Rape culture starts in primary school

[WarriorN]

This is the Everyone’s Invited primary school list 2025. It contains 1664 schools that have been submitted anonymously onto our website by survivors of sexual abuse during
their time at primary school

https://www.everyonesinvited.uk/PrimarySchoolsList2025.pdf

This is a thread I often recall.

https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3364173-Our-kids-were-raped-by-classmates-DfE-wont-listen

Unfortunately this.

Children who are abusive are almost always coming from very troubled homes.

Smartphones would be a convenient scapegoat, but would not address the underlying issues.

A proportion of children in every school will be neglected, abused, facing difficulties at home. This has never changed.

Addressing and reversing growing poverty and inequality, the slashing of services to address wider social issues, are the things that may help.

A huge task.

People need to stop giving their primary age children mobile/smart phones.

Actually rape culture starts at conception - so many men sharing vile views on women and then starting families with unsuspecting women.

Small point about smartphones. My kids are 9 and 10, so we are right in the thrust of ‘everyone else has a smart phone, why can’t we?’ They are not getting a smart phone for as long as I can manage, we have a ‘house mobile’, which can be used by the 10 year old if he leaves school on his own to go to the village park for 15 mins. It’s a call and text phone only. He did get the mick taken out of him for it.

I understand why parents feel more comfortable with their child having a phone as they take their first tentative steps to independence, but what I have noticed is that the phone seems to have replaced teaching kids how to keep themselves safe. I have witnessed many children who don’t know how to navigate roads, I’m not sure that many would be able to risk assess situations, what to do if their friend gets hurt, who to ask for help. I think the phone seems to have become a false safety blanket.

The first few times my son went to the park, we did it without a phone. He was drilled and tested over what to do in various situations. The kids with smart phones make it to the park, but do tend to sit on the swings scrolling. My belief is that a phone won’t stop your kid getting kidnapped or run over, but teaching how to keep themselves safe may do.

Great points, Whatthechicken, I hadn't thought about 'independence' = 'dependent on smartphone'.

I love your last sentence:
a phone won’t stop your kid getting kidnapped or run over, but teaching how to keep themselves safe may do.

Adults should think that way too - if there's a prolonged power cut, and your only means of comms is your smartphone, and the battery runs out, what is your Plan B for emergency calls??

[Hint: hang on to your landline if you have one, and keep a cheap 'Nokia' powered up as it will hold its charge for days till the leccy comes back on. But make sure it's an up-to-date one, at least 4g, because 3g, which Nokias tootled along on nicely, is being discontinued.]

Oh and by the way, Whatthechicken, word on the street is that Nokias are cool again, Gen Z likes them, so your kids are trendsetters😎
Why Gen-Z is going back to dumb phones in 2025 | body+soul

@Whatthechickenwe did the same, a Nokia still no phone in y7. At first it was a phone to take up to the playing field. But to be honest, we’ve found the same as you, that keeping himself safe is the main aim, not relying on a phone.

the only thing is that they don’t use it I’ve found. So it’s a bit pointless, though is useful to have when needed.

Gen z are apparently also buying up all your old digital cameras as they like the vintage look 😆

there’s a huge area on reddit about going smartphone free and moving to Nokias

@RedToothBrush said:

"Why does football have hooliganism when other very masculine sports don't? That's the type of question you should ask...

...the answer comes back to tribalism and power every single time."

Great post generally, but especially the above bit. I remember, pre-Mumsnet, discussions about how marvellous football was at inspiring team spirit, the ability of groups of kids to work together for a common good, etc. However, someone else pointed out that the main point of football was to beat the shit out of the other team, (Plus, possibly, their supporters.) They politely suggested that if peeps wanted kids to learn team spirit, work together for a common good, etc., those kids should join a bloody orchestra. Less tribalism there... 😀

Unfettered access to pornography and social media is the worst thing to happen to young girls in the last couple of decades.

Boys have their brains fried with hardcore porn, girls are pushed hard to sexualise themselves from a young age. But then every moron will harp on about ethical pornography and social media training, because a bandaid is easier than actually enforcing a solution

That's really interesting, WarriorN - you could have got your DCs expensive smartphones with all the consequent dangers, because 'they all have them' and 'they need them for safety' and 'the other kids will tease them ' and all the other mantras about giving smartphones to under-16s.

Not only have they got by without a smartphone, it looks like they got by without even using the Nokias!

So perhaps kids do actually have enough inner resources not to be glued to a phone at every free moment... yours obviously do WarriorN👌

My son is in year 7 and has a Nokia dumbphone for calling home because his school insists on it. It doesn't have a camera and there's no data to go online. He won't be getting a smartphone until he's a lot older. A lot of the parents in his school feel exactly the same about smartphones, and he's never been teased, as none of his classmates ever bring them in.

I don’t know if people already know about this, but in case not, the idea of this pact from Smart Phone Free Childhood is to form large enough groups of children who do not have smart phones so that the peer pressure to have one is less strong.
parentpactresults.smartphonefreechildhood.co.uk/

Brilliant, I’ve signed it.

My son is in year 7 and has a Nokia dumbphone for calling home because his school insists on it.

When I was in year seven, if I needed to call my parents, I could ask at the school office and they would look up the contact number and place the call for me. I didn't know my parents' work numbers. Usually, it would be a teacher calling because something had gone wrong, such as illness or injury, that required my parents to collect me.

It looks to me like your son's school have abdicated their safeguarding responsibilities for knowing that your son has an emergency at all in order to need to make a call home, pushing that responsibility onto your son.

There is a specific, non-urgent-but-still-important reason for most of the pupils wanting frequently to call home, and their each having a mobile makes that much, much easier than queuing at the matron's office, but please don't let the possibility of another school operating differently from the one you went to get in the way of sanctimony.

My son boards and calls home 2-4 times a week. I'd guess his classmates call 1-7 times depending on the circumstances.

His school insists that the phone is a dumbphone with no camera. No smartphones or smart watches allowed. When he goes to senior school, he'll be issued with a specific Nokia model at the start of term.

Another modern problem for children travelling home from school is erratic bus services. Buses due sometimes simply do not turn up. So people use their smart phones for bus apps to find out what is happening. There are no guards or bus conductors around to ask.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere; in Japan children from 4 onwards to 12 are issued with a government mobile phone which can store 10 numbers and they can have something like 10 texts and calls a month. They are then expected to walk to school on their own with this (according to my Japanese friend, happy to be corrected!)

Though, as I type that, “government issue” opens other questions….!

@MarieDeGournayhe does have access to an iPad at home though 😆

however it broke recently.

so now watches a lot of random things on iPlayer. The 7/7 bombing documentary being the last one….

he’s playing chess more though. One iPlayer find was a sort of great pottery throw down style chess thing. (As well as binging marvel movies)

we get asked for one regularly though. It’s a small group of parents who are doing this so it helps. I also wish iPods were still available as he loves music. We now have an Apple Music account for him with playlists that we play though headphones or a speaker.

I think local parents of children currently in ks1 seem MUCH more opinionated on this though, (anti any phone) from birthday party chat.

and we do often feel mean.

But parents can say no to kids.

schools are clearly an issue in all this. All my sons homework is online

Back in the day (remember that? Possibly some of you are too young) NOBODY had a Smartphone. We phoned home (if our homes even HAD housephones, which mine and many of my peers didn't), from the school office. We spent our evenings watching the tv with our parents (three channels, no choice).

And we survived. We learned to be streetwise, we learned not to talk to strangers, get into people's cars (the old-fashioned version of online grooming). Technology moves so fast and the only ones who can really keep up are the very young.

But I was SA by a boy in primary school. This would have been 1969. So the desire, the tendency, has always been there, even before the ready access to porn, to technology. In my view we need a two pronged approach - to tackle technology and its effects on the young mind and ALSO to tackle the 'othering' of the opposite sex, that makes someone with different genitals to you somehow an object, or less-than-human.

I came across this while searching for something else [fruitlessly - I wish MN had a better search facility😡]
Best dumb phone for kids (#1 is under £20) | Mumsnet

Call me political-correctness-gone-made but I find it hard to say dumb phone - I know it's the US/German meaning =stupid, but it means people who are non-verbal on this side of the Atlantic.

Fortunately 'Nokia' is usually accurate. Nokias are the Hoovers of the mobile phone world

It's far better to use a search engine like Google and add the word 'mumsnet' than to try to use MN's own search engine.

This is absolutely not our experience.
I have a sporty DD who was far better at football than many of the boys but the boys NEVER passed to her because she was a girl.

Great post - should have known it would be you, @RedToothBrush
wish you were my real life pal!