Playground sex assaults ‘are becoming an epidemic’

school formed a huge part of their solicitation with the opposite sex.

Geez what a typo! should be socialisation

Bloody autocorrect

I am so glad this is being talked about. Laura Bates deserves a medal.

Much stricter controls / an outright ban on commercialised pornography will be a necessary part of any solution

raining100% it should be compulsory to report incidents of sex assault / bullying of a sexual nature etc etc.

Ah I don't know much about boarding schools. Did meet one girl who went to one at uni but she was a lesbian so not so much into the whole boys side of thngs. She was also very sensible and grown up and very nice and I ought to try and get in touch with her TBH!

My children are all secondary school aged. I suspect that the number of actual assaults will be far worse than reported. There was a programme last year about sexual assault in schools and it was highlighted that this happens at primary schools too and frighteningly there is no requirement for schools to record sexual incidents unlike racist ones.

Just had a google it's watchable here

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b098tgsl

And like a PP said upthread, a lot of he privately educated students I met at uni had attended single sex boarding schools

Yes maybe it’s the rural aspect that is the difference. Students used to travel up to an hour on the school bus to attend.

And yet the DfE are apparently baffled by the rise in home education DD has been HE from the offset, I’m praying she doesn’t decide she wants to go to school as she gets older.

Ah well "rural" might be a clue there.

I grew up in NW London.

I don’t. I was talking in a broader sense.

But for teenagers (especially in rural communities where I grew up) school formed a huge part of their solicitation with the opposite sex.

For lots of the girls locally unless you had a brother who had friends round your house, going to an all girls school meant you didn’t have daily and regular interactions with boys.

I knew many girls from the girls school who seemed naive and “desperate” around boys.

The local boys and girls grammar schools were mixed together in the sixth form. Some of my friends from our mixed comprehensive went there for 6th form and all commented how they all seemed more boy/girl/sex obsessed because they’d been kept apart somewhat for the previous 5 years of adolescence.

This was reflected in the young adults I mixed with at university too.

It’s just my personal experience.

Why do you think children who go to single sex schools are "cosseted" and denied access to things like sex, relationships, alcohol, freedom?

There was a girl guides report into this as well which made shocking reading.

The sex based differences they alluded to in that (boys sexually assaulting girls) is rendered nul and void though with their new idea that there is no such thing as sex only gender and gender is whatever you say it is. So, actually the situaiton in schools is that some children are sexually assaulting some other children and no more info available than that.

Nothing of course I’m not saying it’s 100% universally true. I’m just saying that it was for the people I knew back then.

I think that applies to most things with teenagers though doesn’t it? If you overly cosset them and deny them access to “temptations” (sex/relationships, alcohol, freedom, junk food, whatever) that when they are suddenly released into the world as adults they have a harder time regulating themselves and can easily “go off the rails” compared to teenagers who had age-appropriate access to these things

I would second the comment about why are the boys who have raped not in the criminal justice system?

Not saying they should be banged up age 14 but surely equally there should be multiple agencies involved, they should be nowhere near their victim (not even same school) and what about safeguarding other girls. Don't they have young offender institutes? We are continually told that rape is one of the "worst crimes there is" and ruins lives - the evidence does not seem to support this in the slightest. Here we see that it is a trivial thing that everyone should forget about immediately and carry on as if it never happened.

As someone who went to a girls school I would question the assertion that girls who go to single sex schools love "misogynistic attention".

If anything we were quicker to tell them to FUCK OFF as we hadn't been ground down over years of it in school.

Neither am I saying that girls should be put in harms way!
I would be beyond livid if my boys behaved like this, and tell them that.
Name the behaviour and tell them it is wrong.
I think we should be working much harder to stop it across the board, but separating the sexes forever doesn’t work.
Of course girls and boys should have their own space for changing, and I am not in favour of self ID and think that whilst their should be gender neutral spaces for those that require it should not be at the expense of girls’ safety and need for privacy.
We need to educate adults and children alike.
Women shouldn’t have to be separated completely to be safe though, what sort of a society is that? What message does that send? It’s burka mentality

Cannot belive that even on a thread about female children being raped in schools that people are suggesting girls should keep being put in the path of physical harm just so boys don’t suffer.

I didn’t remotely say that. My posts are much more nuanced than that if you read them properly. I said I was absolutely not prepared to throw my DD under a bus for the sake of the boys development. I will consider single sex education when the time comes.

But I do also think that separating the sexes doesn’t help the boys learn how to interact appropriately with females.

Obviously the solution is not ideally to keep boys and girls away from each other but to tackle this rape/porn culture to begin with.

But until that is done then of course girls shouldn’t just be expected to put up with it.

For the rest of what I said I can only tell my own lives experience. What I personally observed was true. For the schools and unis I went to and the people I met.

Beyond horrific. Dark days if the government can’t get a grip on this quickly.

I do not recognise this situation from my DCs school though. Maybe I am being naive? I have 2 DSs. One at secondary due to start y9 which I guess is when this will get more serious and one due to start this September.

I have talked to them both about porn, trafficking and prostitution, and consent and enjoyment.

Laura Bates has done tremendous work.

And rapists being sat next to their victims across the country is mind boggling. Surely rape is a serious crime and they’d be excluded?! it’s basic safeguarding.

I went to a single sex school and I don’t think that is the answer, it just causes more division and othering. Tackling this behaviour and educating people is the answer.

If a boy commits a sexual assault on a fellow pupil, why is he not expelled?

If a boy commits rape on a fellow pupil, why is he not in court, convicted and incarcerated in an appropriate institution?

All this talk about putting this boy back in the same classroom as his victim simply begs the question as to why he is still in the school at all.

Sadly I'm another who experienced multiple 'minor' assaults at school, starting from the day in Y6 when two of the boys pulled me into the boys changing room after a swimming lesson and ripped my towel off me. I was one of the only girls who had started developing, and they wanted to see my breasts. When I finally got out of there, after standing naked and crying in front of all the boys in my class, I got in trouble for having been in the boys changing room. They were not punished.

There were so many incidents through secondary school. It was considered completely normal. There was one teacher who started when I was in Y11 that would actively punish boys for this sort of behaviour, but even that was along the lines of a detention.

I wish I could say I was surprised by this report. Saddened, yes, but not surprised.

So your attitude is that it’s best for the girls to get used to being treated like shit from an early age?

Misogynistic attitudes and pornography was rife amongst the young men and the girls seemed almost flattered and desperate for the attention. Same with alcohol consumption- they used to ask me why I didn’t drink myself into a stupor like they did

^ how is that any different to the attitudes of those who attend mixed sex? We wouldn’t be having this rape culture in schools if what you suggest is remotely true.

Cannot belive that even on a thread about female children being raped in schools that people are suggesting girls should keep being put in the path of physical harm just so boys don’t suffer.

I think there's a big difference between boarding schools and day schools. I went to an all girls' comprehensive and loved it. I still socialised in mixed sex groups outside school.

Having said that, I would still consider an all girls school for my Dd when she is secondary school aged.

The misogynistic crap that we put up with was mainly in the form of comments and bra strap pinging. This was school in the 90s so pre mobile phones and internet.

The world has changed now and I don’t really want my DD mixing with boys who regularly watch violent pornography and think upskirting with their camera phones is no big deal. And with the whole current trans ideology being forced to share changing rooms and toilets at school because of “right on” policies.

She’s only 3.5 years old though so obviously things maybe better or worse by then.....

It’s not bizarre. In my experience of going to a mixed comprehensive as girls putting up with misogynistic nonsense from boys was part of daily life (unfortunately). You developed a sort of resigned indifference towards the boys.

The girls I knew from all girls school were “boy obsessed” and always went further with boys at parties and loved the misogynistic attention in a way that the girls from the mixed comp did not.

The young men and women I met at university who had attended rich single sex private schools and grammar schools (The uni I went to was rated 7 in the league tables at that point so had a high proportion of private school students) again had much more difficulty interacting appropriately with the opposite sex.

Misogynistic attitudes and pornography was rife amongst the young men and the girls seemed almost flattered and desperate for the attention. Same with alcohol consumption- they used to ask me why I didn’t drink myself into a stupor like they did.

“Because I got all of that out my system when I was 15” I replied - along with having learnt that boys just weren’t all that. I was more interested in my actual degree course by then.