#MeToo in British schools: Gendered differences in teenagers’ awareness of sexual violence

Violence against girls and women increased dramatically during the COVID-19 crisis. Social isolation and the economic insecurity of lockdown life were contributing factors in the intensification of gender-based and sexual violence, which a UN study called a ‘shadow pandemic’ (UN Women, 2021b). Among the stark statistics released by the UN: one in two women reported that they or someone they know experienced violence since the pandemic (UN Women, 2021a). Launching a campaign to raise public awareness of violence against women, the UN called for ‘a global collective effort to stop it’ (UN Women, 2021b). This article is written in the spirit of heeding this call to action by advocating for better ways of educating young people about violence against girls and women and the broader cultures that enable it. In what follows, we present findings from a research study conducted on young people’s experiences of (tech facilitated) sexual harms and gendered violence during the COVID-19 crisis. This study took place in the context of a wider public discussion of sexual violence in UK schools. While not a new problem, the issue of sexual violence in UK schools and universities came to fresh public attention during the lockdowns. In March 2021, following public grief and outrage over the kidnapping and murder of 33-year-old Sarah Everard by police officer Wayne Couzens, the Instagram page and website ‘Everyone’s Invited’ was inundated with testimonies from girls about their experiences – both current and past – of sexual harassment and abuse in school contexts. Set up in 2020 by 23-year-old Soma Sara as a space to share experiences of rape culture and to call out sexism in schools, colleges and universities, Everyone’s Invited went viral following Everard’s murder. To date, there are over 50,000 accounts of sexual violence and over 3000 schools and universities listed on the site. As noted on the Everyone’s Invited website, the list of schools and universities exist not to single out individual schools but rather to demonstrate the ‘prevalence of sexual violence in all schools’ (https://www.everyonesinvited.uk/schools-list-2022).

The Everyone’s Invited testimonies of peer-on-peer abuse in school cultures – and the accusation that educational institutions often do nothing to stop it or to support survivors – received extensive media attention. Headlines declared that it was a ‘moment of reckoning’ (Topping, 2021), and police chief Simon Bailey was widely quoted as saying that this was the ‘#MeToo movement for schools’ (Makoni, 2021). In the same month as Sarah Everard’s murder, UN Women published a report on the ‘Prevalence and Reporting of Sexual Harassment in UK Public Spaces’ (2021), which found that most young women aged 18–24 had experienced some form of public sexual harassment in the United Kingdom. The report also found that girls and women had little faith that the abuse would be dealt with by authorities. In response, thousands of young women began posting videos on TikTok and other social media platforms, stating that they were ‘part of the 97 percent’ who experienced sexual harassment (Bain, 2021).¹

Shortly after the mass mainstream media coverage of Everyone’s Invited and the public outcry over the ‘97 percent’ statistic, the Department for Education and the educational regulatory body Ofsted (2021) released a ‘rapid response review’ which pointed to the high occurrence and normalization of sexual harassment and abuse in state and independent schools and colleges. The review findings confirmed what experts on sexual violence in schools had been saying for decades (Oldenbring and Johansson, 2021; Phipps, 2018; Renold, 2018; Stein, 1994; Sundaram, 2013; Sundaram and Jackson, 2020; Ringrose, 2013; Ringrose and Renold, 2010; Mendes et al., 2022; Variyan and Wilkinson, 2022) – that abusive practices (both online and offline) – are normalized and commonplace. For example, the Ofsted report found that ‘90% of girls, and nearly 50% of boys, said being sent explicit pictures or videos of things they did not want to see happens a lot or sometimes to them or their peers’ (Ofsted, 2021). The review also demonstrated gendered differences, with girls reporting much higher levels of sexual harassment and abuse, as well as greater awareness of these harms, than boys.

Around the same time as the Ofsted review and the media coverage of Everyone’s Invited were gaining traction, concerns were being raised about the rise of incel culture, and the susceptibility of young men to masculinist ideologies during social distancing and isolation for COVID-19. Digital media studies scholar Kaitlyn Regehr (2020), for example, suggested that increased isolation and ‘more time online can also mean more time spent on some of the darker forms’, creating an ‘echo-chamber effect’, in which ‘high dosages of violent content are consumed regularly and become normalised and established as a fixed belief’. The rise of incel culture is tied to the manosphere, defined by Debbie Ging (2019) as a ‘loose confederacy of interest groups’ online that communicates misogynistic ideas in the promotion of men’s rights (pp. 639–640).

This is the climate in which our study took place. Drawing upon our research, we aim to answer the following question: How do young people respond to and make sense of the rising public awareness of sexual violence in British society? We share our findings that some girls in our study were more likely to experience, recognize, and discuss sexual violence, in part due to feminist consciousness raising during lockdown via digital technologies like Instagram and TikTok, while some boys were less aware of news and discourse around sexual violence and more prone to absorbing manosphere-like discourses around false rape accusations which appeared to target them through social media algorithms. In pointing to this difference, we do not mean to suggest a strict binary opposition between genders; indeed, we spoke to teens who complicated this picture and our study also included young people who do not conform to the gender binary. Nonetheless, it is important to investigate the reasons for the notable gendered disparity in how young people in our study perceived and processed the problem of sexual violence against girls and women. Building on Sarah Banet-Weiser’s (2018: 38) theorization of the complex ‘mirroring effect’ between networked popular feminism and popular misogyny in contemporary digital culture, we suggest that the struggle between feminism and misogyny is apparent in teenagers’ responses to online news and sexual violence discourses. If we are to use this period of ‘heightened visibility’ brought about by #MeToo (Alcoff, 2018) and intervene in the ‘complex of beliefs’ (Buchwald et al. cited in the work of Rentschler, 2014: 66) that normalize and perpetuate cultures of violence, it is crucial to understand the entanglement of feminism and misogyny as manifested in the digital lives and social interactions of young people. Our research shows that the increased screen time during lockdown intensified the ongoing struggle between networked popular feminism and popular misogyny, producing a newfound critical recognition of the problem of sexual violence as well as some gender backlash among the young people in our study. We explore the gendered dynamics of these responses as we proceed.

The research for this study was conducted from May to July 2021 immediately following the three major UK lockdowns. Working with a sex education charity that delivers in school educational workshops on consent, sexual health and relationships, we obtained special permission to enter schools in line with COVID protocols. In some cases, schools that were on the Everyone’s Invited ‘list’ reached out to our charitable partner for help in addressing issues around sexual violence.

This article is drawn from a larger project, carried out across five secondary schools in England, in which we conducted 17 focus groups with 65 young people and 29 individual follow-up interviews. Data was drawn from eight of these focus groups and 14 follow-up interviews with 40 young people across four of the five secondary schools (see Table 1). The young people were in Years 9–12, including 19 girls, 20 boys and one non-binary student.² Three schools were co-educational (mixed gender) with one state-funded ‘single sex’ all-boys school. The schools were located in five regions across England and all the schools except for the ‘single sex’ boys school had higher than average proportion of students receiving free school meals. In England, this is seen as an important marker of income deprivation. At the beginning of each focus group, we asked the young people to fill in a demographic survey. Due to time constraints in one focus group, we were unable to collect the demographic data for three participants. Of the 62 respondents, 53.2 percent (n = 33) were boys, 45.2 percent (n = 28) were girls and 1.6 percent (n = 1) were non-binary. In addition, 80.6 percent (n = 50) identified as heterosexual or ‘straight’, 12.9 percent (n = 8) identified as a sexual minority (including lesbian, gay, bisexual or pansexual) and 6.4 percent (n = 4) responded ‘I don’t know’ or ‘prefer not to say’. Participants ranged in age from 13 to 17 year olds, with the majority in Year 9 (i.e. 13–14 years old). Most of our sample was white (90.34 percent, n = 56), with 4.8 percent (n = 3) identifying with mixed/multiple ethnic groups, 3.2 percent (n = 2) other ethnic groups and 1.6 percent (n = 1) identifying as Black/African/Caribbean/Black British.

All focus groups and interviews were conducted in schools, were approximately 1 hour in length, and explored young people’s experiences of online sexual risk and harms during and after COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

The individual follow-up interviews ranged between 10 and 60 minutes in length. The interview protocol involved asking focus group participants if they would like to volunteer for a follow-up individual interview to continue discussing themes raised there. These individual interviews were contingent on their school schedules and their inclination to participate further. Depending on school protocols and safeguarding procedures, teachers were present for three of the focus groups and four of the individual interviews. Teachers tended to sit out of the eyeline of students and busy themselves with their laptops. While it is difficult to measure the impact of having teachers in the room, their presence did not appear to deter young people’s engagement, as most readily shared their views and experiences.

The focus groups were led by a feminist research team of three women academics, which consisted of two senior researchers and a junior research assistant. We were mindful of how our gender could potentially deter the boy participants from speaking candidly. However, not all scholars agree on the extent to which the researcher’s gender impacts expressions of hegemonic masculinity in focus group situations. For instance, Louisa Allen (2005) has argued that the researchers’ gender does not necessarily influence focus group work in predictable ways. In her research on performances of adult male sexuality and identity in focus group settings, Allen (2005) found that the ‘identity work’ performed by the men – both in front of their peers and in front of her as a female researcher – produced key data about their ‘presentation of self’ (p. 35). Allen (2005) further suggests that what seemed most important was that she demonstrated ‘sensitivity about what [the men] were saying’ and created ‘an environment in which they could speak freely’ (p. 52). She argues ‘that it was this style of investigation which was more conducive to the emergence of less traditional male sexualities than these qualities being a direct consequence of simply being female’ (p. 52). We also strove to create an inclusive environment based on listening and respect for the diversity of views being shared with us.

To ensure confidentiality, we invited students to come up with pseudonyms for themselves for the purposes of the audio recording; sometimes, they requested that the researchers come up with pseudonyms for them and this proved to be an unexpectedly useful icebreaker, initiating laughter and creating a sense of camaraderie before moving on to more difficult topics. After obtaining informed consent, discussions and interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim.

The focus groups were organized according to friendship groups with two to six participants per group; the participants tended to self-select into largely single gender groupings, with the exception of one mixed gender group. Allowing young people to choose whom they are most comfortable with to discuss sensitive issues such as gender and sexual violence is important, and we prioritized our participants’ voices and experiences throughout our research (Renold, 2002, 2007).

Focus groups began by providing participants with social media templates, asking them to write a list or draw things they like and dislike about social media (including gaming platforms). Template options included blank display screens of Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Yubo, WhatsApp, YouTube, Twitter and PS5. After 5–10 minutes, participants took turns describing their work to the group, before moving on to questions on topics relating to young people’s experiences and knowledge of (technology facilitated) sexual violence as well as the gendered dynamics of these experiences. Focus group questions included probes around the topic of sexual and gender-based violence; for example, we asked if they think some young people have more negative experiences online based on gender (e.g. girls vs boys). If yes, how so?

NVivo qualitative software was used to organize the data. The research team collectively analyzed the data by reading through all focus group transcripts to generate a list of key themes. These themes were entered into NVivo as ‘top nodes’. From this, the researchers identified an overarching theme of young people’s responses to Sarah Everard’s murder and Everyone’s Invited, which captured distinct sub-themes relating to the gendered disparities in teenagers’ thoughts and views on gender and sexual violence. Following Braun and Clarke’s (2006) approach, we conducted a theoretical thematic analysis, by explicitly engaging with data that fit this analytic interest. As Braun and Clarke (2006) suggest, thematic analysis involves researchers actively identifying key patterns and themes, with ‘the “keyness” of a theme . . . not necessarily dependent on quantifiable measures but rather on whether it captures something important in relation to the overall research question’ (p. 82).

This thematic analysis identified a clear discrepancy between girls’ and boys’ responses to Sarah Everard’s murder, Everyone’s Invited, and awareness of sexual violence more generally. Significantly, this gendered division of perspectives was consistent across all four school settings, pointing to larger societal trends of how young people are currently making sense of sexual violence in the United Kingdom. Although we are hesitant to generalize findings beyond these four schools, our results are seemingly reinforced by Ofsted’s (2021) recent review that noted girls’ and boys’ understanding of sexual violence were often different, with the report stating ‘boys were much less likely to think these things happened’, including perceptions of unwanted touching, sexual assault, sexist name calling and pressure to engage in sexual activities.

While the section above describes the trend of defensive masculinity, it is important to note that some boys from Schools 3 and 4 demonstrated an awareness that girls and women are more at risk of sexual violence. Importantly, we noted that this awareness emerged in response to some of our discussions in the focus groups regarding complex social inequities and power relations, and how this created different experiences of sexual violence for people based on their gender. Indeed, the focus group setting, in which the boys were able to work through issues together with their male peers and with us as feminist researchers, played a key role in helping them come to recognize the gender inequality in sexual violence. For example, in School 4, we witnessed the following discussion:

In this discussion, the boys recognize that girls are sexualized more than boys, face (hetero)sexual pressure, are ‘catcalled’, and experience higher levels of sexual violence (Ofsted, 2021; House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee, 2016). They even entered into a complex discussion with one another about the transactional nature of porn and boys lacking insight into what ‘girls want’ – a conversation that touched on issues of consent and sexual objectification. These discussions demonstrate the potential to break down boys’ defensiveness and address the complexity of sexual violence through supportive, facilitated discussions.

Another illustration of boys’ potential to demonstrate empathy toward women and girls’ experiences of gender-based sexual violence emerged through discussion surrounding whether a boy or man should cross the road for a woman to make her feel safer. This discussion emerged through focus group discussion of the Sarah Everard murder and provoked strong reactions from the boys, including a certain degree of defensiveness. For example, Kenny stated:

So about the Sarah Everard situation, I feel like obviously, the woman would be scared but I don’t feel like it should just be women, I feel like it should be everyone in that situation because it was a policeman and you should trust policemen and policewomen because they’re employed to protect civilians like us, and when we hear a story about a policeman kidnapping a woman, that just scares you but I don’t feel it should just be women, it should be everyone (Year 9, School 4).

In using a gender-neutral frame of ‘it happens to everyone’, the gendered power relations and the disproportionate harm that girls and women experience is glossed over. Feminist standpoint theory (Harding, 2004) has long sought to challenge notions of ‘impartiality’ and ‘neutrality’ by showing how such ideals are shot through with power relations that benefit hegemonic structures. Debates over the apolitical nature of neutrality have taken on even more complexity following Black Lives Matter, when counter calls of ‘all lives matter’ have revealed the entrenched problematics of a so-called neutral stance that glosses over inequalities and racialized and gendered hierarchies.

In statements claiming that violence can ‘happen to anyone’, the boys emphasize their potential victimhood over women and girls’ lived experiences of sexual violence and express a certain degree of defensiveness over the focus on violence against women. However, what was revealed through the focus group interaction, is that this defensiveness is often bound up with boys’ feelings of vulnerability.⁴ Significantly, over the course of the focus group discussion about gender-based sexual violence in public spaces some boys, such as Jeff, began to work through a different positioning in which they drew from their own feelings of vulnerability to express empathy for girls and women:

I remember a lot of people talking about this sort of stuff and I asked my parents and they said that I should always, if I’m going out at night, if there’s a woman in front of me walking down the road, I should always cross the road when going past them just so they don’t feel like threatened and stuff like that . . . So I was very confused about it at first but now I sort of understand how it could be quite scary because when I was younger, I was walking home at night from school or something and it was like a massive person, someone who was quite tall compared to me, I always feel quite scared and I wouldn’t really want to be, even though the chance of it being threatening is really low, it’s just like I don’t feel like just in case, I wouldn’t want to be . . . so I understand that point of view (Year 9, School 4).

Jeff described how he was initially confused about why a woman or girl would perceive him as a threat, but then by discussing this with his parents and reflecting on his past experiences of feeling unsafe when he was younger, he was able to empathize with women and girls’ fears and discomforts when walking alone. In opposition to some of the other boys in the group who became defensive and individualized the problem, claiming that they shouldn’t have to change their actions because of the actions of a few, Jeff was able to understand his positioning in a larger societal trend of violence against women and girls, rather than fixating on whether he himself was a perpetrator of sexual violence. This articulation of vulnerability, based on empathy, is very different to the male vulnerability as ‘aggrieved victimhood’ analyzed by Banet-Weiser (2018) in “Ruined” lives: Mediated white male victimhood’ (p. 16). Rather than the appropriation discussed by Banet-Weiser (2018), in which the white man assumes ‘the mantle of victimhood as their own in earnest’, here, we see a striking example of a more ‘productive vulnerability’ which works to dislodge rather than shore up ‘power relations and privilege’ (p. 3).

Through foregrounding young people’s voices, this research study reveals the differing and often gendered ways young people understood, made sense of, and discussed violence against girls and women. In the girl focus groups, we witnessed consciousness raising via social media platforms, facilitated by lockdown conditions during the COVID-19 crisis, around the gendered nature of sexual violence. While many of the girls’ personal stories about sexual harassment and abuse were disturbing, we were also uplifted to see these framed by them in a politicized way, indicating a coming to consciousness about the structural nature of sexual violence, harassment, and rape culture.

In the boy focus groups, we were struck by the defensive masculinity exhibited by some who denied gendered differences of this phenomenon and who in some cases seemed to adopt the online discourses of the manosphere. In certain instances, this involved attempting to hijack attention from the structural nature of violence to point to the ‘unfairness’ of the situation for men. Through our analysis, we document a lack of understanding about the scale and scope of sexual violence among some of the teen boys in our study. Because they have not empirically witnessed or experienced such violence, and because they are living in a society that invisibilizes and delegitimizes victims’ experiences and rights, many boys were able to disavow sexual violence and articulate a defensive position in relation to privileged masculinity (see also Banet-Weiser, 2021). The ferocity of rape myths and the increased normalization of men’s rights activist (MRA) discourses is a trend that needs much further consideration in schools. Indeed, since we conducted this research project, concerns over online misogynies and the rise in popularity of social media influencers, such as Andrew Tate, has intensified.⁵ While schools and the media have singled out Tate as a problematic figure, the so-called ‘Andrew Tate effect’ goes far beyond any one individual, and it is crucial to continue to look at the wider – and long-standing – gender issues at stake in the entanglement of online and offline misogynies.

Moving forward, it is essential to continue to find ways to involve young people, especially boys, in the conversation about how to prevent sexual violence. The experience of running the focus groups for this study left us feeling hopeful because we witnessed that, through providing boys with the space and time to talk in a safe, non-judgmental environment, they were able to think critically about these issues and demonstrate the ability to shift their understanding and recognize gendered hierarchies. This fits with other recent research that suggests the importance of ensuring that boys feel heard, and acknowledging that certain ‘attitudes often reflect deeper-rooted uncertainties and anxieties that are not being meaningfully recognised or addressed’ (Setty, 2023). Providing young people with a space for guided discussion of issues of sexual violence created awareness of a wider spectrum of experiences as we saw some boys engage in critical discussion of gender and sexual power relations, such as explaining that girls are more ‘sexualized’, subject to cat-calling, and pressured to send nudes, all of which was recognized as inequitable. The focus groups therefore emerged as a valuable setting for the boys’ ‘identity work’ around masculinity and gender-based violence (Allen, 2005; Flood and Burrell, 2022; see also Ringrose et al., 2021b).

There are limitations to this study, which are important to acknowledge. First, the participants in our sample were predominantly white, which can be attributed to the demographic profile of the schools we visited. Future research is consequently needed to explore the ways in which young people with diverse racial and ethnic identities experience and make sense of sexual violence in the United Kingdom, and the ways in which experiences of racism specifically intersect with young people’s experiences with gender norms and patterns of violence. Second, our sample was predominantly cis-gendered and heterosexual. There is consequently a need to explore in further detail whether and in what ways discourses on sexual violence in the United Kingdom are experienced differently for sexual and gender minorities. Third, time constraints meant that we could not do follow-up interviews with all focus group participants, meaning we were unable to delve into all the young people’s experiences in more depth. Finally, many of our participants, both boys and girls, told us of experiences of homophobia and racism online and at school. In future publications stemming from our larger study, we hope to analyze the ways in which race, ethnicity, gender identity and sexual orientation among other intersecting identity factors impact young people’s experiences and perceptions of gender-based sexual violence. This will allow us to interrogate how racist and homophobic language is connected to gendered harassment in both on- and offline spaces.

In conclusion, as the world works to recover post COVID and social isolation, it is essential that we find ways to retain the ground that has been gained in public recognition of the structural conditions that enable violence against girls and women – in schools, on the streets, and in digital spaces. We must hope that the focus is not diverted away from young people’s voices at a moment when they are finally finding spaces to be heard.