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Schoolboy rapists think that their victims’ tears are a normal part of sex, the founder of the Everyday Sexism campaign said as she warned of a sexual assault epidemic in Britain’s playgrounds.
Laura Bates said that across the country schoolgirl rape victims were being put back into classrooms with their attackers because schools did not receive guidance telling them this should not be done.
Ms Bates told the Edinburgh International Book Festival that a rape a day in term time was being carried out in British schools.
She said that the “misogyny and dehumanising” nature of online pornography had made teenage boys think that making girls cry was “part of foreplay” and that the continuing absence of sex and relationship lessons in schools meant there was no corrective to the impact of pornography.
“I went to school recently where they had a rape case involving a 14-year-old boy and a teacher had said to him “why didn’t you stop when she was crying” and he looked straight back at her quite bewildered and said “because it is normal for girls to cry during sex”.
“I go into schools and talk to children around that age all that time who think that crying is part of foreplay because they have seen so much online porn that normalises violence and treating women in a way that is incredibly misogynistic and dehumanising.”
According to research, 5,500 sexual offences, including 600 rapes, were reported to police as having taken place in UK schools in the three years to July 2015.
The government has pledged to produce guidelines for schools to prevent children being forced to share classes with pupils who have raped or sexually assaulted them and consulting on proposals that all state schools should be required to teach relationship and sex education.
Ms Bates, whose Everyday Sexism project brought pressure to bear on the government to make the lessons compulsory, said the proposals were “fraught with potential pitfalls.
“It remains to be seen what the curriculum will look like, what the opt-outs will look like, whether it will include technology,” she said. “At the moment guidance is non—existent because the last guidance was written 20 years so there are all these people experiencing online porn and sexting and there is absolutely no advice at all.”
She added that whereas some schools did teach sex education, often it was given to older teenagers when it should be given to younger children.