Parents need to educate their sons, not shop them for wolf-whistling

Daniel Hambury
Melanie McDonagh29 March 2021
WEST END FINAL

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What are the chances, do you reckon, that parents are going to take up the suggestion that they march their son to the nearest police station if it turns out they’ve been harassing girls from school? That’s a response from Chief Constable Simon Bailey to the phenomenon that is the Everyone’s Invited website and its allegations about sexual intimidation of schoolgirls.

But it’s starting at the wrong end of the problem. If you’re talking about both parties — the girl would be brought in too, remember (perhaps she should be consulted?) — being hauled into the local station, then an awful lot has gone wrong beforehand. The difficult bit of this problem isn’t about bringing in the police; it’s about trying to create an environment at school where the sexes can be friends rather than antagonists, predators or victims. When I put Mr Bailey’s suggestion to the very sane head of one school that takes girls at sixth form, his response was: “I think parents should be educating their sons in preference to shopping them.”

The genius element of the Everyone’s Invited website was that originally it grouped allegations by girls against boys under their individual schools. Although it has now stopped naming the schools, this brought it instant attention. If it had been a generic site that enabled girls to sound off about problem boys, it would certainly have caught everyone’s attention, but by identifying boys by the school they attend, it’s turned the social problem of sexual harassment into an acute embarrassment to the heads of, particularly, private schools. By naming Latymer Upper, Highgate, Westminster and Dulwich, it’s not doing the school brand any favours. And it’s very rough on the pupils who are innocent of any improper behaviour. These, remember, are allegations.

Now state schools have joined this club no one wants to be a member of…there are 75 of them, in addition to 100 private schools, named on the site and you can expect more. Mr Bailey thinks this may be the education sector’s “MeToo” moment and that a “culture of misogyny and sexual harassment” is unchallenged in some schools.

My daughter, who’s 14, is an enthusiast for Everyone’s Invited; she follows it all the time because, she says, friends of hers have been intimidated by boys from neighbouring schools. My son, 17, is at a state school that takes girls in at sixth form which has now been named on the site. He can hardly bear to talk about it, but says his school has tried to bring together boys, girls and teachers at meetings to discuss the issues, but that has shown up differences in approach. His flippant suggestion that the school reconsider having girls at all didn’t go down well. But funnily enough, my daughter says she feels safer at her all-girls school. An unintended effect of Everyone’s Invited may be to give single sex schools a fillip.

The wrong way to go would be to adopt the silly suggestion of an assistant Met commissioner, Louisa Rolfe, who has urged girls to report all instances of harassment to police, including wolf whistling and cat-calling, if it makes them uncomfortable. Reporting a boy for wolf whistling would be to criminalise cheek and impudence. It would also diminish the seriousness of some of the other cases.

I discussed the problem with the head of the Catholic school I mentioned earlier. He had no doubt about what underpinned the new predatory culture: “Internet pornography… it’s just dehumanising”, he said. “And then there’s social media, which really does change the way young people interact”. Both are difficult for parents to monitor; I’d need my children’s help to see what they’re doing online.

But what this head also said is worth considering. He thinks it’s important that the school has a genuine ethos — “we talk about human dignity, and we mean it” — but that they try to apply it to situations children find themselves in. “If we really teach it properly you won’t get boys pressuring girls into sex, and you won’t get girls sharing pictures of themselves naked.” This year it’ll be obligatory for schools to teach Sex and Relationships Education — “and the emphasis has to be on relationships”.

Meanwhile, his school has a person in every form that pupils can go to to talk about problems outside as well as inside school, part of a general culture of openness. That’s a structural solution that every school could adopt.

But we’re deluding ourselves if we think it’s a problem just for schools. It’s over to parents. To us.

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