Times: Girls aged 14 now make up the most common group to report rape to the police

“Teachers are not interested and take a view of "six of one, half a dozen of the other" or even, as in the examples from the TES, blame the girl.“

As demonstrated on page one of this thread.

@Weareoutofwine Fantastic post I agree with you 100%.

Archived version of Moran article: https://archive.is/ObvqK

Absolutely parental influence sets core values, behaviour, approach to life. But there are multiple major contributing factors and unfortunately violent porn is one of them. If only it was just simply parenting.

Here's a link for anyone who hasn't come across this amazing organisation

https://www.collectiveshout.org/about

Collective Shout and their amazing team - I recommend following their Instagram account - an amazing organisation have been going in to schools for quite sometime. Asking teenage girls what their experience is and running various workshops. They really are experts not opinion journalists. It's shocking the things and attitudes they experience. There are other feminist groups that have been doing this for years.

Would recommend following their work.

A colleagues daughter was raped in school. The boy carried on going to the same school. It’s inching it’s way through the justice system but she’s struggled with mental health issues, suicidal thoughts. Been ostracised socially as he is a “popular” child.

There was certainly sexual assault in the mixed comprehensive I attended many years ago. The boys also used to share pornography (magazines in those pre-internet days). Teachers are not interested and take a view of "six of one, half a dozen of the other" or even, as in the examples from the TES, blame the girl.

Caitlin Moran did a very good article recently asking: Why are teenage girls so unhappy? (Sorry, no share token.) She took the hitherto unthought-of step of actually asking some teenage girls.

Here's an excerpt:

“Duh — it’s the boys,” one said when I brought it up, as all the others agreed.
“The boys?” I asked. My last book, What About Men?, had been all about how much boys struggle these days: their loneliness; their suicide rates. I’d spent the past year feeling very sympathetic towards boys.
“Yeah, well, who do you think they’re taking out their unhappiness on? It’s us,” another girl said.
“One boy at school used to draw a picture every day of how ugly I was,” a third girl said. “Every day for two years.”
“They’ve all got ‘Rate The Girls’ polls on their WhatsApps,” the first said. “They mark you down for weight gain, haircuts, what you say.”
“But then, if you’re hot, it’s just as bad, in a different way, because they’ll be talking about how they want to f* you.”
The girls discussed coping techniques. Bad news: none of them worked.
“The only way you can stop them is if you become ‘one of the boys’ and hang out with them. But then,” the second girl said with a sigh, “all the other girls call you a slut. Because you’ve gone over to the boys’ side.”
“Surely it’s not all the boys?” I said. “There must be some nice boys?”
“Oh, yeah,” one girl said. “But they keep their heads down. Because… well, look.”
She showed me the Instagram account of her friend. Under every picture she posted of herself — smiling in a new dress; with her dog — dozens of anonymous accounts had replied with the most rank abuse. “Fat.” “Slut.” “You gonna try and kill yourself again, for attention?”

https://www.thetimes.com/magazines/the-times-magazine/article/caitlin-moran-british-teenage-girls-unhappy-qgc3d5wgf

No it's not. But if reported to police would form part of thr statistics being quoted here

Police records of rape, sexual assaults and incidents of abuse carried out by young children in England and Wales have all seen a significant increase since the Covid pandemic. The Observer has also uncovered an 81% rise in reported incidents that took place on school property.

Sexual assult is sexualised touching. Touching of the leg could fall into this.

These are the things girls are reporting to police. It's not that the 81% of incidents taking place on school grounds are rapes. They will be sexual assaults.

Grabbing of breast/crotch/leg or any other area where the undertone is sexual. All hideous. But not rape on school grounds.

plus many other aspects. If the aim is the tackle this rasing issue, restricting discussion to only parts will not help.

Styling other posters as part of a mob-mentality that is oblivious to nuance is unhelpful. My FWR experience is that posters welcome evidenced complexity.

I doubt that I'm the only one interested in some data or learning of an intelligence network that can validate your claims about the level of malicious reporting and the age-groups that manifest this. I'd also be pleased to learn whether there's incident recording at younger age-groups. I'm still horrified at the reaction of adults to the girls at the heart of the incidents that I quoted above.

Absolutely - though porn is a major contributor to the sexulisation and objectification of women and girls - which has been found in various research (sorry no time to dig out now) to fuel violent acts and objectification of girls and women. Sexualisation, objectification and misogyny is rampant through our society and we absolutely need to fully understand all the contributing factors if we are to tackle it.

From the TES school MN thread I linked earlier:

Decade after decade - there has always been sexual assault, and rape in schools. I've mentioned previously that my local school was notorious for this - so much so that when inspectors visited it, they witnessed sexual activity taking place at the back of a classroom during a lesson. It was only when the inspectors witnessed it that it made the papers - not when parents reported what was happening to their girls.
We're getting no better at recognising it, never mind addressing it.

Let's look at the sentence: "Amongst many outcomes, also factoring into this is an aspect of cancel culture, the mob-mentality to see only black-and-white, and (for want of a different expression) pearl-clutching."

The jumping on a single word (or two word) aspect, when I make it clear that I just couldn't think of a different phase, exemplifies exactly what part of the problem is. Black and white thinking. No appreciation of the grey area. I could have said "narrow focused thought" instead. Safeguarding requires me to consider several different aspects of an incident simultaneously.

The mob-mentality of not seeing the complexities of the wider issue and just thinking in the simplest terms restricts efforts to tackle the problem (and SHSV is a big problem) on a wider level. It's also silencing useful discussion when only one aspect of the wider issue can be voiced.

It's not easy. There are lots of aspects to this and all need discussing together, in a forum that can do this without seeking to polarise views. Online discussion seems to polarise views. The exposure of boys to toxic masculinity is one aspect of this, avalibility of porn another. These are the biggest aspects. But also an increase in malicious reports is another aspect to consider, the effects of reports (on all involved) another, the way the police handle reports another, the culture in school another, the patrical culture girls are exposed to online another.. plus many other aspects. If the aim is the tackle this rasing issue, restricting discussion to only parts will not help.

Unfortunately porn is just one avenue. Gaming is notorious for glamorising and normalising SV and rape as well.

Appreciate this article is old but times have not really moved on. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/feb/13/amazon-pulls-rape-computer-game

and from last month
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c23l4ml51jmo - the standout comment here 'Ms Jefferies told the BBC she was once asked to act out a scene with a male performer involving a sexual assault with no prior warning.'

Where is it happening? Are you telling me that it's happening on the middle of the school playground in view of 200+ other kids?
When I think about my old high school, then I'm still wondering about the 'where' part. It's a bloody big school and grounds too.

i think unpicking some of the practical issues like this is really important @RedToothBrush

im assuming toilets but also when I think of my old school (admittedly all girls) in the countryside surrounded by trees and bushes I can think of dozens of places where you could not be seen by anyone

Heartbreaking. I want to see Government tackle pornography. Anyone who has spent just two minutes on sites can easily see that the bulk of porn with high viewing numbers is now extremely violent, racist and misogynistic. Its so readily accessible. Gone are the days when you had to slip to the back of your local sex shop to access something beyond 'vanilla' (I hate this phrase - promotes the idea that extreme acts of sex are fun- and loving sex is boring - but useful shorthand I guess)

The violence - verbal, physical is off the scale in porn. Consent from performers can not be assumed - you only have to read the countless accounts of performers and ex performers and their detailing of pressure to perform acts they had stated as red lines, otherwise payment is withheld. The sites are full of abuse videos - not some act - but real unconsented abuse in many instances.

I feel uneasy with Coopers insistence that parents and communities have failed children, young people and women. Yes this will contribute but to my mind radical steps need to be taken to limit access to pornography and a new far reaching state regulation/intervention is required. In fact I'd suggest this require cross cooperation across the globe from governments. But I doubt there is the appetite. Its a crisis and government and society is failing to protect children and women.

The police taskforce seems to have worth - but this is not rooting the problem out at the source. We seems to fail to understand time and time again that prevention is better than attempting a half arsed cure. I'm furious as to what porn has done to us across the generations.

Well said LoobiJee

Perhaps the school’s safeguarding lead got their training from poster upthread who made the “pearl clutching” comment and says they are a secondary school safeguarding lead.

Red - thank you for the summary of the angry thoughts that were passing through my mind on reading that piece and the "pearl clutching" item. I agree about this feeling like a shield for a social media crackdown and I'm almost speechless about the notion we should feel protected by Police activity (like you, I think about the tolerance of domestic abuse within their ranks).

For other items (Ptero):

• in the Times piece, there's no mention of the setting for the rapes the young girls and women report.
• I mentioned the TES piece and thread about schools in response to the "pearl-clutching" and "malicious reports" comments. If there are national data, and I should think this is a major evidence gap if there aren't, then this would be compelling.

This reads as part of a planned big crack down on social media companies.

I thought that too.

There's a massive lack of parenting going on. You can crack down on social media companies all you like but I don't think it will solve the core issue really cos Pandora's box is open and the sheer amount of stuff out there means it's everywhere. Its an issue within gaming and internal communication systems - it goes way beyond social media.

Parenting doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Parents who try to avoid giving their children a smartphone or access to the internet are undermined by everyone around them - including the schools themselves, which make the use of apps or an online platform the only way for parents / pupils to interact with school systems.

@Pterodacty1 link I posted above says 81% increase of incidents on school property.

Is the suggestion that rapes are happening on school grounds? Sexual harassment is, its a really big problem and a constant battle.

I firmly believe its from social media toxic masculinity algorithms. These young boys are almost 'taught' to objectify women. Then they find porn and it all gets worse.