Teachers’ upskirt hell

Children ‘as young as 11’ target staff and pupils

CHILDREN as young as 11 are ‘upskirting’ pupils and teachers in schools and sharing the images online, union leaders warn.

Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, said that the number of victims had risen in recent years.

Perpetrators use their phones to take photos up the skirts of women and girls, who often realise only when the image is shared around the school. Mrs Keates said the problem is often made worse by many new schools having ‘open’ spiral staircases.

Her comments at the union’s Belfast conference this weekend come after pupil Timothy Boomer, now 18, was found guilty of outraging public decency in february in the first case of its kind – after he ‘upskirted’ two NASUWT members in Northern Ireland.

following a campaign, upskirting became a criminal offence in England and Wales on April 12, while in Scotland this was already the case. The union is calling for heads to force children to hand in mobile phones on arrival at school to clamp down on this ‘vile form of objectification of women’.

Mrs Keates said of the victims: ‘The thing that they find most difficult is that quite often they don’t know that this has happened, the video has been out there, and then it is drawn to their attention. I have had members whose videos have suddenly come to light and it has been doing the rounds in the school for some time. It is a particularly vile form of objectification of women.’

The NASUWT has seen an ‘enormous growth’ in the number of women making contact about such issues. In some cases, images are uploaded to ‘upskirting’ sites.

Mrs Keates said perpetrators were ‘of all ages’ but some have been 14 or even ‘as young as 11’. In addition, the union has seen a rising number of cases of pupils taking teachers’ images from official websites and superimposing their faces on to porn. ‘of course it doesn’t just go to the school community, once it’s up on the internet,’ Mrs Keates said.

‘All sorts of people are seeing it. We’ve had members seriously ill as a result of the stress of knowing that image is out there.’

She said in many cases teachers who have been victims of sexual harassment are being blamed by heads, and asked if they ‘provoked it’ or whether it was ‘just banter’. ‘What a lot of women feel, particularly when they raise some of these issues, is that they’re not taken seriously,’ she said.

Mrs Keates added that more concern could also be taken over building design. ‘It’s just simple things like when schools are being rebuilt, putting the open stairs up, that kind of thing, that people don’t think about when they are doing these wonderful designs on buildings. Things like that can be an invasion of privacy,’ she said.