School skirt-length policies ‘encourage victim blaming’

BANNING short skirts because they are a “distraction” to male pupils and staff can be seen as victim blaming, teachers have been told.

Amelia Jenkinson, head of the School of Sexuality Education charity, told teachers at a conference run by the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) that such policies risk undermining messaging about “bodily autonomy and consent”.

She said they have encountered examples of schools framing their policies on skirt lengths as being a distraction to “boys and male staff”. Over the past three years, several schools have banned skirts on the grounds of modesty. Caerphilly-based St Martin’s School wrote in an email to parents in June last year that both pupils and staff must wear tailored trousers or shorts after “frequent” complaints from the local area that their skirts are “far too revealing”.

And pupils at Appleton Academy in Wyke, West Yorkshire, were also made to wear trousers in July 2019 to prevent girls from wearing “inappropriate length” skirts.

At the ASCL conference Ms Jenkinson also dealt with the issue of pupils sending each other explicit pictures and video. She said teachers should not tell teenagers to stop sending such content as abstinence-based approaches in sex education classes “don’t work”.

Pupils as young as 14 years old will “inevitably” share explicit images of one another, she said and recommended teachers be “non-judgemental” towards their students. She said: “This idea of ‘Don’t send nudes – you would be really silly to do it’ can actually prevent reporting as well because there is a fear of getting into trouble.

“With nudes as well there is often that risk of kind of victim blaming the person who has sent the image in the first place when there has often been a choice of someone else to share that picture on without that person’s consent.”

Asked how parents might react to hearing this advice, she said: “The approach that we would take is to ensure that young people definitely know the law.”

It is illegal for someone under the age of 18 to send a naked image of themselves via text or social media.

A survey of 557 young people, presented by Ms Jenkinson during the workshop on sexual violence, found that 37 per cent of girls and 27 per cent boys said they had received unwanted sexual images. And 41 per cent of girls had been asked to send a sexual image compared with 17.5 per cent of boys.

A report from ASCL in December 2021 showed that just over half of young people surveyed did nothing when they received unwanted sexual images.

The study involved 480 young people from across the UK, with 51 per cent of those who had received unwanted sexual content online or had their image shared without their consent reporting that they did nothing.