Sexual bullying ‘culture’ plagues Scottish schools

Teachers urged to intervene as three in five girls report experiencing harassment from their peers
7th July 2017, 12:00am
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Sexual bullying ‘culture’ plagues Scottish schools

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archived/sexual-bullying-culture-plagues-scottish-schools

Try to put yourself in the shoes of a girl who is already vulnerable in all sorts of ways. Now think about that girl if video footage of her being sexually assaulted starts being shared among her peers. She needs help desperately - but won’t go to her teachers because she fears it will only make things worse.

Scenarios such as these are exactly what confronted a parliamentary inquiry into bullying and harassment of children in schools. Last month, MSPs listened to a litany of shocking evidence that portrayed Scottish schools as a gauntlet for many girls - with teachers often seeming powerless to do anything about it.

Some of the most compelling testimony came from Girlguiding Scotland, which campaigns against sexual bullying and cited startling figures from its own research at a UK level: 59 per cent of girls and young women aged 11-21, for example, say they have experienced sexual harassment at school.

And even when sexual assaults take place and footage is subsequently passed around, word may not reach the police. Susie McGuinness, a 19-year-old Guide leader and advocate for the organisation, said of such cases that “teachers do not know who to go to or how to deal with it, so it often goes unreported.”

Christina McKelvie, convener of the Parliament’s Equalities and Human Rights committee, which is leading the inquiry, was unimpressed by such inaction: “It seems that schools do not understand what is criminal behaviour,” she said.

McGuinness warned that if the police are not involved and young men do not see the consequences, “we are creating a culture where [this type of scenario] is an acceptable thing to be happening in schools, and it is clearly not”.

‘Boys will be boys’

MSPs heard accounts of a teacher failing to intervene as a boy walked around a classroom attempting to undo girls’ bras and of teachers ignoring boys who shouted out comments to girls such as “show us your boobs”.

Sometimes this was because teachers thought “boys will be boys” and would grow up soon; at other times there was a more sinister edge, as with the teacher who, on the first day of school, reportedly said, “let’s see which girls have developed over the summer.”

McGuinness said: “We are expecting a lot if we are asking girls to stand up and report that kind of thing when they see a culture of teachers ignoring, dismissing and, often, perpetuating harassment.”

Witnesses underlined the importance of starting to combat troubling attitudes about girls from an early age. “By Primary 6, I was sitting in classes in which boys were taking it in turns to shout ‘rape’ the loudest,” said McGuinness. “Teachers need to realise that we need to combat that much earlier.”

McGuinness argued that consent and online abuse needed to be discussed in upper primary, while fellow Girlguiding Scotland advocate Hannah Brisbane said the organisation gathered much of its worrying findings from the 7-12 age group. They found support from Derek Allan, headteacher at Kirkcaldy High School in Fife, where senior pupils mentor younger peers. “It is often very young children who share inappropriate images of themselves and make themselves vulnerable,” he said.

Lanarkshire Rape Crisis Centre has surveyed pupils on how schools handle sexual harassment - it will publish its findings later this year - and found that teachers’ approach to such matters varied. One respondent recalled a teacher asking every boy in a class to spit water into a glass so she could show it to the room, explaining: “Girls who sleep around are the glass”.

The centre’s Niamh McGeechan said: “We heard quite a lot about ‘slut-shaming’ and ‘victim shaming’...It is a no-win situation - the idea is that if you don’t [have sex] you’re a prude, and if you do you’re a slut.”

Fresh problems arise from the growth of “sexting”. Girlguiding Scotland said it was common for “really young girls” to have nude photographs taken and leaked on social networks such as Snapchat - a system where messages are quickly deleted - but that “it goes under the radar, because it is not happening in the classroom”. McGeechan said vulnerable young girls could feel forced into sending explicit images of themselves, but that the response must not be to question why they did this, thereby shifting the blame away from those who post such images online.

“That has dangerous parallels with the question, ‘What were you wearing when you were raped?’” said McGeechan. “That idea exists, and it is really important that teachers realise that that is going on.”

Kirkcaldy High, whose head addressed MSPs, has won plaudits for its “collaborative culture of everyone looking out for everybody else”. Pupils take assemblies, for example, and there is a “buddying” scheme to support younger pupils who might identify as LGBT.

Senior pupil Cameron Bowie told MSPs that there had been a dramatic culture change since he started, with every incident taken seriously.

“I would say that it is uncool for anyone in our school to bully someone else - if they did, everyone would look at them and be like, ‘Why are you doing that?’”, he said.

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