A REPORT on the former school of Renate Williams, who was acquitted of indecent assault, said that, amid the grubby quilts and shabby accommodation, boys were preoccupied with sex and girls (TES, March 3).
The latter is surely nothing out of the ordinary - isn’t it normal for teenage boys to be preoccupied with sex and girls? My husband (now a middle-aged pillar of society) relates that his own preoccupations were “sex, speed (as in motorcycles) and smoking” and I would have thought that any teenage boy would agree that his preoccupations included at least one of those factors. I wonder what the “sexualised images” were? Obviously pin-ups - but of what?
Go into the drmitories of most boarding schools and you will find pin-ups inside the locker doors. Much as I would not like my son to display these he has several friends who, from the age of 10, had pin-ups of nude women on their bedroom walls.
In this new and tolerant age, what can be permitted expected of teenage boys?
Does a co-educational school allow pin-ups in the dorms - and what effect does this have on the development of boys’ relationships with the girls they work with, never mind the statements that pin-ups make about women? And if a school takes a strict moral stance - do the parents care?
Angela Pollard
75 Clifton Road
Rugby, Warwickshire