Regarding the question of the plausibility of the editorial, of why a counselor or a teacher (or HR) would not take appropriate action (even required action) when told about the harassing song —
From my own experience, not all counselors, teachers or HR reps are good at what they do. Especially in STEM-type settings.
A statement that is overly generalized, but nonetheless has decades of documentation behind it: STEM-type workplaces and school settings have had a reputation for not managing the human relations side of their tasks well at all. Not in every case, of course, but it is often a problem. These are technically-oriented organizations and tend to be a bit dense on handling human behavior. And because of this technical bias they sometimes also don’t do well at hiring the excellent HR help they desperately need, because they don’t know how to evaluate HR skills, or how to compensate and retain HR strength.
Just as an example you can Google the lawsuit by female Google employees against Google. The suit has had some reversals in court, but what matters most is that there were enough women who felt the way they did about their Google employment experience to file it in the first place.
I have watched professionals in technical job fields, both management and HR, simply freeze up when confronted with more serious human issues, from sexual harassment to bad bosses. They may have a manual telling them what to do, but they can’t seem to do it. In some cases they promise to follow up but never do (endless procrastination). In some cases they may try to push the problem back on the complainant to manage on their own. In some cases they just mumble, shuffle papers, try to end the meeting quickly (easy to do if no meaningful dialog is occurring) and then forget it.
The complainant never gets an answer and the harassers or bad bosses realize that no action is coming. In fact, the source of the problem may not even see that their behavior is a problem.
I’m not saying all technical workplaces and schools are like this. But there are some that are terribly ineffectual at managing issues such as the one described.
As to the behavior itself, what Olivia describes sounds fairly typical of less-mature teenage boys whose brains are still in the stage that only a mother could love. Even professionals in child development admit that early-teen boys are some of the crudest and least sensitive creatures adding to the coping burdens of the human race. They can be sweet, too, of course, but many are in dire need of good guidance.
