It’s not just the teachers, of course. Imagine how a young girl in a class feels – fears – when she hears a male classmate threaten to rape a teacher. Is she next? Imagine how it feels when she starts getting dick pics in year 7.
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Here’s what we must do, say researchers. All schools need more women in leadership. There are plenty of women in teaching – about 78 per cent of the workforce. But more women principals, more women head teachers. Definitely more women on school councils, boards, parent bodies. Shore’s council had three women.
Not one reached out to Walker during the torturous experience of trying to get Collier to listen (he’s leaving at the end of the year. Good). Shore’s not the only private school with a weird parent body set up (including six actual Anglican ministers who did nothing for Walker either. I thought clergy were meant to be all about pastoral care). Sydney Grammar has separate bodies for mothers and fathers. Guess which one runs the canteen?
We need tough penalties on students and male colleagues. Real respectful relationships education. Schools must keep track of sexual harassment and sexual assaults. Governments must release those figures. Both the public school and private school unions for teachers tell me they don’t keep figures. But one union rep tells me that sexual harassment in schools is soaring.
I do not think SACS has ever been called to account for this tragedy, for their contribution to the making of a murder. When I sent a question to the Coroner’s court earlier this year, asking why a representative of the school had not been called to the inquest into James’ death, I was told it wasn’t appropriate to ask. Maybe. But the behaviour of the murderer in the lead-up was observed by staff and students at the school. The more we know, the more likely we are to prevent this from happening in the future.
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Griffith University’s Patrick O’Leary, professor in the Australian Research Council Centre for Elimination of Violence Against Women, says there must be much more accountability in school leadership for women’s safety. He also says that we must start engaging with boys and young men as allies in supporting gender equity and respect rather than framing it as them giving up power. “It’s about how they can benefit from it,” he says.
One day, my daughter was welcoming students into her classroom. A teenage boy saunters in. He says to her: “I like your arse, Miss.”
She replies, battle-wearied but, like her dad, swift on her feet. “I’d like yours on a chair, eyes to the front.”
But that’s nothing. A friend of hers revealed a student threatened to come to her house and rape her. That boy did not get suspended. They never get suspended for comments like those. And it’s schools all over. Not just the elite boys’ schools where misogyny is permitted to blossom and flourish, but at religious schools, at public schools. It’s everywhere.
What is your school doing to stamp it out? What is the culture doing to stamp it out? What are you doing to stamp it out? It is no longer enough to say “not all men”. Maybe not – but enough men to make women and girls fear for their safety. It’s not just an education problem. It’s a you problem.
I can only imagine what John Collier said in his welcome back speech to staff yesterday, but I bet maybe 30 seconds, along the lines of: I hope Clare can move on now.
Yes, she can. The Australian Human Rights Commission upheld the complaint she made against the school. But all boys and men must move on too, to a better way of being.
Jenna Price is a regular columnist.