Dress Codes In Schools

Ever since we started school we’ve had to deal with dress code. However, schools have different rules such as whether you have to wear uniforms or how short your skirts can be. My elementary school required us to wear uniforms and as the years went on the dress code got progressively stricter. When I moved on to high school it wasn’t much better. They would constantly send people to the office to get a change of clothes, but by doing this they also removed students from their classes, making them fall behind. Most of the reasons people got dress coded were for flip flops, crochet tops with tank tops underneath, ripped/ frayed jeans, the length of shorts or skirts, and boys were even sent to shave their facial hair in the bathroom. Most of these …show more content…
Cue Erykah Badu, an American singer-songwriter and a Houston School District parent, commented to the Houstonian, “The stigma that women are asking men to come onto them due to what they are wearing poses the idea that men are incapable of controlling their urges and tendencies. Telling young girls that they must cover up in order to protect themselves portrays the message that girls cannot be themselves and must change in order to satisfy the comfort of men” (Caldwell). This causes girls to believe their sexuality is a bad thing and that they must be covered up in order to prevent sexual assault from the opposite sex. It also makes boys believe that they can’t control their urges and that they can view girls in a sexual way, harming their view of their own gender as well as their view of girls. This can also lead to victim shaming which is telling girls they have to cover up so they do not distract their male peers or teachers, when the men should be the ones to restrain themselves. Badu also states, “Why are men not punished for looking at women inappropriately? Girls go to school to learn, not to have their teachers or fellow peers fantasize about them”... “Maybe we should shame the inappropriate males that look at “child bearing women,” whose age can be as young as 11. Maybe we should …show more content…
Clovis Unified School District recently adopted a gender-neutral dress code that has one policy for both boys and girls. It enables boys to wear earrings and keep their hair long and removes any language that specifically points out that certain genders are banned from wearing certain clothes. For example, instead of saying girls must wear shorts that are no shorter than three inches above the knee, it will say a student must not wear shorts any shorter than three inches. While this is a good step forward, they only adopted the policy after first voting against it. The Fresno Bee wrote an article on the protests that led to a revote and described how students at Buchanan High School swapped gender specific outfits, meaning girls wore boys shirts and boys wore girls clothes like dresses and tights. It also explained how students started a petition, which got up to 2,500 signatures in only a few days (Mays). In Missoula, Montana 20 students peacefully protested the restrictions that “unfairly target girls.” The students protested by girls wearing shirts that said “I am not a distraction” and boys wearing shirts that said, “I am not distracted.” This protest sparked the worldwide “I Am Not a Distraction” initiative where “girls are given a platform to speak openly about the struggles we face on a day-to-day basis” (Kato). Some positive