Earlier this month, police in Longwood, Florida, a suburb of Orlando, received a call about a reported battery that occurred in the area. Soon enough, law enforcement apprehended the perpetrator and booked her into a juvenile detention center.
These words might conjure a variety of images in your head, images of egregious, ghastly individuals who batter their partners.
It is doubtful that you pictured 12-year-old Breana Evans, a middle school girl who was completely normal by any measure.
As a part of a popular game played at Milwee Middle School, Evans pinched a male classmate’s butt, eliciting an uproar from the school’s administration.
The classmate reportedly did not wish to press charges, but his mother opted to do so nonetheless.
Evans was subsequently served misdemeanor battery charges.
This incident highlights a larger issue facing our society today, the United States’ culture of litigiousness and oversensitivity that has germinated over time.
When girls like Evans are batterers and boys like then-six-year-old Hunter Yelton, who kissed a female classmate on the hand in 2013, are painted as sex offenders, something is fundamentally wrong with our legal and social cultures.
According to Lawyers.com, an average of 3.3 lawsuits are filed each year per 1,000 citizens in the U.S. as opposed to just 1.2 in England.
Americans’ propensity for litigation has varied roots. Some hold that the litigious mindset began around the time of Independence and has persisted since. New Americans were unable to fall back on familial ties to build wealth and status, so instead they took advantage of the legal system to amass fortunes and property holdings.
Others point to the fact that other countries practice a system in which a suit’s loser pays the winner’s legal fees.
In the U.S., the absence of this disincentive makes it far less risky to sue anyone that looks at you sideways.
It’s true that many frivolous civil suits stem from pipe dreams of instant wealth but many cases, including those of Evans and Yelton, seem to arise from damaged egos.
The actions of young children should be judged at face value as immature, if slightly crude, shenanigans that we’ve all experienced at one point in our lives.
As a public educator, Kelley School of Business senior lecturer Dick Canada witnessed this shift to oversensitivity firsthand.
“The era that I grew up in, the way people knew that you liked them was if you teased them,” Canada said. “Today, I will acknowledge that students tend to be more thin-skinned and more sensitive.”
We’ve come a long way since things like corporal punishment were regularly practiced, and rightly so.
Still, we should be worried about going too far in the opposite direction and creating a generation of über-sensitive, thin-skinned adults with lawyers on speed dial.
dkilcull@indiana.edu
