BROCKTON, Mass. (AP) – Berthena Dorinvil’s 6-year-old son is getting a lesson on what “sexual harassment” is a few years before he can spell it.

The first-grader was suspended three days for sexual harassment for putting two fingers inside a classmate’s waistband and touching her skin, school officials told Dorinvil. The boy told his mother he only touched the girl’s shirt after the girl touched him.

Regardless of what happened, experts said only in rare, and often troubling, cases can one first-grader truly sexually harass another.

The Brockton case, on its face, seems to be an overzealous attempt to ensure students feel safe in school after years in which society was not attentive enough, said Dr. Elizabeth Berger, a Philadelphia-area child psychiatrist and author.

“(It’s) an approach to answer 20,000 years of the degradation of women by finding some 42-pound little fellow to take the fall for it,” she said.

Dorinvil’s son was suspended from at Downey Elementary School on Jan. 30 and Dorinvil reportedly has refused to let her son return to school and is seeking a transfer to another school. She’s called the decision outrageous, and said she can’t even explain to her son what he’s done wrong because he’s too young to understand.

“He doesn’t know those things,” she told The Enterprise of Brockton. “He’s only 6 years old.”

Attempts to reach Dorinvil by phone or speak to her at her home Wednesday were unsuccessful.

Brockton school officials have not commented beyond a statement from the Superintendent Basan Nembirkow, which said sexual harassment charges are always investigated and officials are trained to deal with them.

The Brockton School Committee defines sexual harassment among students, in part, as “uninvited physical contact such as touching, hugging, patting or pinching.”

E. Christopher Murray, a Garden City, N.Y., civil rights attorney who has handled school discipline cases, said sexual harassment is a term loaded with meaning a child couldn’t understand.

“The connotation is you’re getting some kind of sexual gratification, or wanting sexual gratification, or are putting pressure on for some kind of sexual gratification, when a 6-year-old doesn’t have that capacity,” he said.

In 1996, a New York City second-grader was suspended for kissing a second-grader and ripping a button off her skirt – an idea the boy said he got from his favorite book “Corduroy,” about a bear with a missing button. Earlier that year, a Lexington, N.C., 6-year-old was separated from his class after kissing a female classmate on the cheek.

Such seemingly innocent examples don’t mean young children can’t commit sexual harassment, experts said.

Children who have been sexually abused or exposed to pornography may have an inappropriately advanced understanding of sexuality, and could harass a peer, said Stacy Skalski, director of public policy for the National Association of School Psychologists. But she added that most 6-year-olds are just figuring out that not all birds and bees look the same.

“A lot of them are just now really noticing that boys and girls are different,” she said

First graders who repeatedly touch classmates need to be disciplined and taught what’s appropriate, said Nan Stein, a senior research scientist at the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley College. But don’t call the apparent discipline problem “sexual harassment” because first graders just don’t get it, she said.

“The preposterous part to me is the label,” Stein said. “You don’t use a label like that with kids of that age.”