Article on the sexual pressures and misinformation affecting schoolchildren

[Mumsnut]

A Mail link, a good article nonetheless by the founder of Everyday Sexism

www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6112399/The-epidemic-sexual-assaults-schools.html

Very good article - Laura Bates is doing such important work, and she's a good communicator too.

My difficulty is with the alleged recency of this problem.

When I was a child, one of my local senior schools (11-18) was the subject of opprobrium when Education Investigators finally visited it and confirmed reports that sexual assault and rape were common. During their visits, they even observed children having sex at the back of a classroom during a lesson (I assume they intervened).

That said, it was a neighbourhood with a high density of people with a criminal history and sexual harassment was a fact of everyday life.

Decades later, are people finally thinking, "This is a bit wrong" or is it genuinely thought to be a phenomenon of recent social changes?

Oh, I completely agree, arranfan. My mum taught in a series of really rough inner city schools from the late 50s through to the 1970s, and some of the stories she had were absolutely hair-raising. (E.g. the 12 year old in her tutor group who came into class in tears - she'd gone out at lunch time to try to phone her mum from the phone box outside school only to find the phone already ringing. In her naivety she picked it up, only to be sexually propositioned by a punter - it turned out that a local pimp had groomed a group of older girls into prostitution and was running a child-sex-abuse ring from the phone box outside the school).

Yes, FermatsTheorem! A number of my family have been in education (stretching back 100 years) and most of them in rough areas (Inner-city). Like you, none of this is new to me - it's SAMO Toxic Masculinity/Patriarchy in more modern garb.

I'm disappointed that this is being treated as a Problem of Modern Life and Social Change rather than recognising it for what it is. If we don't name the problem and accept the scope of it, we'll continue to fail to solve it. As we patently have, for many decades.

I think every generation thinks they have discovered this problem for the first time then fails to solve it.

When I was late teens/early twenties, way back in the mid 80s, the huge public scandal was that we had suddenly discovered how widespread child sexual abuse was (funnily enough, 30 years on we seem to be suddenly discovering how widespread child sexual abuse is... all over again). I remember one of my friend's mums (who'd been a social worker all her life) remarking "I kept trying to square this with my professional experience - then realised that what they were now calling child sexual abuse was what we used to call incest - and actually the incidence of it hadn't changed at all, it was just getting loads of publicity under a new name".

I remember the sexual abuse/incest being a big thing to counteract in the 80s - parent and friends in social work.

Now there are new and far more efficient ways of doing the same thing, along with the new technology, communications and change in practices in the wider world.