#WhenIWas 21 I was horrified by Twitter

Yesterday the Everyday Sexism project started a #WhenIWas thread on twitter which asked (mostly) women and girls to document the sexual harassment they can remember from ages as young as 5 or 6. It exploded on twitter and ended up trending worldwide. Feeling shaken by some of these tweets I decided to cook myself dinner because I find cooking weirdly therapeutic. While I was cooking I turned on my radio, it happened to be tuned into Radio 1’s evening ‘Newsbeat.’ The two top stories were Lily Allen’s interview detailing how she was stalked and consequently victim-blamed by the metropolitan police and the enquiry launched yesterday by the UK government into sexual harassment in schools. A government that, by the way, recently announced that sex education would no longer be compulsory in schools. However, this is not tory-bashing blog post for once it is a reactionary and perhaps emotional call to action:

I already knew that the sexual harassment reported under the #WhenIWas thread existed; of course I did but for some reason it still shocked me. It still shocked and appalled me that girls as young as 10 years old can recall being sexually harassed as they walk down the road in their schools uniforms, it still shocked me that there were almost 20,000 tweets reporting situations where rape was absolutely insinuated. It still shocked me that Lily Allen was essentially told to ‘hush up’ about the way she was victimised and stalked by a man who broke into her home, where her children were sleeping. It still shocked me hearing the reports from teachers and students, female and male, about their experience of sexual harassment in schools. The #WhenIWas tweets revealed just how normalised, prevalent and accepted rape culture is in the UK today and around the world. From telling girls in schools what not to wear on non-uniform day to avoid being ‘distracting’ to boys and teachers to being cat-called on the walk home from school, to being groped in public spaces or sexually assaulted in private ones, these tweets paint a picture of modern Britain that frightens, restricts and angers women. Rightly so.

(N.B. Of course, sexual harassment does not just affect women as a troll so kindly pointed out to me. The #WhileIWas thread predominantly documented and targeted women’s experiences and women do tend to experience harassment more widely. BUT reconceptualising gender roles in regard to sex would also involve removing the stigma and silence that shames men also.)

Everyone remembers the first time they are cat-called walking down the road in their school uniform or groped in a night club. That’s just part of being a girl, right? And everyone remembers the first time they try and speak out about it to ripostes of: “Don’t take yourself so seriously” “It’s a compliment” “Oh boys will be boys” or worse, “Don’t be so frigid.” From the minute to the very extreme, rape culture joins the dots between girls being groped on public transport from as young as 13 years old to grown women being silently raped in their bedrooms. This is not a world where I want to raise a child. In a world that boys are taught that sex and women are public property they are entitled to and girls are taught that their sexuality can be reduced to feeling ‘flattered’ by an old man in a white van honking his horn. I fear for my 17-year-old sister although she’s probably already experienced some of the above, I fear for any young boy assaulted at school and silenced because he ‘got some action’ and ‘should be proud.’ Whilst the enquiry launched by the government is a step in the right direction it is nothing without education. Consent education, sex education, and relationship education. Education that teaches girls and boys not only that to rape or be raped is abhorrent but also that lifting a girls skirt up on the stairs on the bus ‘as a laugh’ or calling boys ‘frigid’ for ignoring advances from their teacher is also wrong. The taboo surrounding sexual harassment in this country must be broken and education is the only way to do that. Only by breaking that taboo and teaching girls and boys, women and men about sex properly and publically will the #WhenIWas horrors be stopped.