Following are excerpts from the U.S. Supreme Court’s majority and dissenting opinions in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education.
JUSTICE SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR delivered the opinion of the court:
Petitioner brought suit against the Monroe County board of education and other defendants, alleging that her 5th grade daughter had been the victim of sexual harassment by another student in her class. Among petitioner’s claims was a claim for monetary and injunctive relief under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The district court dismissed petitioner’s Title IX claim on the ground that “student on student,” or peer, harassment provides no ground for a private cause of action under the statute. The Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, sitting en banc, affirmed. We consider here whether a private damages action may lie against the school board in cases of student-on-student harassment. We conclude that it may, but only where the funding recipient acts with deliberate indifference to known acts of harassment in its programs or activities. Moreover, we conclude that such an action will lie only for harassment that is so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit. ...
We stress that our conclusion here--that recipients may be liable for their deliberate indifference to known acts of peer sexual harassment--does not mean that recipients can avoid liability only by purging their schools of actionable peer harassment or that administrators must engage in particular disciplinary action. We thus disagree with respondents’ contention that, if Title IX provides a cause of action for student-on-student harassment, “nothing short of expulsion of every student accused of misconduct involving sexual overtones would protect school systems from liability or damages.” ... Likewise, the dissent erroneously imagines that victims of peer harassment now have a Title IX right to make particular remedial demands. ... In fact, as we have previously noted, courts should refrain from second-guessing the disciplinary decisions made by school administrators.
School administrators will continue to enjoy the flexibility they require so long as funding recipients are deemed “deliberately indifferent” to acts of student-on-student harassment only where the recipient’s response to the harassment or lack thereof is clearly unreasonable in light of the known circumstances. The dissent consistently mischaracterizes this standard to require funding recipients to “remedy” peer harassment, and to “ensur[e] that . . . students conform their conduct to” certain rules. Title IX imposes no such requirements. On the contrary, the recipient must merely respond to known peer harassment in a manner that is not clearly unreasonable. ...
The statute makes clear that, whatever else it prohibits, students must not be denied access to educational benefits and opportunities on the basis of gender. We thus conclude that funding recipients are properly held liable in damages only where they are deliberately indifferent to sexual harassment, of which they have actual knowledge, that is so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it can be said to deprive the victims of access to the educational opportunities or benefits provided by the school. ...
It is not necessary, however, to show physical exclusion to demonstrate that students have been deprived by the actions of another student or students of an educational opportunity on the basis of sex. Rather, a plaintiff must establish sexual harassment of students that is so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive, and that so undermines and detracts from the victims’ educational experience, that the victim-students are effectively denied equal access to an institution’s resources and opportunities.
Whether gender-oriented conduct rises to the level of actionable harassment thus depends on a constellation of surrounding circumstances, expectations, and relationships, including, but not limited to, the ages of the harasser and the victim and the number of individuals involved. Courts, moreover, must bear in mind that schools are unlike the adult workplace and that children may regularly interact in a manner that would be unacceptable among adults. Indeed, at least early on, students are still learning how to interact appropriately with their peers. It is thus understandable that, in the school setting, students often engage in insults, banter, teasing, shoving, pushing, and gender-specific conduct that is upsetting to the students subjected to it. Damages are not available for simple acts of teasing and name-calling among school children, however, even where these comments target differences in gender. Rather, in the context of student-on-student harassment, damages are available only where the behavior is so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it denies its victims the equal access to education that Title IX is designed to protect.
The dissent fails to appreciate these very real limitations on a funding recipient’s liability under Title IX. It is not enough to show ... that a student has been “teased,” or “called ... offensive names.” ... We trust that the dissent’s characterization of our opinion will not mislead courts to impose more sweeping liability than we read Title IX to require.
Moreover, the provision that the discrimination occur “under any education program or activity” suggests that the behavior be serious enough to have the systemic effect of denying the victim equal access to an educational program or activity. Although, in theory, a single instance of sufficiently severe one-on-one peer harassment could be said to have such an effect, we think it unlikely that Congress would have thought such behavior sufficient to rise to this level in light of the inevitability of student misconduct and the amount of litigation that would be invited by entertaining claims of official indifference to a single instance of one-on-one peer harassment. ..
