“No” means “NO” – unless you’re a female at Rich Middle School in Laketown, Utah, apparently.
The parents of a Utah sixth-grader say their daughter was told she could not say “no” to a boy who asked her to dance at her school’s Valentine’s Day dance.
Azlyn Hobson was “thrilled and nervous” for the Valentine’s Day dance at Rich Middle School in Laketown in northern Utah’s Rich County, said her mother, Alicia.
“She was so excited for this dance. She was telling me about it for two weeks,” Alicia Hobson said. “There was a boy at school she liked, she wanted to dance with him, she was going to have the best time ever.”
Instead, Azlyn said, another boy asked her to dance — a boy that had made her uncomfortable in the past. So she said no.
Then the principal ran over to her.
“He was like, ‘You guys go dance. There’s no saying no in here,’” Azlyn recalled. The principal shooed them onto the dance floor for what Azlyn said was a painfully awkward partner dance.
Understandably, Azlyn’s mother was enraged when her daughter returned home and told her what happened.
“She ALWAYS has the right to say no,” Alicia Hobson wrote in an email, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. “Boys don’t have the right to touch girls or make them dance with them. They don’t. If girls are taught that they don’t have the right to say no to boys, or that saying no is meaningless, because they’ll be forced to do it anyway, we will have another generation who feels that rape culture is completely normal.”
“We want to protect every child’s right to be safe and comfortable at school,” Motta told a local media outlet. “We believe in that 100%. We also believe that all children should be included in activities. The reason for the policy as we have had it (in the) past is to make sure no kids feel like they get left out.”
