The moment you leave your home the boys treat you as fair game

The macho classroom culture created by male pupils can have a devastating effect on teenage girls.

- David Cohen

DO YOU as teenage girls feel safe walking around in London? This was the question put in a workshop to eight Year 9 and Year 10 girls, aged 13 to 15, who go to school in south London — and the responses were immediate and forceful.

“Sexual harassment is a daily occurrence for me,” one girl said. “Boys say weird things that make you feel very uncomfortable,” a second girl added. “This guy in my year who I don’t even fancy had this thing about how he wanted to sleep with me and he told everyone he had a dream about having sex with me, and now I don’t ever want to be in the same room as him.”

A third girl said: “One boy told me, ‘when we’re in bed, I’m going to do this and this to you’. It’s not even a guy I like. It was his way of intimidating me. Boys are getting into porn way too young and talk to us in ways that are completely objectifying and hyper-sexualised.”

A fourth girl said: “We get random guys coming up asking for our Chat [Snapchat], we get rated for our looks, we get comments on how we dress. And if we push back, we get told ‘oh, don’t be so angry, it must be your time of the month’.”

The impact of misogynist influencer Andrew Tate on boys in their school has been “horrendous”, the girls agreed. One girl said: “When boys want to shut us up, they use Tate and say things like ‘get back to the kitchen, you belong in the bedroom, your job is just to make babies’.”