A third of teenage girls don’t feel safe at school. That’s the headline finding from new research, showing that the proportion has more than doubled in four years. In 2019, 15% of year 9 girls felt unsafe, compared to 34% in 2023. The fact that girls as young as 13 are scared of going to school should surely shame a civilised country.

The experience of teenage boys is a hot topic at the moment, thanks to the Netflix drama Adolescence. The Prime Minister has an embarrassing habit of making policy based on what people happen to be talking about at any given time. And while the programme has focused attention on the plight of young boys being infected by the misogynistic ideologies of online influencers like Andrew Tate, the real victim of the show is the young girl who is stabbed to death as a result.

The research suggests that something happened during the pandemic that particularly affected this group, but sexual violence in schools is an equally likely culprit. In a recent survey, almost a third of girls — a similar proportion to the new study, in other words — told the End Violence Against Women Coalition that they don’t feel safe from sexual harassment at school. Four out of five believe that schools aren’t doing enough to protect them.

In January this year, Rape Crisis England & Wales wrote to the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, expressing concern about peer-on-peer sexual abuse in schools; boys attacking girls in most cases. The letter made it clear that the problem has a long history, highlighting a report by a parliamentary committee in 2016 which said that 600 rapes had been recorded in schools over a three-year period. In the same report, almost three-fifths of girls and young women aged 13 to 21 reported experiencing sexual harassment in school or college in the previous year.

Nothing has improved since then. Indeed, the situation has probably worsened given the prevalence of online porn. At a recent meeting in the House of Lords, a woman who delivers sex education in schools reported being asked repeatedly by boys how to strangle a sexual partner “safely”. Even at primary school age, boys are getting a warped view of what to expect from girls and how to treat them with dignity and respect.

The Rape Crisis letter spoke of the urgent need for statuary guidance for teachers on how to respond when a child is sexually assaulted by another pupil. Very few attacks lead to a prosecution and many schools simply “go back to normal”, without adequate safeguarding measures being taken, when an investigation doesn’t lead to charges.

What this means, in effect, is a teenage girl having to sit in the same classroom as the boy who is alleged to have assaulted her. Female pupils who have reported abuse “are given the message that their experiences are not important […] and that they’re not worth protecting”, the letter went on.

That message is only reinforced by the push for “gender neutral” toilets, removing a single-sex space where girls could take refuge. Schools are clearly failing young women. Do we have to wait for another Netflix series before ministers decide that making schools safe for them is an urgent priority?

---

Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

polblonde

---