem, and flipped it open and that was the beginning.

“In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote. It has some graphic violence. It also has prostitution, sodomy, rape, gang rape by “queens” on a 16 year old boy, children watching their mom have sex with random men, child molestation, and so on.

I sent an email to the teacher objecting to the content and asking to meet.
She is allowing my daughter to use a different book. We have not yet met-we will this week.

I asked my daughter about the class, and she started crying. The book before this was “The Highest Tide” by Jim Lynch. In it, a boy is obsessed with his adult babysitter’s female anatomy, describes it often, and “has his way with the sheets” when thinking about her. It also discusses graphic terms for sexual pleasure and where it is located in women, and uses excessive profanity.

My daughter said she can’t get it out of her head, she feels dirty and she is ashamed because it made her curious and she has been wanting to find more stuff like it, but she hasn’t, but she is so ashamed.

I am livid.

She wrote about her disgust with the objectification of women in the first book. Her teacher said “Boys will be boys.” I know that isn’t much, but it was an adult woman talking about masturbation to my daughter without my consent.

I think by secular standards the stuff was mild. By my standards, it was deplorable. I need help navigating with my ideological point of view in this sea of filth. On line it appears that these books are not common, but also not rare, in the high school setting. Therefor this isn’t a case of a piece of literature that will unanimously be understood as inappropriate.

I plan to meet with the principal and the teacher as soon as I have my case together. I have typed up the objectionable passages—eight pages, 31 seperate passages from just one of the books! I am going to ask the teacher to read a few out loud to us in the meeting. The language is prohibited by the school handbook. I don’t know why they think out loud and written would be different.

More below…
 
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So I could use advice. A lot, actually.
  1. An adult provided sexually explicit material to my underage daughter.
    (None of it is “hardcore”, and in our day and age it would not be considered “pornographic.”)
  2. I was not given the opportunity to “opt out” from this sexual education provided in a school setting which is a violation of my rights. (Indiana State Law.)
  3. My daughter’s emotional and physical well-being has been damaged by this experience. I suppose they would argue it is because I have raised her with an unrealistic moral code which leads to guilt, but hopefully everyone here knows that is not true because she has also been raised in grace through the Sacraments and so she has access to the strength of the Savior in fighting the battle for purity. But good luck explaining THAT in a secular environment. Maybe it will be relevant to them that SHE desired to be chaste and an adult violated that against her will.
I don’t know what to focus on.

I don’t know how far I can take this. I would be willing to press charges if it would do good for parental rights to protecting their children. I do NOT want to do harm, for example if it went to that and I lost and it set a legal precedent for the schools to have those rights over parents.

I don’t know what I should be asking them to do in response. They allow me to request another book for my daughter. What about the other kids? What about the fact that it has happened twice and I was not informed?

I don’t know if it would be helpful to inform the other parents. My heart says I should print out the objectionable passages, and send them with a letter to the parents to tell them what the children have been exposed to so that they can talk to their children about it and help them with it. I don’t know if that would be helpful or just cause a problem to no avail.

I don’t know if there are laws that have been violated. (Other than the ones my soul is very adamantly certain have been!)

I was hoping someone with experience or knowledge about this could advise me.

Or even that someone could direct me to any resources that might help.

I have found articles that associate viewing sexually explicit materials with a lower age of first sexual encounter, a higher number of partners, and decreased sexual satisfaction from encounters. (The last of which may be the only concern this teacher might hear.)

I am looking for credible journal articles on the effect of exposure to these things at a young age and the consequence for children who have this type of experience.

Anything at all would help.

Most especially, please pray for me and for my daughter. My name is Theresa. Her name is Mary. Please ask your prayer chains to lift us up, anyone you can. The more the better. I feel that this has potential to have a big impact on protecting intellectual innocence. Or the fact that I feel like this is so important indicates a self-centered inflated view of my own issues, in which case I still need those prayers!

Thank you for any and all help, advice, and prayers.
 
I don’t have advice, but I’ve been in a similar situation as a student. I was forced to read Lolita, In Cold Blood, The English Patient, and a number of other books that contained explicit, disturbing material. My parents would have just told me to suck it up and I was afraid of retaliation from my very liberal teachers, so I didn’t say anything. I don’t understand why students have to read stuff like this when there are plenty of more age-appropriate classics that, if they deal with mature topics, do so without being vulgar and explicit. You have my commiseration and prayers!
 
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all I can say is stick to your guns. If more parents raised objections to objectionable material maybe these books would be removed from High School libraries. I would also closely question the teacher’s motives in introducing material like this to minors. Ask the teacher to explain what literary value do these books contain that is suitable for non-college age children? Then ask why those books when there are so very many great books to choose from that don’t sexualize young minds. Make them defend their standards.
 
With all the hundreds of truly great classic books out there, it boggles my mind that high school teachers bypass them to assign this type of junk to their students.

I’m sorry that I don’t have any advice at this point regarding dealing with the school, but make sure to help your daughter find some quality books to read just for the sheer enjoyment of it–reading good literature is foundational to a quality education. It might also help rid her mind of the garbage she was exposed to in class.
 
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I will write those questions down! That sounds like a good way to try to at least appear to make sense of it. Because I don’t think there are any answers that will suffice. However, maybe if she hears herself out loud she will see how dreadful it is.
 
She is playing praise music when it comes up—she really connects to music. Hopefully this will be something that helps her learn and prepares her for life rather than the horrible violation it feels like now! Thanks for your support!
 
Your daughter plans on college?

“In Cold Blood” is considered a 9th grade and above level book.

If you wish to avoid an adult themes in books, homeschooling is your option.
 
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I found In Cold Blood to be a compelling study as to the why of a brutal massacre of an innocent family. It is an excellent accounting as to why evil can manifest, and shows how evil begets to evil. One of the questions that thinking minds will ask is why there is so much suffering in the world, and within the context of the Clutter murders, the story of killers is part of the answer.

Learning about events, even if they are unsavory, is part of the learning process. If a person wishes to understand why murder happens, it’s important to know what shapes the killer. Literature is about, amongst other things, sharing experiences across time and space. Sexual abuse is often part of the road to evil and it’s important to know that in order to combat that.

I’m sorry your daughter was upset by this book, I really am. Please don’t think I’m being flip, I very well understand how sensitive some can be to this things. But the 9th grade is when I also read Night, which is also an excellent study on the horrors of the Holocaust, and to begin to understand evil, you become familiar with it. At some point she must confront these things if she wants to begin to comprehend how evil manifests into the world.
 
It seems like allowing your daughter to use a different book, since she’s not comfortable with the one assigned, has solved the immediate problem. I also think when you’re talking about high school students, you should be encouraging them to let you and the teacher both know if they are not comfortable with some assigned book, realizing of course that if they go to college they will likely be expected to read a lot of material outside their comfort zone. The teacher has likely been made sufficiently aware that not everybody is comfortable reading books with discussions of masturbation or true crime in them, but I’m not a huge fan of book challenges in schools as students react differently to books and what may be too much for one reader may resonate with another.
 
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CoffeeAndDonuts said:
I found In Cold Blood to be a compelling study as to the why of a brutal massacre of an innocent family. It is an excellent accounting as to why evil can manifest, and shows how evil begets to evil.
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Yeah, I actually think it’s a well-written, though fictionalized, book and it did establish the genre of true crime (ironic, because it’s not totally true itself) which I greatly enjoyed for years and which influenced me in life and career choice etc.

Having said that, I also know many adults who don’t like true crime books, no matter how well-written, because the material is too difficult or depressing or scary for them to read. There’s a reason why those books used to be hidden for years on the bottom shelf at the back of Barnes and Noble before everybody decided to start watching stuff like “Making a Murderer”. If some teenager couldn’t handle reading a book which involves in part the brutal, random murder of two teenagers, I’d just say give them a different book to study.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
Having said that, I also know many adults who don’t like true crime books, no matter how well-written, because the material is too difficult or depressing or scary for them to read. There’s a reason why those books used to be hidden for years on the bottom shelf at the back of Barnes and Noble before everybody decided to start watching stuff like “Making a Murderer”. If some teenager couldn’t handle reading a book which involves in part the brutal, random murder of two teenagers, I’d just say give them a different book to study.
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Yeah, I don’t don’t think In Cold Blood would be my first choice to give to a bunch of 15 year olds either. It could prompt sadness if anyone in their family had been the victim of violent crime.
 
Yes, she plans to attend college. No, she does not need to sell her soul to do so. She has the right to consciensciously object to themes and material in the books assigned to her, even in college.

The adolescent mind is very vulnerable to suggestion. There is no reason to have a book with prostitution, sodomy, paedophilia, and child molestation. They do not cover those in the state-approved sex education program, which by law they give parents the chance to “opt out” of. The language in these books cannot be read out loud without violating the rules of conduct in the school handbook.

If an adult walked into math class and orated one of these passages, he would be in a lot of trouble. So why is it admissible in print?

When she is in college, she will be past adolescence. She will be an adult. Therefor adult themes would be appropriate.
And yet, even for 15 year olds, “adult themes” I can understand. Sexually explicit material I cannot condone.

Prostitution and pedophilia and rape are not just adult themes. They are criminal sexually deviant behaviors.
 
I am not opposed to addressing deep issues in the literature class. However, there are hundreds of books that address the same themes without explaining an encounter with Inez, the prostitute.

The other book, “The Highest Tide” (can’t figure out how to underline here) attempts to normalize masturbation. This isn’t the right place to encounter or discuss the natural side of emerging human sexuality. Do teens need to do that: yes they do. Not in English class.
 
Out of curiosity, which book did you pick for her as an alternative?
 
Hi, I spent like over two hours typing a reply on my phone just for it not to go through because of too many words…can you either private message me or we can email or something? I have a few suggestions that you may find helpful. I actually signed up just to reply to this. Thanks.
 
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