Then of course there was the entire trend of skirt pulling in which the object of the game was to expose the girl's shorts, or panties, or legs, or whatever. They'd pull the skirt up, or down, or wherever. Meanwhile, while wearing pants with a belt, they couldn't be attacked the same way. So it was all tee-hee and ha-ha, and if a teacher noticed, he or she would generally find a way to punish the girl.
It's harder to physically humiliate or attack someone who's wearing pants. That makes pants the superior default garment for self defense.
How many martial arts uniforms do you see that feature a skirt?
Oh man, I’m having so many unpleasant 6th grade flashbacks right now. There were a couple of bullies in my class who teamed up to grab unsuspecting girls around the waist and pull up their skirts at recess. The adult monitors did nothing (this actually worked in my favor, as I sunk my nails into the hand of the bully who grabbed me and drew blood in multiple places. The monitor assessed the situation and walked away).
I literally don't understand how this is the girl's fault, and why this wasn't considered a situation of harassment. If I was a parent and found that my daughter had been punished when a boy indecently exposed her at school, the school director and full board would have it from me.
Assuming you found out, and assuming the school officials owned up to having punished her in the first place. Things are marginally better in the modern era but that's just because cell phones and cameras are everywhere so people charged with protecting the public peace have to at least pretend to do their jobs at least some of the time.
There's such a thing as a toxic operating environment that enables one person, or one group of people, to mistreat others and get away with it. The problem is perpetuated not by the aggressive person but by nearly everybody else around him or her, who engage in enabling behaviors that started out as survival strategies. I wrote about it in one of my books (the one on social self defense won't be out for several months).
I'll provide an anecdote that explains how systems and groups of people protect abusers. When my kid brother was in school, one of his teachers was somebody who probably shouldn't have been teaching. Several parents complained about her screaming at the kids, pounding on desks, and threatening to gouge out the children's eyes. Some of the students were traumatized to the point of wetting the bed or requiring psychiatric help. Eventually some of the parents started to believe their children because they were in communication with other parents and the topic of conversation came up. But complain as the parents would, the principal and school board were on the teacher's side or the staff member's side 100% of the time, the school did not permit students to transfer out of their second grade class, and meanwhile the law required the parents to continue to bring their kids to school. The teacher was extremely popular because of the high level of discipline in her class.
Regarding the rule for blaming the person on the receiving end of an attack, the rationale goes like this: most humans don't attack other humans that way, and the ones that do-- the aggressors-- tend to be well known. The interaction model is a fight between two peers of roughly equal power, in which the situation escalates until it sort of explodes. (Other interaction models between people in conflict aren't acknowledged, because according to the pie-in-the-sky mentality of most people in education and academia there's no such thing as conflict between people of radically different power or privilege levels.) So if there's an incident, the target must have done something to contribute to it such as failing to avoid the aggressor sufficiently or somehow instigating. Furthermore, there are separate rules for aggressors or targets. The aggressor belongs to a people for whom the predatory conduct is deemed to be right, normal, and acceptable, or at least harmless because it's "only in fun". It's within the acceptable range of behaviors for the people in the aggressor's category. But the target belongs to a different group that has different rules. It's the target's responsibility to control not just the target's behavior but also the aggressor's. If there's trouble that's serious enough for an authority figure to get involved, then the target must be at least partially to blame.