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

[RedToothBrush]

Matt Dathan AT matt_dathan

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

In an interview with thetimes, Yvette Cooper says the "incredibly disturbing figure" is a sign of how violent pornography is “fundamentally changing” the views of young boys about sex:

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/violent-porn-warping-young-boys-attitude-to-sex-warns-home-secretary-cxqt79xpd

Beth Rigby AT bethrigby
Shocking & deeply upsetting. Nearly a third of female rapes reported to police involved girls aged 18 & under in yr to March. Data on female rape victims disclosed by 31/43 police forces in Eng & Wales show 1,458 girls aged 14 reported a rape in 2023/4, more than any other age gp

I have not got a Time Subscription so can't read the actual article.

From what I can tell this is a big increase but the article doesn't explicitly say the age of the perpetrators. The suggestion is article implies it's teenage boys but doesn't say it but other are saying the data shows many are much older.

Either way a sudden rise in reporting by 14 year olds is concerning. Is this a change in the pattern of crime or are more 14 year olds merely reporting? Unfortunately it would seem more likely to be the former.

Either in the context of this, it makes you wonder about the erosion of single sex facilities and services that these girls are exposed to and then subsequently have to deal with.

None of these individual issues are good and collectively add up to something which is particularly awful to think about.

I think the point about finding out what's happening and where is really an important one here.

There's a massive conflation and a jumble of issues going on. And whilst a lot of it probably is connected, we need to unpick it carefully.

If this is happening on school grounds, then regardless of all the outside influences and potential causes, why is this able to happen?

It's clearly not happening in the middle of Yr8 Maths is it?

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.

Where's the guidance and national policy development by government on this?

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

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This.

It's really frustrating me in terms of 'its all smartphones ban smartphones'

It's not the smartphone that's the issue.

It's the 'what' not the 'how'. The what being content, the how being method of delivery.

And a lot of the content and messaging ISN'T coming through smartphones.

Conversations I've had this week with various people, really makes me aware of how much of a blind spot this is.

There's parents I know saying we should all get our kids to have dumbphones 'so there's no peer pressure'. There will ALWAYS be peer pressure. It's how you equip your kid and you as a parent deal with peer pressure that's important. Do you sit down and talk about what is normal and not normal? And how others distort this.

Then there's the parents saying 'we need dumbphones' when DS has come home telling me what their child has been watching on flaming YouTube already! And how X is playing 18 year old rated video games at age 10.

I'm sorry, but the lack of parental understanding and unwillingness to parent is a massive part of this conversation. The kids don't get taught about boundaries age 5. They literally don't understand the word no in a lot of cases. About anything. So why would they suddenly recognise the word when it comes to sex?

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

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's a kid in my son's class who has told another parent 'i can do whatever I like because my mum never tells me off.'

The parent doesn't. And when he does something in school she kicks off and blames the school.

Kid doesn't understand the word 'no'.

I am dreading what will happen when he hits high school.

That's where it starts. Not with porn.

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.

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

https://www.collectiveshout.org/about

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.

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

@Weareoutofwine Fantastic post I agree with you 100%.

“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.

I speak to the parents of an average 1 or 2 boys accused of sexual assult or violence every 2 school weeks. And have done for 3 years.

I would not say permissive parenting is over-respresented in this cohort of parents. I would not say any type of parenting (including not good enough patenting, or strict parenting) are over-respresented.

Anecdotal of course. But in my experience it's something outside of parenting style.

I currently work inner-city. Have previously worked in very affluent area and an ex-mining socially deprived area. I also don't see any sig difference in socio-economic status in this issue.

It’s appalling that so many teenage girls have been victimised and we need to turn this around. However, there may be more than one reason why the modal average age for reported rapes is falling year on year. Adult women have lost faith in the justice system and police so may not be reporting in the same numbers, whereas one hopes the rape of a younger victim is less likely to be hand-waved away by police and be properly investigated. The absolute numbers are still horrendous and a stain on our society. We are failing our girls. 😔

Is it a recent, rapid rise? If so I would hesitate to link that solely to violent pornography, which has sadly been widely available for some time now. There's presumably an interaction with other factors too, e.g. the popularity of twats like Andrew Tate.

I remember when I was a baby researcher going into a comprehensive school, observing behaviour in classrooms and talking to the girls & boys

I’d been to an all girls school & I was shocked at the casual sexist bullying of the girls. Lifting up skirts with rulers, pinging bra straps, “you on the blob?”, comments about their breasts, their arses, their faces. The saddest thing was the girls just shrugging it off as ‘just what boys do’

And that was 30 years ago before the rise of the internet

no Wonder so many young girls want to identify out of being female & all the shit that for them comes with it every day

The rise has been since Everyone's Invited. Which was 2019. Everyone's Invited was itself an off-shoot of Me Too.

Everyone's Invited lead to an Ofsted review on how schools deal with sexual harassment and sexual violence (SHSV)

This lead to a very big addition to the Keeping Children Safe In Education document. This is the statutory guidance schools have to follow for safeguarding.

This lead to ofsted scrutinising cases of SHSV in every ofsted inspection.

This lead to hyper-focus on the safeguarding responce of SHSV from schools, knowing that their culture and response to SHSV could sink an ofsted grade (since ineffective safeguarding is automatic inadequate ofsted grade).

This lead to significant increases in schools encouraging reports from girls, making girls (and their parents) aware of the fact that sexuslly criminal behaviour (sexual touching is sexual assault) could be reported to police and in some cases school being duty-bound to report instances to police.

Which leads to the significant increase in reports of SHSV to police.

This lead to significant increases in schools encouraging reports from girls, making girls (and their parents) aware of the fact that sexuslly criminal behaviour (sexual touching is sexual assault) could be reported to police and in some cases school being duty-bound to report instances to police.

except this report is very specifically about rape not broader sexual assault

There is a mis-mash of data being reported 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."

So sexuslised behaviour on school grounds. Includes sexual assult.

Also though is the fact that the most common age-group reporting rape is 14y. This data though isn't to do with schools. Just the age of victims.

I would suggest that the increased focus and responce by schools is a factor in this though. Since if a child discloses rape to a member of staff at school it will be reported to police. This is nothing to do with where the rape happened though. These is no link to it taking place at school.