The fight to combat violence against women has come to a thunderous crescendo in recent weeks – the death of Sarah Everard last month uniting us in grief, but also bringing up memories that many of us have repressed for years. Memories that we’re realising are shared experiences – an investigation last month reported that 97% of women aged 18-24 have been sexually harassed – and which, for some, stem from our school days.
As a result, dozens of women have begun speaking out about what they faced at school, while a number of independent schools have been accused of failing to deal properly with horrific allegations of sexual abuse among pupils.
Dulwich College, Highgate and Westminster are just some of the illustrious institutions that have been described as ‘breeding grounds’ for sexual predators by ex-pupils. The allegations cover everything from assault to revenge porn. In many cases, the victims did not report their experiences, citing a pervasive ‘rape culture’ that they say made them feel their claims wouldn’t be taken seriously. (Dulwich College has ‘condemned unreservedly’ the ‘alleged social and sexual misconduct’ by students, contacted police and pledged to review safeguarding;Westminsterhaslaunched a consultation, noting, ‘behaviours like these have absolutely no place at our school’, and referred some accounts to the local authority; Highgate has said it’s ‘committed to taking whatever action is required to achieve the necessary culture change’ and commissioned an independent review.)
This culture was rife at the boarding school I went to as a teenager.
This culture was rife at the boarding school I went to as a teenager. The girls in the younger years (aged 13-14) were jeered at when they walked around campus. They’d be ranked out of 10 by older boys who took great pleasure in yelling their ‘number’ as they walked by. Photos of their under- developed bodies were pressurised from them and quickly shared. Teachers would blame these girls for being so careless; fellow pupils would brand them ‘sluts’.
It wasn’t just the girls, of course. The boys had their fair share of it, too, particularly the younger ones, when sixth formers would come back from a weekend bragging about everything they did to women in bed, and humiliating 13-year-old boys for having never ‘smelt a vagina’. Things were worse off campus. That’s where the assaults happened: at parties and on weekends away. Those who spoke up were either not believed or humiliated, their trauma used as comic fodder.
When I wrote about these experiences in The Independent, I was inundated with allegations from my old schoolmates, women I hadn’t heard from in nine years. (My school’s headmaster tells me, ‘I was shocked and distressed to read about the completely unacceptable things that students had to put up with.’ He has promised to ‘do all we can to contribute to the change needed in society at this time’.)
None of this is limited to fee-paying schools either. Former private school pupil Soma Sara began sharing her experiences of rape culture via Instagram in June last year, the response to which prompted her to start the Everyone’s Invited campaign to address the issue in schools – a movement that has gathered momentum recently, receiving nearly 10,000 testimonies from ex-pupils at schools across the UK. ‘This is a universal problem that exists across the board in all of society,’ says Soma, 22. ‘There’s been a huge snowball effect, similar to what we saw with #MeToo: when one person comes forward, others feel empowered to do so.’
Soma believes that everyone is complicit to a degree in this culture. ‘That’s why our campaign is called “everyone’s invited”, because we need schools, parents, and the Government to challenge the entrenched sexism that exists in the fabric of our society.’ She says one of the easiest ways to do this is by simply talking and listening. With this in mind, change is already happening. ‘When I first started speaking about rape culture, no one knew what it meant, or even wanted to recognise its existence. Now, we have a moment where pupils are staging protests and our campaign is being covered in the national news.’
The sooner we realise the extent of the problem, the sooner we’ll invoke change. It’s not enough to just strengthen safeguarding, as the education regulator Ofsted has suggested, or blame the proliferation of porn, as one of the country’s most senior police officers has. The kind of change we need is one that means women don’t have to text each other when they get home or remember their school days as traumatic. That’s the kind of change I’d like to see. Olivia Petter is a lifestyle writer at ‘The Independent’.