Teachers and sexual harassment

Written by David Fletcher 31 May 2018
Teachers and sexual harassment

For newly-qualified teacher Maya, sexual harassment started in her first week at a prestigious London state secondary school with a culture of misogyny thinly veiled as banter. Senior colleagues made inappropriate comments about her body, and she and her female colleagues experienced a barrage of abuse from male students. Many times over, female staff who reported problems saw no action taken. Maya’s close friend had her phone stolen by children, who rang her father saying, ‘We’re going to rape your daughter outside school.’ She wasn’t supported by the school at all. A year later Maya left the school, and soon afterwards she left teaching altogether. A recent study of over 1,200 female teachers by a teachers’ union revealed that one in five has been sexually harassed at school by a colleague, manager, parent or pupil. Nearly a third of these were subjected to unwanted touching, two-thirds to inappropriate comments, and over half to inappropriate sexual remarks.

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