Everyone's invited - are people genuinely shocked?

The behaviour cited is shocking - but I am not surprised that it is happening. Teenage parties used to be about drinking and snogging and sex and bad behaviour.

The fact that that has morphed into a different animal is not surprising.

When the Y10s at DD's school were asked what sexual harrassment was, they weren't really sure. They were very surprised to find out that asking repeatedly for nudes on social media counted. Because that's just what happens. They are 14.

And this is at one of the SW London school's that is supposedly better in some way than the all boys ones.....

If 14 year old kids think that's standard - then no, we cannot be surprised by what some of the 16 year olds get up to.

It essentially is not about schools (private or state) but completely about boy's/men's predatory entitlement fuelled by a millennia of being top dog; ingrained misogyny; pack behaviour and the prevalence of porn accessed by increasingly younger boys on unsupervised tech.

Most parents will think their boys are incapable of this behaviour but the truth is they cannot possibly know them or how they behave when with their peer group. Boys who want to call other boys out on their behaviour get ostracised and the feeling of wanting to fit in is so important. And, unfortunately, girls can perpetuate this by making other girls/women feel at fault for the behaviour aimed at them.

Women have been told to put up and shut up for ever. And society pushes that - victim blaming; behaviour changes to 'keep safe'; minimising men's behaviour as being a joke/misunderstood etc.

My DD, when she was in yr 6 aged 11, came home and told me some boys in her class had been commenting on touching some of the girls nipples. She was upset and shocked and I called the school to explain. Actually the school handled it really well and took her seriously. However the girl who was initially targeted completely minimised it (backed by her mother) and the main boy's mother gave me such a bollocking for suggesting her son was a sexual predator when it was 'all blown out of proportion' (her words). For most of the next term my daughter was ostracised by most of the boys and some of the girls 'for snitching'. What was my daughter taught? Call it out and become a social pariah. It's so fucking ingrained that I truly despair.

Any conversation on this has to be a start.

Not parties.

Don't know where you got that from.

But I agree, if you don't let your U16 go to a party and get drunk, then they will be a lot safer, boy or girl.

I was at private schools in the 80s and 90s. This stuff happened. Gatecrasher balls, parties in mansions unsupervised by anyone bar ineffectual nannies, loads of drugs and booze. It was well known that coke turned most lads into arseholes.

If anything it's probably less common now that the teachers aren't actively encouraging it and are much less likely to be shagging the girls themselves, and there's much less of the gay boys trying to prove their masculinity by copying the alpha males or pretending to be them.

I agree completely Morred. Increasingly I feel the whole of society is poisoned by misogyny and this is just yet another expression of that. It makes me feel hopeless.

The other side of "not being shocked" is something like 1/3 women suffer domestic abuse, so many children will have overseen abuse at home. Most adult women have been harassed at some point. Men are often vile to school girls (grown men used to park up their cars when we walked across a road to our hockey pitch and beep horns and shout comments at us. We were 11-16 year olds). What is it people think is so magic about teenage boys that they won't have picked up on this culture?

@happywombles

I agree - but what IS shocking is that some of the schools have tried to cover it up!
I hear that the 'independent' chair brought in to investigate the Highgate allegations is a personal contact of the leadership there. Which is outrageous!

I am not shocked.

I would also say be exceptionally careful in ascribing everything to one type of school. For example, I am willing to believe that some wealthy boys at a single sex school behave in a particular, appalling manner.

But I don't believe that boys at co-ed schools or boys from disadvantaged backgrounds and necessarily perfectly behaved. Or that all girls are incapable of being sexually abusive.

Sometimes at co-ed schools the behaviour isn't limited to parties, it happens in the very classroom.

Mind you, with 24/7 access to phones and messaging harassment can continue all the time no matter which school children attend.

What does especially alarm me is how poorly schools, parents and non-perpetrator classmates react.

In addition, and this is my personal experience - the sense of entitlement, privilege and arrogance was much greater for me and DD when it came to boys from private over comprehensive schools.

This.

I definitely don't think that this is exclusively a private school problem, but I do think that some private schools have particular issues, often exacerbated by single sex environments and a culture of entitlement.

I'm not shocked by this at all, as it merely reflects what I have observed over a period of many years.

Not surprised no, although that doesn't make it less shocking.

This is what some boys and some men think of women and girls. We are there to be judged and owned.

And it definitely doesn't only apply to private schools.

It's exactly how things were when I was at school at a London independent in the 90s. I am disappointed that things don't appear to have improved at all but not shocked. I am shocked on the other hand that schools haven't got better at dealing with reports of rape/assault.

Not shocked at all, pleasantly surprised it has made it into the news. One of my friends went to one of these schools, was raped repeatedly and once at a fancy army event. She always thought it was the norm and then had a breakdown.

WineAndMassage agreed and seen it myself as the norm in the workplace. The perpetrators then apply what has been accepted at school into the workplace. The amount of NDAs out there... ask yourself why are there so few women in top corporate positions. They are culled in groups or individually following complaints (by them). It’s all the same theme.

I'm shocked because there were only two instances when anything remotely dodgy happened at my school (80s) and both times the perpetrators were expelled. No messing around, no second chances, suspended following morning and booted out by the end of the week.

Also, where are the parents? Unsupervised parties happened very seldom. Parents were always somewhere on the premises although normally keeping a low profile. If the parents weren't around, we weren't allowed to go along.

But I grew up in a pub. I'd seen enough drunks by the time I was teenage to already regard them with contempt, and to know when a parent/doctor was needed.

It is common and rife and no-one has taken any notice for YEARS.

Well some parents do still set boundaries on their teens behaviour. It really should be obvious that an U16, girl or boy is too vulnerable to go to unsupervised parties and binge drinking in the park, likewise with online activity. The schools are very clear that parents should be supervising online activity but many parents don’t.

I was saying this to dh last night.

I can remember threads on here over the years about the casual sexism in schools (not private, all schools) and the casual sexual assault, and how that was tolerated by schools, and how it was painted as 'boys will be boys'

There have been many accounts where girls report more serious assault/rape and either the boy is too young, or the school says it is a police matter and the police says it is a school matter and neither will deal with it as both are 'kids' and it is one word against another.
etc etc etc.

It is common and rife and no-one has taken any notice for YEARS.

Perhaps now being “cool” won’t be quite so cool now

It’s the “cool” kids isn’t it? They set exclusive norms. I know boys who went to DC and other state and private schools who would never have behaved in this way and thought the boys who did were prats. I also know boys who were so keen to be part of the “cool” crowd that they conformed to the exclusive norms, and in some cases one on one in private those were not their values.

The exclusive norms for the “cool” girls’ are also destructive, focused on appearance, size and success, notoriety even, with boys.

Some parents seem willing to be permissive of the unsupervised parties, drinking on the commons etc where these assaults take place because they want their children to be “popular” whether it is naivety or as I have heard, teenagers will be teenagers, it’s a phase.

I agree sprongles but it was nothing like the stories i am hearing. Even when I worked in a ghastly mysogynistic office in my first job.

I’m also not shocked. I went to a state single sex school that was in the process of merging with the boys school. It was awful, and deeply sexist and predatory. The combination of them not being around girls often and the school being underfunded and under performing (hence the merge) meant that we had a terrible time around them. The girls used to get blamed and told we couldn’t look at the boys so as to not provoke them. That really helped.

This is not (just) a private school thing. I remember when I was at university the warnings I had about certain societies and groups in Freshers week

I honestly blame the explosion of online porn messing up brains

I went to a private school in the 90s. This stuff just didn’t happen. Not like this.

I think most people choose private schools for breadth of education. I think a few want to avoid a culture they don’t like. Some people have been educated privately for generations. I think new purchasers are more likely to think their DC is avoiding others they might not like but for many it’s just what you do. For others the local comp is what you do!

Again, this is down to parenting. No one has been to every university in this country to know whether Oxford is worse than Durham of whether LSE is better than UEA. We simply don’t know.

Boys are left m, by parents, in their bedrooms with computers and possibly porn. Parents on MN boast that they never see their boys - they stay in their bedrooms. Their parents don’t know what they are doing or thinking. They don’t see their phones. Or their computers. This isn’t just a private school issue. It’s about respect of women and how bots are parented.

I think the class/money/entitlement thing is relevant. I remember at university a number of boys who had been to some of the named schools (and others) thinking girls should be flattered by their "attention". This was especially true of girls lower down the social pecking order. That attention was usually some level of sexual assault. I think it's a particular type of sexually predatory behaviour. Not the only type though.

No you can't@en0la - and the site organisers have said that from 23 March no schools will be named for new testimonies.