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Listen to thisI had been a teacher for all of a few months when a girl in my year 10 form group walked in to my classroom with a suspicious bruise. It was the type that couldn’t be easily explained away as merely the result of a bumped elbow. Teacher training had prepared me, a little, for spotting some telltale signs of physical abuse; so I thought this injury might have been the marker of a violent home life. My attempts at subtlety failed as the student soon assured me all was well: the mark was actually only from her 13-year-old boyfriend in year 9: I had nothing to worry about.
I filled in a child protection referral, and passed it along to an appropriate school official. It’s what I would have done had the disclosure been about her parents and not a fellow pupil. In person, I chased it up with the colleague and was surprised to hear that nothing would happen to the boy: teen relationships were apparently a tumultuous business.
This miserable pattern repeated itself through the course of another year. At the time, another colleague and I were baffled by the mishandling of the situation. How could our school fail to have systems in place to deal with the violence this young girl was facing? The school’s inaction had rendered the violence permissible, and we knew it would have been handled differently had this been an incident of bullying or a fight.
What I had thought was an isolated failure nearly nine years ago is now recognised as a system-wide problem. On Tuesday the Commons women and equalities committee launched its inquiry into the scale of sexual harassment and violence in UK schools. Chaired by Maria Miller, the committee finds the “widespread sexual harassment on a regular basis” of young women a “really concerning problem”.
Great. But let’s agree that disquiet isn’t enough when walking from your English to science lesson may result in your bra strap being pinged, your skirt suddenly lifted from behind, or letters of the alphabet loudly bandied about so that you can be sure this is an assessment of your breasts. We need more than the usual bromides.
In 2010, a YouGov poll of 16- to 18-year-olds found that a third of girls had experienced unwanted sexual touching at school, and 71% had heard sexual name-calling of girls either daily or a few times in a week. A 2015 BBC News freedom of information request revealed that there were 5,500 recorded sexual offences in our schools, with 200 alleged rapes taking place each year between 2011 and 2014. Adult alarm and anxiety over the scale of sexual violence and harassment perpetrated by young people on to their peers is getting us nowhere.
This is an institutional problem that needs system-wide change. That some schools are dealing with this as though it were a private matter is really a reflection only of the government’s own approach. This is big-C Conservativism, preferring to view this as an issue not for government but for individual families and schools. Perhaps when a generation of young women begin filing class actions against the Department for Education for failed duty of care, it will reconsider.
What young girls need is the type of institutional change that can be kickstarted only by government. They need personal, social and health education, including sex and relationship education to be made a mandatory part of curriculum delivery. They need all schools to be given clear policies on how to deal with sexual harassment and violence. This means an appropriate and clear complaints process, ensuring victim confidentiality on everything from the use of sexting to the display of pornography as a form of bullying and public humiliation.
Most adult women will, at the very least, have an official process to deal with sexual harassment and violence in their place of work. Pretending that this level of detail and clarity isn’t needed for schools is an astounding abdication of responsibility.
On Tuesday the Department for Education told us, in a statement: “Schools are safe places and fortunately crime in schools is very rare but sexual assault of any kind is an offence and must always be reported to the police.” Such statements are insulting in their disingenuousness. The groping of girls by young boys may well be criminal, but it is nevertheless endemic. The fact is that schools are reluctant to criminalise their students. It isn’t as simple as reporting an inappropriate touch to the police when we are talking of a 12-year-old “accidentally” brushing up against another student’s private parts.
Starting such change is, of course, important but doesn’t free the professional network (health, schools, social services, the police) from their immediate responsibilities to protect young people suffering peer-to-peer violence right now. For that, we need a robust system that is sensitive to children’s needs, viewing their experiences with the seriousness that the word violence demands. This isn’t kids just being kids.
We know young boys are not born this way, but have learned the lessons of a pervasive cultural reality that views women as objects of male desire. We know too that teaching boys and girls about how and why such behaviour is unacceptable makes the problem visible – the first step in rooting it out.
Lola Okolosie
20 April 2016
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/20/sexual-violence-schools-harassment
