How we improve safety for women and girls in educational settings across Scotland is a good question and one that we need to answer urgently as a country because every day that we leave this unanswered, the risk to safety remains – and in some respects is intensifying – for the more than 80% of teachers and support staff in our schools, and at least half of the school population who are girls.
The patriarchal architecture of modern society enables and perpetuates – and publicly so in politics, and in the media and social media – the hateful attitudes and behaviours towards women and girls that we see on our screens, smartphones and newspaper columns every single day.
Tweets, snapchats, Tik-Toks, TV programmes, newspaper headlines – you name the medium, the misogyny is plain to see. Misogynistic messages, often telegraphed by the far-right, are increasingly seeping into the mainstream and into our classrooms. This means that the girls and women in our schools, individually and collectively, are at risk of humiliation, fear, anxiety and low self-esteem.
The cumulative impact of the daily exposure to misogyny is harmful to mental health, amounting to a health and safety at work issue for women staff, and a safety and wellbeing issue for students who are girls.
The cumulative impact of the daily exposure to misogyny is harmful to mental health
And we know that the risks don’t stop at ‘casualised misogyny’ – aggression and even physical violence that’s rooted in misogyny, are on the rise in our schools – unwanted touching, groping…worse.
In the second half of 2023, the EIS conducted a survey of our school branches to gather further evidence to add to the growing body of anecdotal evidence from our members about rising levels of violence and aggression in our schools. More than 80% of EIS branches reported that there are incidents of violence and aggression every week.
Almost 40% of branches stated that prejudice-based violence, including of a misogynistic nature, has increased – physical violence and intimidatory, obscene and derogatory verbal comments towards teachers are more commonplace. 80% of teachers in our schools are women. This means that the rising incidence of violence and aggression in our schools is disproportionately impacting women.
Zero Tolerance (a third sector organisation that campaigns on violence against women) published research in November 2024. All the boys who participated in the research study used ‘incel’ language and perceived Andrew Tate as a role model.
The same research had identified that in February 2023, 83% of secondary school teachers agreed that they were worried that Andrew Tate’s views, or influencers with similar views, were having a negative effect on male pupils’ behaviour. A year later, in February 2024, 41% of secondary teachers reported having seen aggressive misogyny from students in their school since the start of the same school year.
All of this points to the fact that far too many boys between the ages of 5 and 18 are already absorbing a message of entitlement, a message that their problems and insecurities can be solved by male superiority, that they can and that they should, act hatefully towards the women and girls around them – their mothers, their sisters, their classmates, their teachers, the school staff who are there to help them. And too many women and girls are at risk of internalising these messages, viewing themselves as less.
The Zero Tolerance research showed that fear of sexual harassment prevents a quarter of girls from speaking out in class. Fear of being raped, followed home and/or kidnapped affects girls’ sleep, concentration, and ability to participate fully in learning. And girls living in deprived areas are more likely to say that fear of sexual harassment holds them back at school.
Where there are risks to the safety of women and girls in our schools, we need to do all that we can to protect against those risks
I recently re-read some of the newspaper coverage of Sarah Everard’s murder, and in one of the newspaper images of one of the many demonstrations that women held to protest Sarah’s death at the hands of a Metropolitan police officer, was a placard held aloft by a young woman. The placard read: ‘Protect Our Daughters, Educate Our Sons’. I think that’s the answer in a nutshell.
Where there are risks to the safety of women and girls in our schools, we need to do all that we can to protect against those risks, which includes educating women and girls about misogyny, as well as educating the boys; and protecting the boys, too, from the harms that a distorted sense of what masculinity means, poses to them, as well as to the girls and women around them.
We urgently need a well-resourced, equality-proofed, national and whole school approach to tackling behaviour in schools, including misogynistic behaviour. It’s welcome that the Scottish Government has published a whole school approach to preventing gender-based violence, which the EIS had input to. However, as with the National Behaviour Action Plan, it requires much more resourcing to be able to embed it and to make women and girls actually safer in our schools – as well as feeling safer in schools.
Strategies on paper are good and necessary to have but proper mitigations require staff. Teacher numbers are falling. Support staff numbers are not keeping up with the level of need. The number of staff who provide specialist additional support is falling. We need to reverse these trends. Women and girls are less safe in school when there are insufficient numbers of staff.
Education staff and education are mission critical if we’re to change misogynistic behaviours and make schools into safer work and learning spaces for women and girls. Education staff and the education that they provide are critical for the work that needs to be done with boys on their journey to becoming men, otherwise too many more of them will go on to commit serious acts of gender-based violence against women and girls in adulthood.
Education staff and education are mission critical if we’re to change misogynistic behaviours and make schools into safer work and learning spaces
With so much at stake, it’s so important that teachers and support staff are given proper time to engage in CLPL and collegiate discussion to take forward whole-school approaches on tackling gender-based violence as part of Curriculum for Excellence – to recognise casualised misogynistic attitudes and behaviours, challenge bullying and harassment effectively, and counter gender-policing which contributes to rigid stereotypes about men and women that enables a culture of misogyny.
And for educators to educate well, they need good quality teaching resources – teaching resources that carry an effective counter narrative to damaging media and social influences, resources that provide positive messaging without inadvertently glorifying the negative or giving more airtime to a misogynistic narrative.
There’s a critical role here for a newly focused Education Scotland to start to create these quality teaching resources to support teachers to teach about equality, including gender equality, from age 3-18, and about peace education too – how to resolve conflict in non-violent ways.
For the past decade, others have been stepping in to fill the gap in useful teaching resources – third sector organisations and the EIS. Recently TIE (Time for Inclusive Education) launched its ‘Digital Discourse Initiative’ to empower students and teachers to critically challenge misinformation, disinformation and radicalisation into far-right misogyny.
At the start of January, the EIS launched our Peace Education resource, which includes a focus on gender equality. Almost a decade ago, the EIS produced our ‘Get it Right for Girls’ resource that contains guidance for members on tackling misogyny in schools – and it’s still used, including in discussions about Andrew Tate.
Girls and women need to see that our society and our education system cares about their safety
Some schools have engaged in the Mentors in Violence Prevention scheme. Some schools have undertaken some work on the Equally Safe at School initiative.
These are all useful resources but we’re seeing a patchwork of approaches when we need a properly resourced, system-wide, joined up approach that will enable prevention of the risks to women and girls, making misogynistic abuse and violence the exception rather than the norm.
And we need that system-wide approach to include a shared understanding of what is unacceptable behaviour and of the consequences that will occur where boys’ and men’s treatment of women and girls is unacceptable.
Girls and women need to see that our society and our education system cares about their safety – really cares about their safety and their rights as equal human beings – and boys need to see this too; to understand the risks to women and girls that misogyny poses; to understand the boundaries; and to understand that they are not entitled to cross them.
The EIS would love if we were getting it right for girls and women in our schools and we’re more than willing to work with government, employers and allies to help make it happen.