School rape culture scandal has festered for decades
The clue was in the name. The Everyone’s Invited website has, in recent days, shone a light on the shocking rape culture that present and former pupils say exists at some of Britain’s leading independent schools.
Yet while accusations against establishments that charge up to £40,000 a year – including Westminster School, Latymer Upper, Dulwich College, Eton, St Paul’s and King’s College School, Wimbledon – were destined to make headlines, it was only a matter of time before the net widened to include the state sector.
Set up as a platform for anonymous claims of sexual harassment and assault, the website and its Instagram page, followed by 34,000 people, have been inundated with thousands of allegations, which its founder, Soma Sara, and her team upload by hand. Girls as young as nine have made claims about being held down and undressed at parties, forced into sexual acts and coerced into sending explicit photographs to older boys.
“After saying no many times to a boy, [he] coerced me into going upstairs with him and raped me while I cried and bled and repeatedly asked him to stop,” writes one girl who attends a fee-paying boarding school.
“The boys would have scorecards and get points for different sexual activities and different people they had got with,” says a former pupil at a private London school.
Ms Sara, 22, a former private school pupil and sex abuse survivor, set up the platform last summer.
“Rape culture is endemic,” she told The Sunday Telegraph. “It’s in all schools, all universities and all of society. All generations, young and old are invited. The title Everyone’s Invited really means what it says.”
“It’s not just private schools in London,” writes one user. “I was at a state school in the north where girls joining for Sixth Form were forced to do a striptease for the boys. They ranked us in order of how ‘good’ it was. I was ranked best and ‘reserved’ for the head boy. I was told that if I showed any interest in other boys, they’d send everyone the video of the striptease. The school knew but put it down to boys will be boys.”
An Instagram account set up for pupils of the London Oratory, a leading Roman Catholic state school, to share their testimonies has had a similar outpouring of accusations, painting a worrying picture of sexual abuse, harassment and humiliation that extends beyond fee-paying schools.
Daniel Wright, the school’s head teacher, is said to have written to pupils, parents and staff this week, informing them that he had spoken to pupils who had reported concerns. The school added: “It is completely unacceptable that anyone should be subject to sexual assault or harassment of any kind and we do not, and will not, tolerate it.”
There can be little doubt that the outpouring follows conversations around female safety prompted by the death of Sarah Everard. Girls and women have been emboldened to
‘Boys forced the new Sixth Form girls to do a striptease. I was ranked best and “reserved” for the head boy’
share their stories in a way not seen since the MeToo movement in 2018.
Among them are women who, as one mother put it on Twitter, “had hoped this wouldn’t be an issue for our daughter’s generation”.
This is a scandal that has been right under our noses for decades – and has only worsened with the rise of social media and online pornography, issues on which school safeguarding policies have been slow to keep up.
State schools are at least subject to Ofsted inspections and signed up the Safer Schools Partnership, but fee-paying schools are not, instead inspected by the Department of Education or the Independent Schools Council. The Metropolitan Police have now offered to send officers in to teach boys about consent.
Some have acted quickly, with Dulwich College in south London contacting police over allegations. In an open letter, Samuel Schulenburg, 19, a former pupil, accused the school of being a “breeding ground for sexual predators”. One testimony read: “I was held down and had my top and bra taken off by a group of Dulwich College boys who only gave my clothes back 10 minutes later as I cried and screamed.” Joe Spence, the headmaster, said the school was “acting and will act on any case where an individual pupil is named, passing cases to the police where there is an allegation of criminal behaviour”.
Yet on Friday he banned pupils from going to a demonstration against “rape culture”, warning they would face disciplinary action if they took part.
Girls at other schools including James Allen Girls School (Jags), the source of many allegations against Dulwich boys, have held protests.
All this has left parents worried. One mother with a son at Dulwich College and a daughter at Jags, said both sexes were being failed, with girls vulnerable to abuse and boys vulnerable to false accusations or being “demonised”.
Some appear to have reflected on their own behaviour. “I know a couple of boys who have gone back to girls from a few years ago and said: ‘What I did to you was not OK. I didn’t realise,’” Nia Michael-George, 15, a student at Streatham and Clapham Girls’ School told one newspaper last week.
On Everyone’s Invited, one boy wrote: “I’m at King’s College School and it disgusts me that we have competitions to have sex with the ugliest girl and everyone puts in a fiver. At the end of the year whoever has slept with the most people wins the ‘prize money’. I don’t know how to put an end to a huge tradition without being bullied for doing so.”