All children have the right to be safe at school. But increasingly, students – mostly girls – are reporting routine sexual harassment and abuse by male students.
These everyday sexual affronts include accounts of touching, rape threats, sexist taunting, body shaming, sexual moaning, gestures, and other forms of sexual intimidation, sexual abuse and increasingly Image Based Sexual Abuse including AI-generated deepfakes.
Reports of sexual harassment of female teachers by male students are also on the rise as documented in the ‘Sexual Harassment of Teachers’ [SHOT] report based on a survey of 1000 teachers and published by Collective Shout and Maggie Dent.
Child sexual abuse by known adolescents is now identified as the single most common category of sexual offending against children. Adolescent males have previously been identified as the cohort with the highest rate of sexual offending. Pornography is acknowledged as a driver of attitudes fuelling this abuse.
Melinda will share what girls and female teachers across the country have told her, along with the findings of the SHOT report which she co-edited and propose recommendations.
Melinda is an author, speaker, media commentator, and advocate for young people. She is best known for her work addressing sexualisation, objectification, harms of pornography, sexual exploitation, trafficking and violence against women.
