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Start Date
25-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
25-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Since early 2021 the Instagram account and campaign Everyone’s Invited has collected over 54,000 testimonials about sexual harassment and abuse in UK schools. Extensive media coverage focused on sexual harassment as common across independent and elite schooling and universities, with over 3000 institutions ‘outed’ as complicit with sexual violence. Through a mixed methods study of five schools across England amidst this national backdrop, we carried out interviews, focus groups, and questionnaires with over 500 students. We witnessed how schools were involved in a live terrain of struggle to address a rising tide of reports in their environments, while trying to implement a slew of new safeguarding pressures stemming from Ofsted (2021), amidst already difficult conditions arising from the pandemic – including multiple lockdowns, remote learning, staff, and student mental health crises, and more.
Our research found that @Everyone’sInvited and the issues it raised were actively discussed in all the school settings. Four of the five schools were on the Everyone’s Invited ‘list’; girls at the fifth school told us the school should be on the list. In this paper, we will outline and document student accounts of sexual harassment, and pinpoint some of the main barriers to effectively addressing these issues in current school contexts. This includes the central role of social media in this awareness raising; the backlashes that girls experienced when openly expressing feminist views or challenging ‘lad culture’ and sexism at school; and the masculinity politics (Kimmel, 2013) in an all-boys school where we witnessed fear about the rising political tide, heightened defensiveness in claims about #NotAllMen, and an inability for some boys to understand how they could be a part of feminist political change. In our conclusions we outline practical strategies and resources to tackle every day and digitized sexual violence and feminist activist tools to promote consciousness raising in gender inclusive ways that we have developed with our charitable partner School of Sexuality Education.
@everyone’sinvited - #MeToo in British Schools: Young people’s changing understandings of sexual harassment at school and online
Since early 2021 the Instagram account and campaign Everyone’s Invited has collected over 54,000 testimonials about sexual harassment and abuse in UK schools. Extensive media coverage focused on sexual harassment as common across independent and elite schooling and universities, with over 3000 institutions ‘outed’ as complicit with sexual violence. Through a mixed methods study of five schools across England amidst this national backdrop, we carried out interviews, focus groups, and questionnaires with over 500 students. We witnessed how schools were involved in a live terrain of struggle to address a rising tide of reports in their environments, while trying to implement a slew of new safeguarding pressures stemming from Ofsted (2021), amidst already difficult conditions arising from the pandemic – including multiple lockdowns, remote learning, staff, and student mental health crises, and more.
Our research found that @Everyone’sInvited and the issues it raised were actively discussed in all the school settings. Four of the five schools were on the Everyone’s Invited ‘list’; girls at the fifth school told us the school should be on the list. In this paper, we will outline and document student accounts of sexual harassment, and pinpoint some of the main barriers to effectively addressing these issues in current school contexts. This includes the central role of social media in this awareness raising; the backlashes that girls experienced when openly expressing feminist views or challenging ‘lad culture’ and sexism at school; and the masculinity politics (Kimmel, 2013) in an all-boys school where we witnessed fear about the rising political tide, heightened defensiveness in claims about #NotAllMen, and an inability for some boys to understand how they could be a part of feminist political change. In our conclusions we outline practical strategies and resources to tackle every day and digitized sexual violence and feminist activist tools to promote consciousness raising in gender inclusive ways that we have developed with our charitable partner School of Sexuality Education.
Bio
Jessica Ringrose is Professor of the Sociology of Gender and Education at University College London, UK. She is an expert in diversity, equity and social justice in education; digital gender and sexual cultures & feminist theories and qualitative methodologies. She is author of over 90 journal articles and book chapters, editor of 5 special issues of journals and editor/author of 6 books. In 2020 in recognition of her research, advocacy and public engagement, she was awarded the Distinguished Contributions to Gender Equity in Education Research Award, from the American Educational Research Association.
Tanya Horeck is Associate Professor in Film, Media and Culture at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. Tanya Horeck is an internationally recognized expert on sexual violence in popular film, television & digital culture. She has written and edited four books and her essays have appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals including Screen, Crime, Media & Culture: An International Journal, Feminist Media Studies and Television & New Media. She has served as a public policy consultant on sexual violence and digital media and her work is taught on universities across North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. In response to the growing problem of image-based sexual abuse, Horeck (in conjunction with the charity School of Sexuality Education) has produced digital resources of ‘teachable moments’ designed to help sex education facilitators and teachers instruct young people on how to stay safe online.
Kaitlynn Mendes is Associate Professor of Sociology at Western University, Canada. Her research, engagement and knowledge mobilization activities tackle urgent theoretical and empirical problems around gender and inequality, such as how digital technologies shape, disrupt, and transform the gendered nature of political participation, and how existing legal and educational policies are failing to address the rise of trolling, harassment and image based abuse amongst young people. She has authored 3 monographs, 2 edited collections, 1 policy document, and 50 outputs in top-tier journals or important edited collections and has delivered nearly 50 international keynotes and/or invited addresses on the topics of feminism, activism, rape culture and social media.