Female teachers are being harassed by men in the profession sending them explicit photos and inappropriate messages via social media, Tes can reveal.

Tes has heard accounts of male teachers sending unsolicited pictures of their genitalia to female teachers. One female teacher told Tes she had been sent such photos by more than ten different male teachers over a four year period.

Another woman told Tes she had received inappropriate and unwanted messages from five different male teachers over Twitter.

And Colin Grimes a male primary teacher who is taking a stand against online abuse says he is aware of a female colleague who has been harassed by eight different male teachers.

The first female teacher Tes spoke to works in a secondary school in the North West, and asked not to be named. 

She said male teachers had sent her unsolicited photos of genitalia “more than ten times” over the four-year period during which she had been on Twitter, with “three or four” sent in the past year.

Usually a conversation would start normally enough about “something topical in education”, she said.  

“It might be that people are talking about curriculum or data or assessment or whatever. Someone tends to direct message something like that.

“You interact because that’s fairly innocent, and then those images just come completely out of the blue. You’ll be mid-conversation and one just appears.”

The teacher said she was “shocked” when it happened the first time, although it had become “fairly normalised” after further occurrences.

The experience also made her feel “humiliated”. “You’ve got that humiliation factor,” she said. “You start maybe thinking ‘have I done something to warrant that, is that my fault?’”

She said she had spoken to many other female teachers, often in the early stages of their career, who had been victims of similar online abuse from male peers.

The harassment ranged from bombardment with unsolicited messages commenting on a woman’s appearance, to extreme images, including of ejaculation.

It was worrying male teachers were engaging in this abusive behaviour, she said, when it was their job to help young people stay safe online.

“We tell them that when you put an image out there, you’re not in control of it. But the adults in the situation don’t even seem to take the advice that we’re trying to give kids, and that worries me. Whether these men are a threat to children I don’t know.”

A second woman Tes spoke to, who works in a secondary school in the East Midlands and also asked not to be identified, told about the unwanted messages she had received from a male teacher and education blogger. 

“He sent me a few direct messages, we sort of bounced messages back - as I do with most people that message me - I’m quite polite in that regard,” she said.

However, the messages soon turned “sinister”, with the male teacher sharing intimate details about his relationship with his partner. “I just thought this isn’t the sort of conversation I want to be having,” the woman said.

“Then he randomly sent me a picture of himself topless from the nipples upwards.”

The woman ignored him, but it wasn’t long before he asked “do I get a selfie back?”

“I didn’t say anything, and then he turned to ‘does your boyfriend know you’re talking to me’ and it turned very sinister quite quickly.”

The woman told Tes that the messages eventually stopped “once he realised he wasn’t going to get anything back from me”.

While the male teacher only sent her a topless photo, the woman said she had subsequently heard that the same individual had sent an unsolicited photo of his genitalia to another person.

The unpleasant incident she experienced wasn’t a one off. The woman said she had received unwanted and inappropriate personal messages from five male primary teachers. “One guy messaged me 30 times and I didn’t reply to any of them,” she said.

She said another male teacher had sent her and a number of female teacher friends messages asking “what pyjamas we wear”. “It’s very uncomfortable, very personal, very persistent, quite intimidating.”

She said the thing which “scares me the most” is that these male teachers “have an influence on at least 30 young people… they are responsible for the safety and safeguarding of young people.”

Some teachers have decided to take a stand against the issue. 

Mr Grimes, a teacher at Rothbury First School in Northumberland, recently wrote a blog denouncing the “uninvited attention” which female teachers have received over Twitter, including male teachers sending photos of their genitalia.

“It seems that there is a portion of the edu-world, predominantly male, who think that it is ok to send inappropriate messages and photos to other members of the community,” he writes. “Well it isn’t.”

In the blog, Mr Grimes says he has heard from someone who had “reported eight different male teachers on Twitter for inappropriate contact and nothing had been done.”

“As a community of educators on Twitter I feel that we owe it to each other give each other a degree of protection, to circle around those being approached in this way and give a collective response.

“Maybe the people being sent the images should make them public. If nothing else it’s possibly a safeguarding issue after all.”