Schools ‘need more help’ to tackle rising number of sexual assaults by pupils
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Charities say better guidance is needed over increasing number of sexual assaults in UK primary schools. Schools must be given clearer guidance on how to handle peer-on-peer sexual abuse among pupils, charities have demanded. Rape Crisis and other charities wrote to England’s education secretary Bridget Phillipson and Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, last week, calling on the government to step in with clearer statutory guidance on how schools in England and Wales should address sexual violence when both the victim and the alleged perpetrator are pupils.
The letter said many victims were “failed” and “retraumatised” by schools, which often interpreted the police not pursuing a conviction as “cause to simply go back to normal”. The charities warn that peer-on-peer abuse is increasingly widespread and is affecting younger children, including in primary schools, in part due to the prevalence of online pornography. They believe serious assaults are being mischaracterised by some schools as “exploratory play” or “age-related exploration”.
An inquiry by MPs in 2016 found that 600 rapes had been reported in schools over a three-year period. In 2021, the campaign group Everyone’s Invited collected thousands of testimonies of abuse in UK schools, while the same year Ofsted said that sexual harassment had now become such a routine part of school life that schoolchildren often didn’t bother reporting it.
Ciara Bergman, chief executive of Rape Crisis, said: “It needs to be made clear that children who have been sexually assaulted or abused at school are entitled to a supportive response from their school, irrespective of any criminal justice processes.”.
