Of the many thousands of testimonies I’ve been sent about sexual abuse in schools, one in particular remains stuck inside my head. It’s from a teenager who shared with my charity, Everyone’s Invited, how, when she was ten, a fellow pupil said he was going to pay another boy £20 to rape her.
‘I didn’t know what rape meant but I was frightened,’ she wrote. ‘I didn’t tell anyone.’
Someone else, however, did. A boy overheard this awful conversation, which got reported to the female headteacher.
She responded by telling this confused little girl that these are the sort of things men say to women and, unfortunately, we have to accept that that’s just the way it is.
Like me, you’re probably wondering what was going through this headteacher’s mind when she said that. Was it her clumsy way of trying to prepare a young girl for her future life as a woman in a misogynistic world? Or was she simply shutting down a conversation she didn’t know how to have or a situation she didn’t know how to deal with?
We’ll never know. But what I am sure of is that this child’s testimony – perhaps less harrowing than others submitted via a submission form to Everyone’s Invited, but still deeply disturbing – encapsulates why the work we’ve been doing with secondary school children for the last three years now urgently needs aging down to primary school level.
I set up the website Everyone’s Invited in 2020 to record the experiences of teenagers at schools in the UK, eventually gathering more than 10,000 incidents of harassment and abuse that sparked a widespread scandal across both the private and state school sector.
But waiting until children are 13 to teach them how to challenge misogyny is clearly too late.
Soma Sara, who founded the website Everyone’s Invited in 2020 to record the experiences of teenagers at schools in the UK, is now exposing a wave of misogyny in primary schools, with more than 1,000 accounts submitted to the site
Girls aged four to 11 are being subjected to the worst of rape culture at primary school: sexist name-calling, harassment, molestation and even penetration (stock image)
Recently we published the names of 1,664 UK primary schools whose former pupils have anonymously shared with us their experiences of sexual harassment and assault.
We’re talking here about little girls aged between just four and 11 being exposed to the worst of rape culture: sexist name-calling, harassment, molestation and even penetration.
As well as this ten-year-old being told she would be raped, another told us she was only four when she was forcibly taken to a playground shed by a group of around 15 older boys and made to kiss one of them while the others blocked the door.
Two years later one of these same boys grabbed her by the hair before slamming her against a metal fence. ‘He told me I could only go back to playing if I kissed him,’ she wrote.
Other children told of being molested during lessons, of being slapped and choked in the playground, of being penetrated with sharp objects and of being called vile derogatory names.
One six-year-old was asked to have a threesome with two classmates. The mother of a five-year-old told us how a boy took her daughter’s glasses and said she couldn’t have them back until she took her knickers down. She said that when she reported this to the school, the headteacher insisted this was normal childhood curiosity.
But it surely wasn’t. This was no case of ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours’ – the boy was clearly coercing the girl into something she didn’t want to do.
Reading this avalanche of disturbing primary school testimonies has left me reeling. It’s hard to shake off such devastating stories. I feel deeply saddened by them all.
Soma began sharing on Instagram her own experiences of rape culture at school and university when she was 22 years old
Not least because of the sheer scale at which this is happening.
The list of schools, which covers the length and breadth of the country, equate to children at one in 12 UK primaries. Many will still be grappling with how to tie their own shoelaces, and yet are now also having to navigate the kind of misogynistic hatred that grown women find terrifying to comprehend.
At that age, many girls don’t have the language to even describe what’s been done to them. And so they silently carry their experiences, mired in shame.
Meanwhile the perpetrators are victims too – little boys who’ve been indoctrinated by an explosion in online misogyny against women, which they’re being exposed to at far younger ages than perhaps any of us previously let ourselves imagine.
Something has to change. And for all the demands being placed on the Government to ban mobile phones for under-16s and limit the flow of pornography into our homes, this problem is so big we all need to become part of the solution.
The most recent National Police Chief’s Council report shows there has been a 400 per cent increase in child sexual abuse and exploitation from 2013-2024 –and 52 per cent of alleged offenders in cases of sexual violence in primary schools are children themselves, compared to 33 per cent just a decade ago.
Some children may learn this sort of abhorrent behaviour from the adults they share space with in real life – but increasingly they learn it from the online world where they’re only ever a few misplaced clicks away from the sort of sexualised content that dehumanises us all.
And that’s where our collective attention now needs to be focused. Because that exposure to violent online pornography and the toxic alpha-influencers who speak about women in hateful ways, plays a huge part in how our girls are being treated by their peers.
It also informs what our young boys grow up believing true masculinity to be.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how many parental filters you’ve put on your wifi, or how firm you stand on not giving your child their own phone until they’re in their teens.
If just one kid in a class of eight-year-olds has unfettered use of a smartphone (and there’s always at least one), then every other child on their radar has access to whatever nastiness they seek or unwittingly find.
That includes being exposed to the poison spouted by the incel community – young men who consider themselves unable to attract women sexually, and typically hold views that are hostile towards women.
This is no longer fringe, but mainstream thinking, teaching young boys that women must be dominated, tamed and oppressed; that being emotional or vulnerable is to show unacceptable weakness.
Recently, all this has been addressed at teenage level in the powerful Netflix drama Adolescence.
This chilling depiction of radicalisation has sparked a national conversation about the dangers of young boys becoming enthralled by these toxic influencers. The Prime Minister has even said the four-part series should be shown in schools.
This is encouraging, but there’s a danger that once we run out of plaudits for Adolescence, and a new show grabs our collective attention, the conversation will end there.
We can’t let that happen; we must keep talking about the issues it has raised in order to bring about meaningful change.
I’ve already seen how that works with Everyone’s Invited. Five years ago, I began sharing on Instagram my own experiences of rape culture at school and university when I was 22 years old. After receiving hundreds of responses, I founded the website for survivors to share stories about misogyny and sexual harassment in schools.
It went viral, ultimately leading to an Ofsted review of safeguarding policies and experiences in schools. Everyone’s Invited is now a charity, of which I am CEO and founder.
Today, we send teams into secondary schools challenging everything from the casual sexist language being used by young boys, to the way things like groping, upskirting and misogynistic attitudes have become normalised elements of teenage life.
We help children to critically evaluate the online world so that when – not if – they stumble upon its horrors, they don’t immediately accept things like degrading, abusive porn as being normal.
Until now, 13 seemed the right point at which to intervene.
But over the last three years what started as a trickle of testimonies from primary schools has become a devastating outpouring.
So we’ve begun exploring how we can empower primary school teachers in what is a new arena for them – 80 per cent have admitted to us that they feel ill-equipped to address these difficult issues.
Most say they’re aware of pupils aged nine and younger already watching online pornography. And that they’ve witnessed misogynistic, violent, sexist language in the classroom and playground.
Educating young children requires talking to them about far more than the importance of boys being respectful to girls. We must also warn both sexes of the dangerous content they will inevitably find online.
There will, no doubt, be a pushback from older generations, who will find the idea of discussing porn, even in the most careful, age-appropriate way, with eight-year-olds repulsive. They’ll see it as an affront to children’s innocence.
Sadly, childhood innocence no longer exists in the way older people remember it, because of what the internet exposes them to long before they even get to secondary school.
Also, the buck doesn’t stop with primary school teachers.
Parents and grandparents have a huge role to play, beyond not being squeamish about the difficult conversations that must be had in school and at home.
Many see young people turning away from drugs and alcohol and think that means they’re living more wholesome lives. But what good is sobriety if exposure to violent pornography and women-hating influencers is poisoning their world in other, more pervasive ways?
Children are being exposed to harmful content online from an early age due to the prevalence of smart phones (stock image)
They want to believe that limiting children’s access to online culture is the answer, but that is utterly unrealistic. We live in a digital age; our children increasingly socialise, learn and do their homework online.
There isn’t going to be a digital retreat. How can there be when our smartphones have become our third arms?
Instead, adults need to venture deep into the online cultures that Generation Alpha – that’s anyone under 16 – are being exposed to.
That means downloading all the apps young children shouldn’t have accounts with but do. So, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat – you need to be literate in them all.
You need also to look at YouTube, and anything else your child might conceivably be viewing, so you can try to understand their world.
Because it’s not just porn and misogyny that is tainting their childhoods. Our research found that 62 per cent of girls have experienced shame about their bodies by the age of six and 69 per cent of boys by the age of nine.
Primary school age girls have beauty regimes and worry about not being pretty enough, thin enough or having too much body hair. Boys are suffering similarly as they obsess over their looks too.
All roads lead back to online culture here too.
But none of this is hopeless. When my story first blew up in the media, rape culture was a phrase always referred to with inverted commas. People didn’t want to believe it was real, or that it led to violence against women and girls.
Now, there’s no questioning that rape culture exists. Young people have a name now for the toxicity that impacts them horribly. They’re far better able to call it out.
With prudent, age-appropriate intervention, we can empower our children with the same knowledge, which will help them counter the violence, hate and misogynistic porn that is blighting their lives too.
But as the heartbreaking testimonies of all those primary school children has revealed, we must start it now and when they’re much younger than any of us – me included – ever wanted to believe.
* As told to Rachel Halliwell
For more information visit everyonesinvited.uk
