There is an epidemic of violence within our schools and Our Schools Now exists to combat it.
Every study shows girls and young women to be experiencing public sexual harassment (or PSH for short) en masse. There are such high rates of it with so little done to prevent it, we believe it’s normalised within society. As schools are a microcosm of society, they have become a breeding ground for unchecked attitudes and toxic behaviour towards girls and marginalised genders. Crucial to our project are the statistics around reporting within schools. The Estyn 2021 report We Don’t Tell Our Teachers revealed, within Wales, 46% of pupils wouldn’t even think to report an incident of PSH to their teachers. While Our Streets Now research has found 76% of pupils don’t feel confident reporting it to their schools. There is most definitely a combination of reasons for this, from lack of awareness that PSH is what they’re experiencing, to believing their teachers will only trivialize the issue anyway. We maintain the best strategy to eradicating a culture of PSH within your school is to have a whole-school approach to it. From specific safeguarding policies to curriculum lessons to extra curricular activities; the only way to redefine your school’s approach to dealing with PSH is to tackle it head on.
The question we get asked often is, why bother? This is just how it is! Nothing can change it so what’s the point in trying?
We’re a team of people who know experiencing harassment is, depressingly, a daily occurrence for girls and young women. We all have personal experiences of PSH ourselves and understand how widespread and insidious it is. But we also believe passionately in the power of young people to change society and our campaign exists in order to support and educate people on how they can achieve that.
So, why bother? We bother because we believe in a world where pupils can attend their learning environment without a fear of being harassed. And we will keep on supporting schools to tackle this issue until things change.