Today’s middle schools are the training ground for tomorrow’s Harveys and Bills.

While more women and men are publicly speaking out about sexual harassment and assaults, many students don’t realize that what they face in hallways and classrooms often goes beyond bullying.

At least 1 in 4 middle schoolers say they’ve experienced unwanted verbal or physical sexual harassment at school, according to 2014 research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Girls as young as 12 have told me about boys who compare them to porn stars they’ve watched online. The easy access to and widespread consumption of pornography among tweens and teens reinforces warped attitudes of women as little more than sexual objects.

The country, however, has always been more riveted by high-profile cases of sexual abuse involving celebrities than by how to better educate young people about respecting other people’s bodies. The latest reports involve Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who has joined a growing list of powerful men facing accusations of sexual misconduct.

Multiple women allege Bill Cosby raped them. Rape allegations have also surfaced against Weinstein. Fox News employees say Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly abused their positions for years by sexually harassing women there. The highest officeholder in the land has also battled similar allegations. At least 15 women have publicly accused President Donald Trump, who was elected after being caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by their genitals, of sexual harassment and assault.

These men have all denied wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, 27 percent of middle school-aged girls and 25 percent of boys reported that they had experienced verbal or physical sexual harassment or violence, the most common being unwanted touching, according to the study. Middle school counselors talk about trying to deal with rampant sexting among students, and increasingly educate students about the risks of digital sexual experimentation. But rarely are sexual harassment and consent discussed in this context.

Here’s an easy test for parents: Ask your middle schooler if he or she knows the difference between sexual harassment and assault. Find out if it’s part of the health curriculum. If it isn’t, define it for them: Sexual harassment includes unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors and other conduct of a sexual nature that affects a person’s employment or education, interferes with work or educational performance, or creates an environment that a reasonable person would find intimidating, hostile or offensive. Let them know it’s unacceptable.

The way boys treat their classmates now lays the foundation for how they will treat their co-workers later. We’ve seen an avalanche of victims who have shared details of the abuse they’ve suffered. Too often, powerful people have been able to degrade and abuse others because wealth, status and societal attitudes insulate them. Young people take note when these serial offenders don’t appear to suffer real consequences. They hear those who defend sexual predators based on their personal interactions with an individual, rather than the merits of the allegations against them.

I saw this pattern of denial every time a popular coach or religious leader was implicated in a sexual crime. The default response of the community was to take the side of the accused. Many believed that if a predator was good to them or helped them, he was falsely accused.

While we may perceive a difference between a predator who accosts women in the street versus one who attacks them in a well-appointed office, there is no difference.

Different setting, same character.

The most basic lessons we teach toddlers are the same ones we to need to hold them accountable to as they grow up: Be respectful. Keep your hands to yourself. No matter how large or fragile your ego, you don’t have the right to grab anyone.

Not even if you are the smartest kid in the science class, a star athlete or the boy next door.

Not even if you are the most powerful producer in Hollywood or the president of the United States.

By now, the NRA is banking on us having moved on from the last massacre.

The images have started to fade from the latest grisly horror show in which innocent people -- just like you or me -- are mowed down in a public place by a madman with a gun raining bullets on a crowd. They are betting that the scene isn’t as shocking as it was 18 years ago at Columbine High School.

We’re so familiar with the subsequent “thoughts and prayers” stanza that it starts trending on Twitter before the body count is finalized. And the hubris of the National Rifle Association is so great that it is scheduled to begin running ads in Virginia’s gubernatorial race eight days after the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.

Those of us still disgusted, heartbroken and angry about Las Vegas, Orlando, Charleston, San Bernardino, Newtown, Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora -- and yes, Columbine -- can find hope in the NRA’s calculated disregard of the dead.

The powerful gun lobby, which opposes virtually every form of gun regulation, is drunk on its $36 million investment in a winning presidential candidate and a Republican-controlled Congress willing to kneel before its demands. And why not? While a horrified public has watched mass shootings increase, lawmakers at state and federal levels continue to make it easier to buy and carry guns. It’s easy to look at this trend and say that if Congress couldn’t pass universal background checks after the mass slaughter of first-graders in their classrooms, then nothing will ever move them to enact policies that will reduce gun-related deaths.

That’s a fundamental miscalculation of how this type of social change will happen. The NRA has unquestionable spending power, with an annual operating budget of about a quarter of a billion dollars and the ability to spend 15 times as much on campaign contributions as gun control advocates. Its greatest strength, however, is its energized and committed base willing to call and write legislators and vote on unfettered access to guns as a single issue.

But the NRA’s managed to galvanize more than just its base; it’s galvanized mothers.

After the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, Shannon Watts founded Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. They started with 4,500 active members and now have 60,000. There are active, committed volunteers in every state, including deep-red ones like Missouri. Congressional candidates are coming to these Moms meetings in St. Louis and organizing on the issue of gun safety laws. That has happened through the power of grassroots action, by an expanding platform on social media and by the growing disgust every time there’s another senseless attack.

Our society isn’t building up a tolerance to gun violence; it’s building up to a tipping point against it.

In our lifetimes, policies on all sorts of issues have moved in ways that people didn’t think were possible. Look at the change in public attitudes toward gay marriage, smoking and health care. Now, we’re seeing the beginnings of a similar shift on gun safety. Public attitudes are shaped by a growing number of voices saying “enough.”

Mainstream late-night television host Jimmy Kimmel nearly broke down during an emotional monologue the day after the attack in Las Vegas. He talked convincingly and from the heart about the need for basic, common-sense gun reform. That is not the sort of testimony America has seen from a comedian.

The same day, a country music guitarist -- who played at the outdoor concert where he saw a gunman kill 59 and injure more than 500 people -- publicly defected from the NRA crowd.

“I’ve been a proponent of the 2nd Amendment my whole life,” Caleb Keeter wrote on Twitter, “until the events of last night. I can’t express how wrong I was.”

The lead guitarist for the Texas-based Josh Abbott Band noted, “We actually have members of our crew with (concealed handgun licenses), and legal firearms on the bus. They were useless,” he wrote. “We couldn’t touch them for fear police might think we were part of the massacre and shoot us.”

He summed up what so many Americans have felt: ”Enough is enough.”

This is the NRA’s base slowly starting to turn away from propaganda. Multiple studies show a downward trend in gun ownership among American households over the past 20 years. About 90 percent of Americans support background checks for every gun sale. Nine states have universal background checks.

With each attack, it’s harder to convince the public that a person’s right to own a semiautomatic assault weapon outweighs a child’s right to not be killed at school. Each time there’s a gruesome attack and Congress takes no action, it moves the needle. Every election where the NRA flaunts its multimillion-dollar moneybags in the wake of a national tragedy, it motivates voters to push back against absolute power.

No political party stays in power forever.

An army of mothers, a late-night comedian and a country band guitarist will help bring about the change that so many believe is out of reach.

Stick around for the long game.

The protests about police shootings haven’t stopped in the heartland. Two weeks after a St. Louis judge issued a not-guilty verdict in the Jason Stockley trial, there have been protests in malls, before concerts and baseball games, and in schools.

Many of the high schoolers who walked out of their suburban St. Louis classrooms to protest the Stockley verdict were in middle school when teenager Michael Brown was fatally shot.

The anguished reaction in the streets three years ago captured the world’s attention, but it made an indelible impression on the newest generation of emerging social activists.

Theirs is an adolescence punctuated by protests. It’s a coming-of-age experience vastly different from their Generation X parents, like myself, who were too young or not yet born during the Vietnam War protests. We were even further removed from the civil rights movement, which belonged to our parents’ generation.

Today’s parents, in our mid-30s to early 50s, lacked the visceral experience as teenagers of watching police, in militarized vehicles, firing tear gas on crowds and making mass arrests in the malls we hung out in, in the streets familiar to us.

Our children’s perspective on how to impact social change is being shaped by the experiences they are living through. And what a tumultuous few years it’s been.

Today’s young teens growing up in the middle of the country have watched a national movement against racial inequality and police brutality spring from civil unrest in their own area. They watched students at their state’s flagship institution -- the University of Missouri -- challenge the administration’s response to racism on campus and saw the football team unite to bring down a university president.

The few degrees of separation in cities like St. Louis mean that social media feeds, filled with images of protests, likely involve someone they know or someone to whom they can find a mutual connection. They may have marched in the largest single-day mass protest in American history, joining between 4 to 5 million people participating in women’s marches across the country a day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration. That was soon followed by hundreds of thousands of people at airports nationwide demonstrating against the administration’s travel ban.  

And, most recently, amid two weeks of daily protests since a judge found former St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley not guilty of murdering Anthony Lamar Smith, #TakeAKnee also started trending. NFL athletes silently kneeling during the playing of the national anthem have inspired similar protests against racial inequality and injustice on high school and college fields across the country.

From pop culture to social media to sports, everything is intensely political.

These students have also seen the backlash to this activism and the growing polarization in civil society. They may have something to learn from previous generations who fought similar battles. Those who were 16 in 1963 when Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech are 70 now. They may remember that the historic march, now taught with reverence as a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement, took place against a backdrop of fear and suspicion.  

In the 10 weeks before the 1963 March on Washington, there were 758 demonstrations in 186 cities resulting in 14,733 arrests, according to the Justice Department. A Gallup poll taken before the march found that the majority of Americans were against it -- viewing it unfavorably, thinking it wouldn’t accomplish anything, or believing that it would end in violence.

In addition to the power of their civil disobedience, that generation also learned that the most potent protests happened at the ballot box.

It remains to be seen if today’s 16-year-olds will harness that same political muscle when they are old enough to cast ballots. This generation after the millennials, Generation Z, makes up a quarter of the U.S. population. They are a larger cohort than the baby boomers or millennials.

Given their collective formative experiences so far, this generation will not accept a return to a status quo their parents accepted. They are armed with technology, including social media, to organize and amplify their voices, and a courage to stand up for their beliefs that has been tested and proven to be strong.

This generation is getting loud.

And they won’t be ignored.