School policies that encourage girls to take responsibility for male behaviour

[jewel1968]

What are your thoughts on a school enforcement of skirt length policy in that skirts should be around the knee. And more specifically what would you say about a female teacher telling a 13yr old girl not to wear shorts on a school camping trip because of the impact it will have on male teachers. Not my DD but a friend's DD.

Is there a very unhelpful message here for girls i.e. that they are responsible for the behaviour of boys/men?

Thats grim.
I thought this would be about sitting disruptive pupils next to quiet ones.

I hate this stupid policing of clothes, and i also can't believe ANYONE would be stupid enough to actually say this outloud or commit it to paper instead of coming uo eith an actual proper reason.

The examples you give really piss me off.

Girls regulated on what they wear. Boys can wear shorts way above the knee - no one bats an eye.

A girl’s knee is not indecent - but with the threat to same sex spaces plus gender neutral toilets they’ll be expected to put up with adult male penises in toilets / communal changing rooms.

Talk about mixed messages to girls.

If I was the parent of the 13yr old girl told not to wear a skirt because of male teachers - I would make a complaint to the school.

If the male teachers can’t cope with a 13 yr old girl in shorts the they are in the wrong profession. Brother in law is a secondary school teacher - he would be aghast at this notion.

Everyone inc boys and men are responsible for their own behaviour.

Honestly, I would think she had a particular "concerning" teacher in mind that she was warning your friend's DD about.

There's a pragmatic balance to be found between idealism and realism here.

In an ideal world I would tell my daughter's that they could wear whatever they wanted and they'd have nothing to fear from anybody.

In the real world wearing revealing clothes makes girls/women more attractive to paedophiles/men respectively.

Pragmatically I tell my daughter's to dress sensibly for whatever occasion they are attending, and if they go out on the town to be aware of whatever type of attention it might bring.

Incidentally I wouldn't let my daughter's go to school with skirts above the knee as it just looks unprofessional, my female colleagues would be sent home from work, I'd expect my daughter's to be sent home from school.

And yes, mentioning the male teachers does seem inappropriate. Either those teachers are trusted, or they should be referred to the local safeguarding process for investigation.

The fact that it's a teacher who the child is being told she has to manage the reactions of makes it even worse. He is an adult, he's responsible for managing his own behavior, and if he can't do so then maybe he needs to find a different job.

My very slim DD wears a skirt that is technically in breech of uniform rules (bit on short side) but NEVER gets challenged. Her friends often do get challenged.

I would complain if it were my DD

my female colleagues would be sent home from work

woah, what the fuck?

are your female colleagues actually children?

There is certainly some truth in this though - it's very uncomfortable for some male teachers when dealing with girls who are wearing revealing clothes. Not because of the risk of doing something inappropriate, but because accusations can happen so easily, and even accusations of looking at a girl wrong can be taken very seriously, when there is nothing in it.

The comment about male teachers was silly, but there is a trend for girls (generally from years 9-11) to dress in a sexualised manner. Short, tight skirts are more of a problem than short skirts themselves - some are so short you can see their underwear when they are walking up stairs. Rather than state a specific length that would need to be measured, it’s easier to choose knee length!

Gosh, the poor men, with those horrible little girls making accusations all the time.

(Are you lost?)

Surely burkas and chastity belts are the answer to all these pervy male teachers who can't stop lecthing at kids.

children leading men on eh?

my my my

We live in a sexualised culture and skirt length has become associated with that. The whole culture is fucked.

There is certainly some truth in this though - it's very uncomfortable for some male teachers when dealing with girls who are wearing revealing clothes. Not because of the risk of doing something inappropriate, but because accusations can happen so easily, and even accusations of looking at a girl wrong can be taken very seriously, when there is nothing in it.

Wuh?!

it's very uncomfortable for some male teachers when dealing with girls who are wearing revealing clothes
I disagree. I've heard male teachers claim "I didn't know where to look"; actually, I think they know precisely where they should/shouldn't have been looking.
Gosh, the poor men, with those horrible little girls making accusations all the time.

(Are you lost?)
Unfortunately there is more truth is this statement. There are some children - male and female - who have learned that they can distract from their own behaviour by making malicious complaints. Luckily these complaints are usually not very well thought out, and are easily disproved. Every school I've worked in has had a few children who had "Never be alone with this student" on their record (although "never be alone with any student" is a better policy).

As Mockers says how is asking girls to modify their dress any different to women/girls expected to wear the burka?

Well the key is that expectations should be similar for both sexes. Or that there should in fact simply be a single dress code that can be chosen from e.g. trousers or knee length skirt and shirt.

I do wish our local school would require the girls to wear longer skirts - you can sometimes see the bum cheeks and crotch of their tights beneath their skirts. I don’t think the girls are freely choosing to dress like this; it is peer pressure from both girls and boys. I know practicality never features particularly high on the clothing choices of teens but these belts skirts must be cold and far from practical too.

I don't want to see someone's underwear when walking up stairs behind them. That is true for boys and girls. The rule should be knee length skirts and shorts but the reason why is it often specified skirts is because girls' are often very tight and short whereas that doesn't seen to be an issue with boys. But if I saw a boy in hot pants type shorts, that would be a problem.

1st rule of misogyny, women and girls are responsible for everything that men say and do
I would tell the female teacher to fuck off, also to tell her male colleagues that they must realise that not every female is available for them to fuck.
Women and girls are not on this earth to be wank fodder for unscrupulous men.

Saying something like this to a student about a teacher is weird, weird enough that if my kid said it had happened, I might wonder if someone had been telling her fibs or that she'd misunderstood. However, anything is possible.

I don't really accept the premise though that somehow people aren't supposed to consider the impact of their behaviour on others. We don't go around living our lives in a way that is somehow isolated from others, and the things we do affect the feel and functioning of the community around us.

There are a number of things I expect young men in a school to do in order to make the environment comfortable and respectful for the young women (and I suppose the teachers as well but that is less important in some ways.) I also would say the same thing about the young women. It is an unfortunate fact that fashion and trends sexualise women's clothing but not usually men's, and if students in a school are taking the Kardashians or whatever for their models it will tend to create an environment that sexualises women in general and all the women in the school specifically, which isn't particularly nice for anyone, or good for young people developing their sense of what it means to be an adult.

As for the particular rules, putting together a good dress code seems fairly fraught, and sometimes they go wrong. But it's the nature of them that they are going to be a broad brush approach.

They send girls home from primary school for wearing warm weather clothing in scorching hot weather if their shoulders show but the boys can wear their tank tops and droopy drawers with their under drawers on display 12 months out of the year.

Well, here I would like to observe that my DD’s school sends the boys home for ‘skinny’ trousers but seems to let the girls wear skirts which are basically bum warmers (along with thick black tights).

Not sure what conclusion to draw there but I will also note that I must be very unprofessional as I regularly wear skirts and dresses above the knee as I do not like the feeling of material flapping around my legs. Fortunately no-one has sent me home yet.