A concerning new report has shed light on the prevalence of sexual harassment in Australian schools, with almost half of teachers reporting they’d been personally sexually harassed.
The Sexual Harassment of Teachers Survey (SHoT survey), published by Collective Shout in partnership with parenting author and educator Maggie Dent, analysed responses from more than 1012 Australian teachers – most of whom are female.
Of those, 46.9 per cent indicated that they had experienced sexual harassment within a school environment and more than 80 per cent of them were harassed by a student.
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Respondents spoke of being propositioned, threatened with rape, sexualised in the classroom, subjected to sexist slurs, and asked for nude photos.
“I had a student tell his girlfriend about his rape fantasies involving me. He also threatened to rape his girlfriend if she told anyone,” one teacher reported, per the study.
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Many also reported students, predominantly male, moaning and groaning at them or mimicking sex acts in a school setting, leaving them uncomfortable and feeling unsafe.
Almost 59 per cent of the teachers involved reported “feeling unsafe in the classroom/school grounds following sexual harassment”, and close to 80 per cent said that sexualised behaviours are on the rise in Australian schools.
More than 49 per cent of teachers also reported witnessing a colleague being sexually harassed in the school environment, and two-thirds of respondents reported witnessing the sexual harassment of a student by another student.
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Despite this, teachers reported feeling ignored and dismissed too many times.
Four in five also indicated that sexualised behaviours are on the rise in Australian schools and that this behaviour is starting younger than ever, including students as young as Kindergarten to Year 3.
The report also identified pornography, misogyny and social media as contributing factors in the rise of sexual harassment in schools.
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“This report demonstrates a strong need for educational authorities to provide teachers and schools with clear steps they can follow to prevent and deal with sexual harassment,” Dent said in a press release on Monday.
“This is something staff, parents and students need to be educated about. Some of what we are hearing about in this report is technically criminal behaviour and it simply cannot be dismissed as ‘boys will be boys’ – which was a phrase we heard multiple times in the survey.”
The report contains six recommendations to better deal with the issue and Dent called for a whole community response to address inappropriate sexual behaviour in schools.
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