A primary school teacher recently confided to me that a 10-year-old boy at her school had described a girl in his class as “good enough to rape”.
We don’t know where the boy first heard this language and it is doubtful that he understood the impact of his words but as Mayor of London Sadiq Khan recently said, "male violence against women and girls can start with words. But it doesn’t stop there”.
Evidence of this is demonstrated by the Everyone’s Invited campaign, which hosts the testimonies of over 50,000 young survivors of peer-on-peer sexual harassment and abuse, and has released the names of nearly 3,000 schools mentioned by young people. Worryingly, 14 per cent of those schools were primary and given that children in the UK are criminally responsible from the age of 10, there is an urgent need for schools to be proactive in preventing sexual harassment through an age-appropriate RSE curriculum at an earlier stage.
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