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20 minute read | DSLs and Safeguarding Teams |
In the wake of the media attention from Everyone’s Invited the Ofsted Review of Sexual Abuse in schools and colleges shone a light on an area that young people, their advocates, researchers, the regulator itself and the Department for Education have been highlighting for several years: sexual abuse and harassment, particularly of girls and minority groups, has become normalised in our society. We welcome the attention given to this area and the strong action focus being brought by both Government and the regulators.
It is one thing to highlight an issue, quite another to tackle it. Sexual abuse and an objectification culture are two complicated areas that require thought and care to address. The change required here is cross-cutting, societal and cannot be accomplished within one area/provision in a young person’s life.
Keeping Children Safe in Education now requires schools and colleges to include “a statement which makes clear there should be a zero-tolerance approach to abuse” (para 145) in their child protection policies. This article seeks to clarify how settings might meet this duty and avoid an arbitrary response which may in practice increase the barriers to disclosure and risks to young people. Such a response would risk undermining the work to date on exclusions, minimises the impact of sexual abuse to a catch-phrase and most importantly risks increasing the pressures on young people who may have been harmed.
The need for change
We certainly need a paradigm shift. In their damning report Ofsted highlighted a 'normalised' culture of sexual assault and sexual harassment where students tell us staff do not know the reality of their lives. They found senior leaders consistently under-estimated the size of the issue in their setting - not recognising the problem or downplaying reports. Around 9 in 10 girls & young women said sexist name calling and being sent unwanted explicit pictures or videos happened ‘a lot’ or ‘sometimes'. Boys talk about whose ‘nudes’ they have and share them among themselves like a ‘collection game’, typically on platforms like WhatsApp or Snapchat. Such behaviours exist in a national culture of the sexualisation of women and girls, high levels of domestic abuse and where the majority of men are reported to access pornographic sites.
Young people don't report their concerns because:
- they are not seen as abnormal;
- of the impact on their reputation;
- they may be socially ostracised;
- they fear Police intervention;
- they don't know what will happen next.
The report recommends:
- Development of a culture that recognises and addresses all kinds of sexual harassment.
- Proper sequencing of the RSHE curriculum with high quality teacher training.
- Improved engagement between interagency partners and schools, in particular around Police intervention or when there is no prosecution.
- Routine record keeping and analysis to observe trends and patterns.
- Tightening up of the forthcoming Online Safety Bill.
- A guide for young people on what happens if they talk to staff.
- A national campaign on sexual harassment and abuse.
- A more robust approach to inspection of these issues, in particular ensuring they follow up where schools report no incidences of sexual harassment.
On a setting by setting basis we should ensure we:
- assume it is happening here and plan accordingly.
- whole school/college approach to developing a safeguarding culture.
- staff model respectful behaviour.
- children and young people are clear about acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, as are staff.
- people are confident to ask for help.
- systems are in place and they are well promoted, easily understood and easily accessible so that children can report abuse.
- carefully planned and implemented RSHE curriculum.
- a behavioural approach with sanctions & interventions for poor behaviour.
- support for learners who need it, including those who are harming others.
- training & clear expectation for staff and governors.
- listen to pupil voice.
- provide protected time for DSLs to engage with local safeguarding partners.
- all follow the guidance in Keeping Children Safe in Education.
It is interesting that the report comments on children and young people's wider experience online and in social settings outside of education while the report was titled sexual abuse in schools & colleges. Our education settings, rightly or wrongly, are being held accountable for a problem that extends across society and with a dearth of other agencies well-placed to support young people at an early stage. Even so, there are many areas where schools and colleges have been found wanting, young people's experience in many situations is desperate and we will all want to improve. Culture development is not something done to societies and schools and colleges are well-placed with committed staff who can enlist the support of young people as a group in the development of safe spaces and develop the confidence to hold each other to account.
A history of intolerance
Zero tolerance has its roots in populist, Republican measures to reduce crime in the eastern United States. The roots of the approach are sound: one broken window leads to another, an escalating decline resulting in squatting, dereliction and routinised drug taking. Zero tolerance however, was not a reparative, valuing process of keeping up investment. Instead, it is variously defined as a strict response which does not allow for discretion in the application of a sanction.
Such a strict definition allows little flexibility in responding to individual events and the people involved. We certainly need to reduce the acceptance of sexual abuse and harassment as routine and un-noteworthy. Responses to sexualised behaviour however require local discretion and an individually proportionate response to adapt to the needs of the young person who may have been harmed, the context and the needs of the young person who may have harmed. To do otherwise is to move from the complexity our young people recognise themselves and risk losing their trust:
Young people often felt that online sexual harassment takes place in a nuanced and complicated manner… Rejecting a simplistic reading of the issue, they discussed how it depended on how the person being targeted feels, who is involved, and the specific nature of the behaviour. For them, it depended on numerous intersecting factors such as the wider peer group context, family values, the dynamics of the school community and wider society. It was also dependent on the type of content, how a young person may react, the relationship between the victim and perpetrator, how well they knew each other, as well as the gender dynamics involved. The way in which the content was shared, the online platform and the size and make-up of the audience were all factors that were also seen as variable and significant. It is clear that every experience of online sexual harassment that young people face is unique and nuanced to them. It is equally apparent that online sexual harassment cannot be understood solely in the context of an individual ‘victim’ or an individual ‘perpetrator’, but as part of a wider social and cultural phenomenon.
Project DeSHAME report, 2017:25
The dynamics and efficacy of intervention cannot be reduced to two words. The Ofsted Review notes itself the risk of disproportionate responses in silencing the voices of young people:
Children and young people told us that sometimes the consequences of reporting abuse have been so ‘punitive’ for the perpetrator that, rather than acting as a ‘deterrent’ to harmful sexual behaviour, the result is to ‘put off’ children and young people from reporting incidents… if, in their view, the policy is ‘unfair’. These children and young people do not feel confident that staff would ‘deal with things sensitively’. Some said that school leaders are not as interested in their ‘personal well-being’ as they are in the ‘outward appearances’ of the school… This highlights the complexity for schools and multi-agency partnerships in managing peer-on-peer sexual harassment and sexual violence, including online. Children and young people need to feel confident that staff will respond in a proportionate and fair way to incidents.
Young people’s culture and agency
Addressing the issue starts with really hearing the voice of young people and understanding their experiences. The pressures of youth are many and varied and now fuelled by the catalyst and reach of social networking. It’s crucial we understand the barriers, especially for adolescents to talk about relationships and sex in general terms, and the greater challenge of opening up about abuse and harassment. This must be approached in a young person centric way – in particular identifying the difference between disclosure and discovery: The Marie Collins Foundation highlight the importance of helping the child who may have been abused along the journey, rather than as adults taking over and compounding the abuse by ‘doing to’ young people. Where there is disclosure, a call for help, the young person is further along this road. In the different situation where abuse is discovered, there is work to do with the young person to learn about their understanding of their experience and how we might proceed. Without such reflection we risk pushing the young person into protecting the young person who may have abused, undermining the opportunities to help and affecting their long term wellbeing. Sexual abuse and harassment between peers, especially adolescents, requires just as sensitive handling as other forms of abuse.
If we do not recognise and work with adolescent agency and developmental drivers, they can remain a potent force in adolescent vulnerabilities.
That Difficult Age, Research in Practice (p31)
This however is not just an issue for teenagers and those young people in secondary schools and further education. Values that are held by young people are not developed overnight, but the result of exposure to a myriad of people and cultures over time, with some views being set early on in childhood. All providers therefore need to be aware that sexual violence and sexual harassment occurs in primary schools and be working to support children from nursery upwards to understand rights and issues such as personal space. Throughout this insight, where we refer to young people we mean children and young people.
It is also only through young people that we can attempt to effect change within school and college settings. As adults we can hear about youth culture by getting alongside young people: a top down, paternalistic response is out of kilter with the developmental needs of adolescents and will not protect young people. It reinforces their perception that parents and adults know nothing of their world, risks creating a culture of silence through the fear of further response or reprisal in the school or wider community, moving the problem elsewhere, raising the exclusion rates and consequently the risks to those young people of exploitation (Children Missing Education, DfE).
The Ofsted Review found young people turn to one another at these difficult times. They are the victims, the survivors, the friends, the bystanders and sometimes the perpetrators. They may be several of these at once. Our schools and colleges are special places that help shape the development and culture of our society. They are good at education, although in this area need the confidence as well as the tools to engage young people in the discussion and work with them to develop their own safe cultures, in and out of school, online and offline, in the places they inhabit.
Hearing the voices of young people
In reading testimonies from young people and reflecting on the findings of the Ofsted review, girls repeatedly state their concerns were not taken seriously or were brushed under the carpet. We must take care in our responses to both take young people’s concerns seriously and ensure we do not exacerbate feelings of helplessness or loss of control. School and college leaders as figures of safety and authority in our settings are well-placed to ensure young people’s experiences are valued if they have the discretion to properly take young people’s feelings into account in their decisions about how best to respond.
A blanket ‘zero tolerance approach’ with no additional guidance or nuance could invite scenarios where young people feel a further loss of control. We must take this opportunity to take action that moves us away from scenarios where victims feel like they have been let down by systems that are supposed to keep them safe. It is important that schools do not set themselves up to fail by enshrining in policy something that may be interpreted in a way that cannot become reality: it is not feasible nor desirable for all young people who may have harmed to be excluded from our education settings. There needs to be careful judgement about when such a sanction is applied.
We must also consider that Keeping Children Safe in Education encourages schools to take the wishes and feelings of children into account when managing safeguarding reports – including in determining the action to take and the services to provide. Sexual harassment and sexual violence exist on a spectrum and the response should be proportionate to the type of abuse perpetrated. Exclusion or a managed move may be the only appropriate option in some cases, but having a rigid zero tolerance approach does not allow for flexibility or personalisation in the approach taken and in some circumstances may not be what is best for the child (or children) involved. We should take care in the development and application of our policies to ensure discussion and clarification around what we truly mean by ‘zero tolerance’ in developing an approach that is both compliant and genuinely makes a difference to the long-term prevalence of sexual harassment across society.
Having a zero toleration approach to the culture of normalised sexual violence and sexual harassment enables us to meaningfully respond to every incident of peer on peer sexual abuse. We open up opportunities to listen to children, learn from them about their experiences without them living in fear of repercussions and it allows greater scope for positive intervention to ensure that perpetrators learn from their actions and do not continue to exhibit inappropriate and/or harmful behaviour. We can establish an environment where every incident of sexual violence and sexual harassment is dealt with and is never tolerated, without treating every case in the same way.
Empowering school and college communities
Culture change is not effected by a change in policy. Our communities will take time to accept the need for change. It begins with dialogue. How you approach this will depend very much on your setting and model, but the following steps may be useful in framing an approach:
- Create safe spaces to have open discussions with staff and students about the Ofsted review, about the kind of behaviours that exist in your setting. Work towards an acceptance that peer on peer sexual violence and sexual abuse is likely to have happened and to be happening in your setting. Work to understand the blocks and barriers for young people to bring such behaviours to the attention of your staff. Consider how you might reach students who are particularly at risk, or those who may pose more of a risk to others. Who in your staff team might be best placed to reach out to all young people? How do you create safe spaces for discussion for girls, those with a learning difficulty and LGBTQ+ individuals and groups?
- Build on the strengths of your values and culture. Reflect on how these are perceived and reframe them to meet the requirements of the guidance, of zero tolerance of sexual abuse and harassment. Agree with staff and students how you would like to be.
- Focus on small but critical changes in behaviour towards this goal, agreed and understood by all students and staff. Consider changes in the language used between students and by staff, agree (rather than instruct) what is acceptable and unacceptable, and develop a clear mechanism for young people communicating a concern between themselves or to staff for the small changes you are looking to achieve. These provide a model and conduit for young people to know what to expect and build trust in us for them to raise more significant concerns.
- Ask children about their context and environment. Where do children feel safe? Are there any spaces or areas in school where they don’t feel safe? Where they feel uncomfortable, or try to avoid? Sometimes grounding questioning in the concrete can help to open up dialogue and discussions, particularly around difficult issues that children may not have recognised as abusive up to now.
- Review your progress. Look for measures that things have changed both in concrete data (evidence that people are using your mechanism, analysis of the use of your behavioural policy, a student survey) and through informal measures: how it feels, what students say. Reflect on these through the year as a senior leadership group, but also with students to demonstrate the progress they are making towards the institution you aspire to be and capture this evidence for parents, governors and the regulator.
By creating a fabric of shared expectations, a new normal, we support school leaders, teachers and young people themselves to identify unacceptable behaviour, to have shared expectations of mutual respect, to hold one another to account and, where necessary, to seek help from the adults around them and we can evidence this is so.
A framework to support progress
Such an open and considered approach creates discomfort and impetus for change. It reduces our capacity to tolerate inequality, unfairness, harassment and abuse. It builds the strength of young people to be part of the change and to drive this change in the inaccessible medium of online discussions and the local community.
It is however serious and intensive work. Consider how you will resource your approach and encourage the required personal investment by staff into the PSHE curriculum in particular to create a more effective and meaningful dialogue with students. Wider staff groups will need training and work to build confidence in engaging with young people about relationships and sex. The DSL will want to work with subject leads to ensure the safeguarding ramifications of the topics discussed and how it may impact on some of the vulnerable students is considered.
You will also want to reach out to local agencies to ensure you have a shared approach to dealing with concerns and providing the required support to young people who have been harmed or may have problematic or harmful sexual behaviour, particularly if the Police determine they can take no further action. You will want to feel confident in your support for young people who may have been harmed, skilled in your risk assessments and have connections to specialist support for complex cases.
Conclusions
In our analysis, however, this will not be enough. The issue of sexual harassment and sexual abuse is endemic in wider society, in our adult community. It is underpinned by continuing inequality for women, by the on-going threat of sexual violence towards women and girls, and by the disruptive and influential messages delivered to society through the huge increase in access to pornography. We do not fully understand the impact of pornography on young people, but studies show many are influenced in their aims and attitudes around sex. In wider society Ofcom report half the UK population visited an adult content site in September 2021. There is a need for a national discussion on how this taboo subject affects our culture and the development of our young people.
Schools are, fundamentally, places of education, with an opportunity to shape the way that young people interact with one another both now and in the future. However, sometimes all this action will be insufficient: there is no silver bullet. There are groups of young people resistant to change who will challenge a sense of mutual respect and will require targeted interagency work to create the safety, the understanding and the boundary to keep these young people safe and those around them. Here a considered multi-agency strategy to support, disrupt and create opportunities for change is likely to be most effective.
School leaders will sometimes need to make difficult decisions on the basis of risk and the safety of others. They need the support and the confidence of Government, the regulator and the public. To be truly effective they need the confidence of their students and to demonstrate their accountability to this group. These must be educated, caring, proportionate decisions based on sound values, the context of the situation and the individuals involved. For us the call from every testimony on Everyone’s Invited, from the Ofsted Review and from our school and college communities is to expect more of our staff and leaders, for them to take prompt, proportionate and effective action to directly address sexual violence and sexual harassment. It is not to provide directives that take away the tools they have, nor to leave schools with the sole responsibility for societal change: the Ofsted review is a call for action for society – what kind of world do we need to nurture our children and keep them safe?
So where does that leave Zero Tolerance, a requirement in every school and college policy in Keeping Children Safe in Education? In our view it is zero tolerance of a culture where sexual abuse is accepted as par for the course, of adults not taking action to get alongside young people and intervene, and of responding ineffectively to incidents that arise so that the young person or other young people continue to expect and experience abuse. Your policies must include clarity around sanctions and sanctions within the guidance to meet the requirements – it will take careful thought to write these in a way that changes the lives of children.
Where to get more help
- In developing a strategy – see our free members’ recording workshops on Responding to the Ofsted Challenge.
- In staff training – see our members’ materials on peer on peer abuse.
- In building the confidence of specific staff – see our training on consent.
- In responding to risk – see our training on harmful sexual behaviour.
- In responding to a concern – contact your local children’s services. Members can seek further advice from Safeguarding Network.
If you’re interested in our materials, membership is from just £99+VAT a term and provides access to free in-house training packages covering every area in Keeping Children Safe in Education.