Written submission from Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project (SVS0077)
Introduction
Executive Summary
Establishing the scale of the problem
How much sexual harassment currently occurs in primary and secondary schools?
Girls report experiencing a wide variety of different forms of sexual harassment and sexual violence, including verbal harassment, very regular use of derogatory sexual terms such as ‘slut’ and ‘slag’, physical assault, including unwanted sexual touching, groping, having skirts lifted and tops pulled down, and in some cases sexual assault and rape.
One example is when I had maths class, at age 14, I was sat next to this boy who would constantly feel up my legs and try to make his way up to my crotch, however I would try my best to bat his hand away although he would STILL carry on until the end of the lesson. This made me feel so uncomfortable and so angry but I would never say anything to the teacher, it only stopped when the teacher changed the class around and I was able to sit by a friend. It was a few weeks later that my best friend (also in that class) said he had been doing the same to her. Neither of us told a teacher for fear we would not be listened to or believed.
Research by YouGov for the End Violence Against Women Coalition in 2010 found that 71% of young people heard ‘slut’ or ‘slag’ being used towards girls at school at least once a week and that almost one third of girls aged 16-18 experience unwanted sexual touching at school. A recent BBC freedom of information request found that 5500 sexual offences in schools including 600 rapes had been reported to police during a three year period. Taking into account the average length of the school term in the UK, this amounts to one rape reported per day in a UK school. We know that on average just 15% of rapes are reported to police, with the figure even lower (just 10%) in studies of female students, suggesting that the problem may be much greater in reality.
Our project entries and my interactions with pupils across the country strongly support these statistics – this is a widespread, regular and common problem. It doesn’t affect every child but it is something that the majority of girls are experiencing, and is widespread even in its most severe forms.
Today I began to think about what happens in my Science class with my friend. Every day, these 5 or 6 guys always make jokes about her in a very sexual manner, the teacher hears them and does nothing. I thought nothing of it until I was listening and realized they were sexually harassing her. I was so desensitized to it because if a man does that, it means you are pretty and I was sitting there waiting for them to do the same for me. They are saying things like "She puts out every night" "We are in love and I got her pregnant" "She’s a whore" "I will do it with you all night every night" and the fact that no one even blinks when it happens pisses me off. My best friend is sexually harassed every day and no one even thinks anything of it and I am appalled that this sort of behaviour is acceptable and is seen as a complement.
The problem is intersectional, with some girls experiencing racist, ableist, homophobic or transphobic harassment combined with sexism, which has an insidious and cumulative impact.
I'm 15 and get the bus to school. Nobody ever really made fun of me before, but as soon as I got my hair cut short into a pixie cut lads I didn't know were calling me 'lesbo' and 'boy' just because almost every girl in my year has wavy hair that goes halfway down their back and I don't.
Yesterday I got the bus with a friend, and some boys in lower years were shouting 'Can I get inside you?' at her.
The Everyday Sexism Project has only been active for four years, and is qualitative in nature, so it is not possible for us to say with certainty whether the problem is increasing in severity, though we can say with confidence that the problem is currently severe. However, conversations with teachers, parents and school staff suggest a general perception that the problem may be getting worse.
I am a secondary science teacher and a form tutor in Yorkshire.
I felt I needed to comment on your site on the increasing sexism I am witnessing amongst pupils in my classes and form group. It appears to be getting worse year on year, morphing from the sexism we have come to expect from silly school boys (the pinging of bra straps, etc) to something much more sinister and somewhat violent.
I witness on a daily basis the girls in my classes being called 'whore' 'bitch' 'slag' 'slut' as a matter of course, heckled if they dare to speak in class, their shirts being forcibly undone and their skirts being lifted and held by groups of boys, (I WANT TO EMPHASISE THAT THIS IS MORE OFTEN THAN NOT A DAILY EVENT, AND OFTEN BORDERS ON ASSAULT). On a daily basis I am forced to confiscate mobile phones as boys are watching hardcore pornography videos in lessons and I have noticed sadly that as time has gone on the girls in my classes have become more and more reserved and reluctant to draw attention to themselves.
Who are the targets of harassment and who are the perpetrators?
Female students are the majority of victims in our reports but we have also received a significant number of reports from female teachers. In the majority of cases the perpetrators are male students, but in a significant minority of cases the perpetrators are male teachers. Girls also experience sexual harassment and assault on their way to school in public spaces or on public transport, and in these cases the perpetrators are sometimes male students and sometimes male members of the public (often much older men).
In a small minority of cases the victims reporting harassment are boys, and in these cases there is a particular problem with disclosure or reporting, due to stereotypes about boys being tough and not speaking about emotions, as well as the general assumption that this is a problem mainly affecting girls.
How often are teachers the victims of sexual harassment and sexual violence in schools?
Teachers also report experiencing sexual harassment in schools, often at the hands of students, and report particular difficulty in dealing with these situations because of their position and duty of care towards students. There is often a lack of support from schools in tackling these situations and a reluctance to see the problem as systemic rather than a one-off incident.
I worked at an all boys school. I loved these boys, and I poured my heart into teaching them. I left when I received an anonymous, hand-written rape threat, placed on my desk. The school really felt that it was an isolated incident, despite several female staff members complaining of sexual harassment from students and staff on a daily basis. I still have nightmares about the place.
How well is the problem being recorded and monitored?
The problem is widespread and it is my belief that it is not currently being satisfactorily recorded or monitored. At individual school level it frequently goes unreported, and those who do report, either to teachers or parents often describe being ignored, told ‘it’s just boys being boys’, ‘he just likes you’, or even blamed themselves for what has happened.
After being continuously groped against my will by one boy in my class for the majority of the year, finally had enough and told a teacher, only for them to tell me that 'boys will be boys'
When I was in primary school there was one boy who was always picking on me and calling me names. Whenever I told a teacher, the two main response were a) it’s a sign that he has a crush on me b) Boy's will be boys and I should just ignore him.
The first teaches girls from a very early age that abuse is a sign of love and therefore, when they are abused in some way, it will be stuck in their minds that they care about you.
The second response is teaching girls to keep quiet about abuse and to get over it. Rather than telling girls to just ignore abuse, maybe schools should be telling off the boy who did the abuse instead of inadvertently encouraging rape culture?
Very few schools seem to have specific dedicated pathways for reporting and dealing with incidents of sexual harassment and assault and girls often have no idea who to report to even if they do want to come forward. In some cases girls are punished as well as boys, or even more severely, when incidents such as sexting (where a girl has been pressured by a boy into sending him a nude picture) come to light.
At a national level I am not aware of any specific dedicated function for recording these incidents.
What can schools do to support students to deal better with the online elements of this problem? What impact is the online world having on levels of sexual harassment and sexual violence in schools?
It is important to note that these problems are not just happening on school property – young women are also experiencing harassment and violence in public spaces and at events such as parties as well as online. It is vital to give them the tools to deal with such issues wherever they occur.
Both project entries and school visits strongly suggest that a great deal of sexual harassment and violence is facilitated by the internet. Young people may experience sexual pressure, sexual bullying and ‘sexting’ 24 hours a day via channels such as Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Tumblr, Ask.FM and other anonymous ‘question and answer’ websites.
Yesterday at school I was sat at a desk working, and didn't notice a male friend of mine take a picture of my breasts. The only reason I found out is because he snap-chatted the picture to various other guys from my school, having edited it so that my breasts were circled.
Girls face enormous pressure and normalisation as they are asked to send nude pictures of themselves to boys, and boys are often pressured into competing to demonstrate their worth through the acquisition of nude pictures. Girls who are reluctant may face accusations of being ‘frigid’ or a ‘prude’, and threats of disengagement from male peers. Those who do give in to the pressure frequently see the images spread very quickly amongst a large network, both within and outside school. In such instances, girls are branded ‘sluts’, ‘slags’ and ‘whores’ and see a devastating social penalty, while the boys involved are generally hailed as ‘lads’, ‘studs’ or ‘players.’
[From a male teacher] I am currently dealing with a situation whereby a girl in my form class sent a topless photograph of herself to her then boyfriend, said boyfriend then used this blackmail the girl in to giving him oral sex which he filmed on his phone and then distributed both the photo and video amongst the boys in the year. This girl is now having to consider leaving the school and interrupting her GCSEs due to the abuse she is experiencing from her fellow pupils.
Online pornography is also having a significant impact, with the vast majority of young people aware of it, and reporting pressure as a result to perform particular sex acts (such as anal sex or allowing a boy to ejaculate on your face) and body image pressure, such as the pressure to shave off all pubic hair or to surgically alter labia.
There is a negative impact on boys and young men as well, with online pornography sending confusing and misogynistic messages about how they are expected to behave in sexual relationships.
The nature of online pornography in its current manifestation is often (even in the most mainstream, easily available cases) extremely misogynistic, stereotypes and dehumanises women (including racial stereotyping) and often involves hurting, humiliating and degrading them. It sends the message that sex is something brutal and violent that happens to women and that it is focused on male rather than female pleasure.
I hear from a significant number of young people of all genders who are confused, scared and bewildered by this but are not provided any spaces where they can safely and usefully discuss these issues, so fears fester and stereotypes are allowed to become accepted as the norm. It is significant that young people do not seem to distinguish between porn and ‘real life sex’.
I am thirteen and I am so scared to have sex it makes me cry nearly every day. We had sex education in year six and I felt fine about it but now some of the boys at school keep sending us these videos of sex which are much worse than what we learnt about and it looks so horrible and like it hurts and it keeps coming in to my mind and at night I get really scared that one day I will have to do it. I don't want to speak to my mum or dad about it obviously and I feel like if I say to my friends that the videos and stuff scare me and upset me they will laugh at me and everyone will find out and pick on me for it. I try to think don't worry you won’t have to do it for ages but everyone at school keeps acting like its normal and were meant to do it really soon like some of the boys keep asking me have i done it and can i do it with them and showing me the horrible pictures and things.
I know it sounds stupid but i just wanted to tell someone because i feel like it’s unfair that girls have to have horrible things done to them but boys can just laugh and watch the videos and they don’t realise how scary it is. why did they talk about sex at school like it was okay but then the real life sex that we see is so scary and painful and the woman is crying and getting hurt.
In one recent case I was in a school where a teacher told me they had recently had a rape case involving a 14-year old male perpetrator. One of the teachers had asked him ‘why didn’t you stop when she was crying?’ and he had replied: ‘because it’s normal for girls to cry during sex’. Similar stories have seen boys who have watched porn and subsequently thought that ‘girls crying is part of foreplay’.
These one-dimensional portrayals of sex, if not offset by conversations elsewhere, can create an enormous amount of pressure and anxiety for boys as well. One young woman in her late teens said she had been having sex with her boyfriend for the first time when he started unexpectedly throttling her. She panicked and managed to push him away, and he broke down in tears of relief and asked ‘wasn’t that what you were expecting?’
In today’s digital world, is completely unrealistic to expect that we can prevent young people to stop seeing online porn. But what we can do is help them to make sense of it and to differentiate between what they see online and what a healthy relationship might look like with clear, comprehensive, age-appropriate conversations.
Understanding the impact of sexual harassment in schools
What impact does sexual harassment and sexual violence in school have on girls and young women; boys and young men; and teachers?
The impact on girls and young women is enormous and varied. Girls report feeling embarrassed, ashamed, self-conscious, guilty, sad, nervous, scared, depressed, anxious and experiencing low self-esteem. As well as having a detrimental impact on their confidence and mental health these experiences have a significant impact on their lives and achievements; girls might drop a particular school subject because of stereotyping or bullying, they might change their route to school or even avoid going to school altogether, they might become withdrawn and less sociable, lose confidence in their abilities and see their school work deteriorate.
I am the only girl in my physics class at school and until recently I would have considered myself as a confident individual, however due to the belittling comments directed towards myself or the "eye candy" as some have taken to calling me, I do feel that my confidence has suffered.
Many older women have also reported long-term problems as a result of sexual harassment and sexual violence at school, including a detrimental impact on future education and career plans, unhealthy attitudes towards relationships which have resulted in future problems, and ongoing trauma and mental health problems.
An atmosphere where sexual harassment is common also sees boys experiencing pressure around how they are expected to behave and those who do not conform sometimes experiencing unpleasant and homophobic attacks. The machismo implicit in such an atmosphere also has other more complex knock-on impacts for boys, including a pressure to appear hyper masculine which can prevent boys from feeling able to talk openly about their feelings.
What is currently being done to reduce levels of sexual harassment and sexual violence in schools?
To my knowledge there are currently no measures in place at a national level to address this issue and while there are isolated examples of individual schools or teachers who are doing an excellent job at being aware of the problem, highlighting and tackling it, these are rare. The biggest single factor in failing to address the problem of sexual harassment and violence in schools, in my view, is the lack of compulsory sex and relationships education to address issues such as healthy relationships, sexual consent, online pornography and gender stereotypes. In the absence of a compulsory element on the national curriculum to encompass these issues the vast majority of the thousands of young people I have met report that they receive no guidance or information on these issues at all. As a result, there is nothing to offset the confusion and myths about sex and relationships that abound, in particular derived from online pornography.
There is an enormous about of confusion amongst young people about rape and sexual assault. On school visits I frequently hear phrases like ‘rape is a compliment really’ and ‘it’s not rape if she enjoys it’. Girls report believing that a rapist is a stranger in a dark alleyway and that a boyfriend can’t rape you because you have to have sex with him. Young people are aware of and internalise victim-blaming attitudes that suggest girls who flirt, get drunk or wear short skirts are ‘asking for it’. Certain experiences such as unwanted sexual touching are normalised to the extent that girls begin to see them as simply part of life. All this contributes to a great reluctance to report sexual assault and rape.
2 years ago my boyfriend sexually assaulted me and tried to rape me, I managed to get away from him but I didn't tell anyone because I was scared nobody would believe me as I was only an 11 year old girl. At the time I thought it was normal so I didn't speak out
Even when these issues are raised in schools, they are very often communicated in a deeply problematic way that reinforces victim blaming and suggests that the responsibility for withholding consent lies with girls, who are expected to say ‘no’ to the ‘inevitable’ advances of boys.
My (female) teacher declared that 'boys just cant help themselves' in a lesson about sexual bullying. Other conversations about girls as 'teases' in revealing clothing also happened. Whether it was the intention of the speaker or not, when I hear that 'boys cant help themselves' it is like giving young men the message that its ok to do what you want its in your nature, while at the same time it tells girls, you cant expect anything more from boys so get used to it
In some cases, even when some conversations about sex education are carried out in schools, the boys are sent out while the girls are given the session.
We were taught that girls need to be careful and close our legs or "we might be raped"
This is backed up by a significant amount of statistical evidence. When the UK Youth Parliament surveyed almost 22,000 young people about SRE, 40% said theirs was either poor or very poor, and 43% said they hadn’t received any at all. When Brook surveyed over 2,000 14-18-year-olds throughout the UK, nearly half said that SRE “doesn’t really cover what they need to know about sex”. An ICM poll for the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW) found that 77% of young people feel they do not have enough information or support to deal with physical or sexual violence. And a recent Ofsted report found that schools were failing young people on SRE.
Our reports also suggest that in the absence of teacher training specifically focusing on these issues, teachers are not only ill-equipped to provide students with the support and information they need, but there are also a significant number of cases in which teachers are directly implicated or involved in making sexist comments, or condoning them when male students make them.
Every single week, at least one sexist comment is made by a male student in my classes at school. Usually it's something along the lines of "Get back in the kitchen" or "make me a sandwich bitch." The horrifying thing is, these comments are said loudly in the middle of class and no one bothers to stand up for themselves! It made me feel worthless when this happened in one of my lessons taught by a male teacher and he actually laughed and said; "That's a good one!" If this sort of behaviour acted out by adults in school is acceptable, there is no hope.
Recommendations
All the evidence I have seen suggests that the single most effective measure to tackle this problem would be the introduction of compulsory sex and relationships education on issues such as sexual consent, online pornography, healthy relationships and gender stereotypes in all schools, including coverage of LGBTQ identities and rights, starting from primary school level. There is a deeply misguided belief in some quarters that we shouldn’t ‘expose’ children to these ideas from a young age but in reality we know that they are already exposed – a 2014 poll by ICM for the BBC found that 60% of young people are 14 or younger when they first see online porn and in my visits to primary schools these problems are already evident from a very young age. In one primary school, the corner of the playground that was too far away to be seen by the teacher on duty was known as the ‘rape corner’. Young people are already inevitably exposed to these issues and situations - the only question is whether we give them the tools they need to navigate them in a safe and healthy way.
In addition to helping young people navigate future relationships safely, such education would also play an immensely important role in helping children who are already experiencing abuse, not only within school but externally, perhaps in the home or somewhere else. For children who may have been groomed or abused from a young age such education would be vital in offsetting normalisation and helping them to recognise that help is available.
Meanwhile there is enormous support for compulsory SRE from parents, teachers, young people and women’s organisations. To tackle these issues head on at a young age could also have a very real impact on the wider societal problem of violence against women, where 85,000 women are raped and 400,000 sexually assaulted every year and just 15% of rapes are reported to the police.
In addition to the introduction of compulsory sex and relationships education on the specific issues mentioned, I would recommend that schools should be supported to deliver this, with the necessary funding, teacher training, and support for suitable outside organisations to be brought into schools to deliver sessions if preferred.
A national taskforce dedicated to tackling the problem of sexual harassment and violence in schools and at universities would also be welcome (as this is a problem that is very clearly spilling over onto university campuses), in consultation with relevant organisations and stake holders. Progress and implementation should be carefully monitored, preferably by an external and independent group of people. Schools should be supported to develop a dedicated system for the recording, reporting and processing of incidents of sexual harassment and sexual violence. Pupils should be made aware of these systems and of their reporting options and steps should be taken to ensure that they do not face recrimination or increased victimisation as a result of reporting. Schools should be supported to develop a disciplinary structure for dealing with sexual harassment and violence that penalises perpetrators appropriately without blaming victims, and which takes into account the fact that some victims may wish to report an incident in school without choosing to report to police. These systems should be developed in partnership with relevant stakeholders and should be nationally standardised if possible.
This is a problem that needs to be tackled at every level, including dedicated specialist teacher training on sexual harassment and sexual assault in schools, support from teaching unions and schools.
Conclusion
With 85,000 women raped annually in England and Wales and 400,000 sexually assaulted, how can we fail to tackle vital issues such as consent and healthy relationships in the classroom? With the NSPCC warning that “thousands of teenage girls who are sexually assaulted by boys suffer in silence because they often accept the abuse as part of a relationship or don’t know how to stop it”, how can we fail to provide them with the information they need to recognise abuse and access help? When these things are happening in schools (where almost one in three girls experiences unwanted sexual touching) why aren’t we tackling them there? And with 60% of young people saying that they first see pornography aged 14 or younger, why aren’t we giving them the tools to offset and make sense of the confusing messages such material can often impart?
It’s great that some parents discuss these issues with their children, but we can’t guarantee they all will. 750,000 children already witness domestic violence each year, and many grow up in homes where they might get the message that violence in relationships is the norm. Some parents describe feeling unable to discuss these issues, or find it difficult to know where to start. Schools provide young people with guidance about plenty of other important life lessons, such as healthy eating, so why not give them similar support on the universal topic of human relationships? It’s too important to leave to chance.