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Topic History of: Abuse at private schools - is this story believable?
Max. showing the last 5 posts - (Last post first)
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Jo |
Maybe some here will dismiss this as just modern "romance", but it seems like abuse to me.
Porn has corrupted our children – and we let it happen
Our offspring wander through the dank dungeon of the internet largely without supervision so we shouldn't be shocked at the damage it causes
I wish I could say that the scandal about a “rape culture” in private schools comes as a surprise. More than 10,000 “testimonies” by young women (and a few guys) who have experienced sexual abuse have been posted on the website Everyone’s Invited. The stories range from boys pressuring girls to send them nude pictures to truly repulsive acts of personal humiliation. Schools which feature in the rollcall of shame include eminent academic institutions like Dulwich College and Highgate.
Chief Constable Simon Bailey, who is heading a taskforce to investigate the allegations, has encouraged parents to report their own sons if they suspect them of sexual assault. Good luck with that.
Older readers may think that sexual harassment in schools is hardly new. But snogging behind the bike sheds and furtive gropings atop the pile of gym mats in the PE store look like a gentleman’s calling card on a silver salver in Jane Austen compared with today’s brutish couplings.
Eight years ago, I wrote a piece that many readers found deeply shocking. It came about after a friend’s daughter started at a mixed-sex boarding school. When the mother asked how she was getting on, the girl said: “OK, but you have to give the boys blow jobs or they get cross.” My startled friend protested that her darling 14-year-old did not have to do anything of the sort. “Oh, yes you do, Mummy,” the girl replied, “and you have to shave down there or the boys don’t like it.”
There was one graphic piece of the story that I withheld. Look away now if you’re at all queasy. As part of the initiation ceremony at the famous boarding school, the rugby team lined up between the goalposts and the new girls knelt down to service them. Equality between the sexes was working out well, wasn’t it?
I said back then that it was enough to unleash my inner Mary Whitehouse and I really meant it. The campaigner with the perm of steel was much mocked for being a prude, but Mrs Whitehouse wasn’t wrong about the corrupting influence of pornography. The kind of dirty mags that boys had to pluck up courage to buy from the top shelf of the newsagent when I was a teenager has been replaced by access-all-hours hardcore material online. Mobile phones only acted as rocket boosters to plunge the depths of depravity.
I remember my daughter’s bemusement when I queried the social nicety of receiving a picture of a boy’s penis before you’d actually met him. “Everyone does dick pics, Mum,” came the weary response.
My concern only grew when I was having dinner with a group of women and the conversation turned to how on earth we were supposed to raise sons and daughters who were capable of forming meaningful relationships in an age when kids had free access to the sewer of the internet.
Sue, a GP, said: “I’m afraid things are much worse than people suspect.” Sue had treated growing numbers of teenage girls with internal injuries caused by anal sex; not because her patient wanted it – on the contrary – but because a boy expected her to. The girls were deeply ashamed at presenting with incontinence. They had lied to their mums and felt they couldn’t confide in anyone else. When Sue questioned them further, they said they were humiliated by the experience, but they felt they couldn’t say no. Anal sex was standard among teenagers now, even though the girls knew that it hurt.
Sue worked in the leafy heart of Hampshire. The girls were often under the age of consent and from loving, stable homes. Just the sort of kids who, only two generations ago, would have been enjoying riding and ballet lessons, and still looking forward to their first kiss, not being coerced into violent sex by some kid who picked up his ideas about physical intimacy from a dogging video on his phone.
Pornography is ubiquitous; children are exposed to the nastiest imagery from a tender age. They don’t have to be looking for it - sickening pop-ups often just appear. I make no excuses for the boys who feature in gross anecdotes on Everyone’s Invited. I do notice that many of the revolting things they did to girls come straight out of the porn playbook. Like the Russian jerk who peed on his victim.
Just to cloud the already murky, malodorous waters, young girls have been warped by the same highly-sexualised culture. “You wouldn’t believe the pics some girls send you,” one kid at a boarding school told me. And not all boys subscribe to laddish culture and can be deeply respectful around potential girlfriends.
There are no easy answers here. The school in Australia which made boys stand up in assembly and apologise to the girls for all the rapes committed by their gender made the error of blaming innocent young males for circumstances which are largely beyond their control. My generation has allowed its offspring to wander through the dank dungeon of the internet largely unsupervised. What right do we have to take the moral high ground when they imitate the foul things they found there?
We could start by telling all our sons that pornography is not a primer for a relationship. And our daughters not to tolerate anything which hurts or disgusts them. Then erect an almighty paywall around internet porn and pray that impressionable minds don’t get polluted too young. |
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Green Man |
Wyot wrote:
Who says romance is dead Jo!?
When I was at school I was - yes full of hormonal fire - but also a hopeless romantic. This may have been because I read so much so young. I was desperate to save tragic Tess of the d'Urbervilles and fretted for poor Anna as soon as she met Vronsky...I suppose if I had instead grown up with sexting and hardcore porn I may have been a less sensitive boy... 
Mind you being not short of admirers myself I made up big style for my earlier romantic hesitations when I got to University 
Harold Robbins on steroids.  |
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Wyot |
Who says romance is dead Jo!?
When I was at school I was - yes full of hormonal fire - but also a hopeless romantic. This may have been because I read so much so young. I was desperate to save tragic Tess of the d'Urbervilles and fretted for poor Anna as soon as she met Vronsky...I suppose if I had instead grown up with sexting and hardcore porn I may have been a less sensitive boy...
Mind you being not short of admirers myself I made up big style for my earlier romantic hesitations when I got to University |
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Jo |
This article refers to evidence apart from anonymous accounts.
Why are girls calling out 'rape culture' at Britain’s top public schools?
As girls in London stage walkouts over abuse at the hands of male peers, concerns are growing that an institutional problem may be afoot
By Rosa Silverman ; Eleanor Steafel and Luke Mintz
This morning, a slew of red ribbons are being tied to the wrought iron gates of one of the most prestigious private schools in the country.
After yesterday’s walkout by girls at Highgate School in north London, those at James Allen's Girls School (JAGS) in Dulwich, a leafy enclave on the other side of the capital, are staging their own day-long demonstration against the so-called ‘rape culture’ they say lies at the heart of the public school system – each ribbon representing a testimony of sexual violence.
The protest comes in the wake of thousands of shocking allegations that have come to light from students, past and present, this month – painting a depressing portrait of sexual humiliation, harassment, abuse and even rape as a fixture of Britain’s private school experience.
Many of the country’s top independent institutions have been named on Everyone’s Invited, a website and 32,000 follower-strong Instagram page set up last year by former private schoolgirl and sexual abuse survivor Soma Sara, 22, as a platform for claims of sexual harassment – which have skyrocketed amid the conversation about female safety triggered by the death of Sarah Everard.
The alleged perpetrators aren’t named, but the establishments are, and although these problems aren’t exclusively the preserve of the independent sector, the number of allegations emerging about a string of Britain’s most prestigious schools raises uncomfortable questions: do these settings have a particular problem with rape culture? And if so, what has allowed it to flourish?
Last week, Ava Vakil published an open letter online about what she branded “the deep-rooted culture of misogyny” at King’s College School, Wimbledon – describing the £20,000 a year private school as a “hotbed of sexual violence,” and the label of a “King’s boy” having come to mean “a privileged, usually white, usually wealthy boy who engages in derogatory behaviour towards women.”
Vakil, now a second year Oxford University undergraduate, attended Wimbledon High School, an independent girls’ school that sits a 20-minute walk from King’s, and with whose pupils King’s boys frequently socialise. Speaking to The Telegraph over the phone, she doesn’t want to discuss her own personal experiences, but says “misogynistic behaviour” at King’s was “common knowledge” among her peers.
At the end of her two-page letter, addressed to the King’s headteacher, Andrew Halls, she included a further eight pages of anonymous testimonies gathered from current and former pupils of Wimbledon High, King’s and other local schools, accusing male pupils of threatening rape, circulating nude photos of girls without their knowledge in group chats, and violent and drunken sexual assaults.
“This is a culture problem,” says Vakil, a smart and articulate 19-year-old. “The attitude of entitlement and that lack of respect for women shows itself in a lot of different forms.”
Today’s protest at JAGS follows an open letter last Sunday by Samuel Schulenburg, 19, a former pupil at its £21,246-a-year brother school, Dulwich College, a mile down the road, accusing his alma mater of being a “breeding ground for sexual predators,” and detailing more than 100 anonymous accounts of “assault, revenge pornography and slut shaming... exacerbated by... young men who... laughed at stories of sexual violence”.
A current student at JAGS – some of whose pupils contributed anonymous testimonies to the letter, accusing Dulwich College boys of assault, harassment and sharing intimate photos online – told The Telegraph the toxic culture was “large scale.” Ahead of today’s protests, the girls had printed out screenshots of threatening, explicit messages sent to them by Dulwich College boys and pinned them up around their own school corridors.
“Seeing them collectively was so disturbing because we understood that to an extent we’ve been brainwashed, and the effects of the normalisation and the allowance of this behaviour,” she says, “making us think their abuse wasn’t valid unless it was rape.”
Dr Joe Spence, Master of Dulwich College, said the school was listening to feedback, in particular that from JAGS, and “condemns unreservedly” the behaviour and attitudes reported in the open letter. He added that they are “acting and will act on any case where an individual pupil is named, passing cases to the police where there is an allegation of criminal behaviour.”
One 48 year-old mother, who asked to remain anonymous, has a son at Dulwich College and a daughter at JAGS, and says both sexes are being failed, with rape allegations crippling boys who say they have been falsely accused, alongside a culture that leaves girls open to abuse.
She is anxious that teenage boys aren’t “demonised” as a result of the conversation now dominating headlines daily: “They’ve got porn, weed and booze, so what kind of behaviour can we expect when there’s not really a cogent, proper, sex-positive way of educating them?” she says.
James Allen's Girls School told The Telegraph: "The safeguarding of our pupils is our absolute priority. We are acting upon any disclosures brought to our attention, offering support to those students who come forward, and reporting to the relevant external authorities where appropriate."
Of course, derogatory, misogynistic and abusive behaviour towards girls predates smartphones – “I’ve had messages from women who went to Wimbledon High School 30 to 40 years ago, telling me this was the behaviour of King’s boys when they were there,” says Vakil – but it’s possible social media and the availability of online porn has left school safeguarding policies struggling to keep up with technology.
One 20-year-old former public school boy describes the sharing of explicit images via Snapchat as currency among classmates: “It was the cultural capital. Who was sexting who, that was your ranking... It very quickly just became the norm. It was almost like if you weren’t doing that it was weird.”
The schools themselves stand accused of not doing enough to teach consent or to punish students who are found to have carried out abusive behaviour.
“There seems to be this particular intersection between class and race privilege and I think at these schools boys are encouraged to view themselves as a cut above,” says Vakil. “Ultimately that can feed into this kind of behaviour. Because if you grow up thinking people like you aren’t held accountable for their actions that is absolutely going to affect the way you behave, [including] towards women.”
As Vakil notes in her letter, private schools produce pupils who then progress to positions of influence, perhaps disproportionately so.
“If these boys are growing up and entering the world in high level positions of extreme influence and power, it’s so important to make sure they don’t carry these attitudes with them, because the butterfly effect of that is just huge,” she says.
Steve Biddulph, a parenting expert and bestselling author of Raising Boys, wrote in The Telegraph last week: “Two groups in society do the worst job with raising boys – the wealthy and the very poor,” with some upper class families “outsourcing” the raising of their children.
He says: “It’s entirely possible for a boy from a well-off family to grow up with no men close to him, no-one connected to his inner world. A father can be an aloof, distracted or distant figure. No teachers at school relate to him on a deep or individual level. He becomes a herd animal, and the herd is made up of other deficient boys who have no moral compass. This is how rape culture arises.
“We are not raising proper human beings, but a kind of arrested permanent adolescents.”
There are signs, however, that the current moment could be a turning point. On Tuesday, Vakil had a constructive meeting with the King’s headteacher, Andrew Halls to discuss the contents of her letter and the school is conducting an independent review.
Halls told The Telegraph: “I am grateful to Ava for sharing these testimonies and for finding time to talk to me. These accounts are shocking, and we will not tolerate any form of abuse or discrimination... and we will act on what Ava has told us.”
“I was incredibly encouraged,” says Vakil. “They showed a willingness to listen and a commitment to make change. I am very happy they are beginning to acknowledge the scale of this problem and no longer attempting to deny the prevalence of this culture. Of course, this must be followed by action.”
In further evidence of positive action in south London today, the mother of the JAGS and Dulwich College siblings reports there will be a group of supportive boys “protesting alongside the girls.”
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Green Man |
There were a few dodgy teachers in my school.
The head caretaker also got a year 9 pupil pregnant via a rape
I just remember school just being unpleasant and depressing. |
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