The next generation of rapists is in your classroom now

(This article is written especially for all you educationalists out there)

Yes, that’s a provocative title to this article and by intent. But don’t take my word for it, go to everyonesinvited.uk and read the testimonies — if you can bear to. Or better still, stop and think for a moment where the future murderers, rapists, torturers and abusers are right now. Yes, in schools, being taught by teachers like you and I.

We educationalists have become skilled at getting young people to pass exams but we’re miserable failures at producing healthy, well-balanced, non-violent, and non-aggressive human beings. We are especially pathetic at getting males to become well-adjusted individuals.

This is not a new problem, it goes back a long way, but now has never been a better time to critically examine what our schools and education systems are actually for.

This critical scrutiny on male identity has been building up at least since the 1980s, but it’s taken MeToo and BLM movements, fuelled by social media, to get us to this point. And what a point we are at.

This latest swell against toxic masculinity started just a week ago (21st March, 2021) with a report in The Sunday Times about Dulwich College being a “breeding ground for sexual predators”. An open letter by former Dulwich schoolboy, Samuel Schulenberg, 19, paints a horrifying picture of ‘assault, revenge porn, slut shaming, and young men who laughed at stories of sexual violence.”

In short, a violent male dominated rape culture festering in the hallowed halls of one of England’s ‘great schools’.

I know, a lot of state school teachers would have thought, ‘oh, well, its Dulwich, just another bunch of over-privileged males with too much testosterone and money and too little intelligence and empathy.’

Yes, fair comment.

Except for the fact that just seven days later, and The Guardian is reporting that over 100 UK state and private schools have now been named on this same website, schools from the grandest to the not-so-grand.

This being the age of social media political platforming, it didn’t take long for the story to go global, quickly getting converted into a website for ‘every brave survivor [of rape and sexual harassment in schools] to share their story’ anonymously on everyonesinvited.uk.

At time of writing, the catalogue of anonymous testimonials of rape and pretty much every other horrendous act of male sexual violence against females, stands at 5,800. And its increasing by the hour.

What is being exposed is a ‘rape culture’ flourishing across UK education.

But do you seriously imagine this problem is confined to UK schools? No chance. It is in your school too. Well, assume it is until you prove otherwise.

This is not a problem of class, privilege, wealth, poverty, nationality, religion, race or ethnicity.

It is a problem of masculinity — toxic masculinity. And Toxic masculinity exists everywhere.

That this new movement comes at precisely the time of a UK national conversation over male behaviour sparked by the murder of Sarah Everard, only makes it more urgent and necessary that we educationalists do not try and diminish the problem we are being confronted with.

We must face up to a very unpleasant truth, which is that the next generation of murderers, abusers, rapists and torturers of women and girls are sitting in our classrooms right now.

But we should not be surprised. A report by End Violence Against Women (2016) found “endemic levels of sexual violence and harassment in schools’, with 5,500 sexual offences, including 600 rapes, reported to the British police between 2012 and 2015.

Make no mistake, the EveryonesInvited (and think about what that title is referring to), Movement is likely to be the next big social wave sweeping away any comfortable illusions within global society. First, MeToo, then BLM, now EI.

Only this time, the illusion that is getting swept away is the innocence of our children.

If you imagine that your school, perhaps a rather elitist international establishment located well away from the social and cultural poverty which now marks the UK, is somehow not part of this distressing story, think again.

Just be prepared for what is coming because like MeToo and BLM, no school can claim to be protecting its students from the effects of toxic male behaviour. How do we know this? Because so few schools even bother to try.

There are schools bravely going down this road, delivering ‘healthy relationships workshops’ at primary level and above, but is your school?

How many of your male students imagine, even at primary level, that, as one student put it; “men fuck, women get fucked”?

How many of your male primary students understand the word ‘consent’?

How many believe that females are weaker than males?

How many believe sharing sex images on a phone is ‘normal behaviour’?

How many times has any adult talked to your children, boys and girls, about gender relationships, gender identities?

How many of your students, even at primary level, are learning about sex relationships via pornhub?

Schools have, quite rightly, over the past few years focused a lot of energy, time, money and attention on safeguarding. But as I write in a forthcoming article in the new International Schools Network:

One of the most important and much needed changes to occur in independent and international schooling over the past five years has been the introduction of safeguarding and child protection — ensuring a school has the proper systems and procedures in place to protect students both physically and online.

So why is it then that over the past 12 months we have witnessed a growing chorus of global protests against perceived injustices, effectively abuses against students, in many of those very same schools?

From accusations of racism and homophobia, to protests against the dominance of ‘whiteness’ in management, few of these highly elitist schools can claim to be fully functioning, protecting, fully ‘safe’ institutions.

If female pupils are being sexually harassed, raped, violated, slut shamed, subjected to revenge porn, and if those same male perpetrators imagine that this is all okay, good fun even, because “this is what lads do”, then where is the safeguarding in that?

And don’t imagine that this sexual harassment ‘problem’ is separate to the homophobia in schools problem or the racism in schools problem. They are all part of the same problem.

I know, school leaders have over the past few decades been conditioned to think that results = success. And in the private education sector especially, how many school owners think otherwise? Not many.

But this new anti-male violence global movement is telling us all something rather different. It is saying very clearly that if we educationalists continue to imagine that our job is simply to get children to pass exams then we may as well quit now, because we are doing more harm than good.

I don’t expect this article to have any impact, but I know for sure that every thinking and reflective educationalist, from London to Hong Kong, Mexico City to Moscow, will have to now realise a new reality whether they wish to or not.

Best not to wait until the police come knocking on your door, asking questions about rape and sexual violence in your school. Start addressing this issue of toxic male behaviour and toxic gender and sexual relationships, now, today.

This item needs to be on the next agenda of your school’s senior management meeting, and every department meeting.

And here are the questions that need to be answered by every educationalist in your school at every upcoming meeting:

1. Do you recognise this problem?

2. Are you happy with it?

3. What do you intend to do about it?

(Article originally published in Educational Digest International, 28th March, 2021)