Schools must go beyond saying sexual harassment is 'not acceptable'
Anki Deo and Kendal Sefton
Monday, March 15, 2021
The devastating confirmation of Sarah Everard’s murder has shaken the whole country, prompting us to confront the distressing reality that violence against women and girls needs our urgent attention.
The problem's scale can no longer be ignored. The recent UN Women UK survey reveals that 97 per cent of women have experienced sexual harassment.
Public Sexual Harassment (PSH) is the most common form of gender-based violence within the United Kingdom, yet there is no specific legislation tackling it.
PSH can be anything from unwelcome and unwanted attention, sexual advances, and intimidating behaviour that occurs in public spaces and can happen both in-person and online. Not all experiences of PSH are the same and different identity categories influence an individual’s experience.
Experiences of PSH are pluralistic, and can be affected by characteristics such as gender, race, sexuality and religion.
Current conversations surrounding PSH and gender-based violence are focussed on encouraging men to take measures to appear less threatening, calling out the actions or words of others, and starting a dialogue with other men. However, these are just short-term responses to an altogether bigger problem. Would it not be more logical to tackle the root causes through education rather than just the symptoms?
As the institutions set up to protect and prepare young people for their futures, schools can do much more to support girls and marginalised genders against public sexual harassment and prevent students from becoming perpetrators of violence.
So, why is there a need for schools to challenge PSH? Two-thirds of girls have experienced unwanted attention in a public place, 35 per cent have reported being harassed in their school uniform, and 47 per cent of students are hesitant to report harassment to their school because they do not know how to or are fearful of being dismissed.
We need to acknowledge the crucial role schools can play in tackling the problem of violence against women and girls. This can be done in three crucial ways:
Firstly, PSH should be included with other forms of sexual violence when teaching the PSHEE and RSE curriculum, and these should be discussed with explicit reference to gender. Current RSE legislation states that young people should be taught about ‘what constitutes sexual harassment and sexual violence and why these are always unacceptable’, yet 64 per cent of children stated they had never been taught about public sexual harassment.
Secondly, schools should implement policies that explicitly outline how they support students who are harassed and take action in these cases. Research conducted by Girlguiding found that a staggering 64 per cent of girls aged between 11-16 have had teachers advise them to ignore incidents of sexual harassment, and 61 per cent say they have had teachers and members of staff dismiss incidents as ‘just a bit of banter’ or ‘messing around’. This cannot and should not be deemed acceptable.
Thirdly, schools can improve their approach to PSH through training staff on how to avoid the language of victim-blaming (e.g., asking the girl what she was wearing or doing out so late) and challenging toxic masculine behaviour across the school, rather than being passive bystanders.
The 2020 research conducted by Our Streets Now found several students to have identified victim-blaming attitudes as being prevalent within their school environment.
Furthermore, almost three-quarters of secondary school students surveyed within this study reported a negative experience after reporting PSH. All of the above statistics identify clearly the need for an education programme that addresses the complexities of PSH for both girls and boys.
Aside from these targeted approaches, an overall critical analysis of how gendered language and stereotypes can creep into school life is crucial to creating positive long-term change. If schools do not include male-identifying pupils in their efforts to change, then their efforts become futile.
Men being violent towards women is, for the most part, a learned behaviour that is reinforced through a lack of accountability.
Thus, challenging toxic masculine behaviour at every level in the education system can only serve to make the entire community happier. Boys will likely have better coping strategies, and consequently, better mental health and behaviour, and girls will be safer, more confident, and be more able to flourish as they should. Schools can and should go beyond saying that sexual harassment is unacceptable. They have the power to reduce its prevalence in tomorrow’s society by challenging the status quo.
The swell of conversation surrounding the tragic death of Sarah Everard should not be reduced to simply thinking that men are inevitably violent, and women are scared and weak.
Our take-home should also not be that in order to allow women to share the same social freedoms men do, men need to be restricted in some way.
Really, we should see efforts to change social attitudes towards violence against women and girls as freeing men from the idea that violence is acceptable, cathartic, validating or justifiable. Schools must go beyond simply telling students that sexual harassment is not acceptable; they must act for both the short- and long-term.
By challenging both current expressions of gender-based violence and the underlying causes of this behaviour, schools will be playing a pivotal role in protecting and preparing all students for the future, thereby creating a better society for tomorrow.
Kendal Sefton is a research and public affairs officer at Our Streets Now and Anki Deo is a trainee modern foreign languages and PSHE teacher who also works for the Our Streets Now campaign.
