Content warning: This article discusses sexual violence.
‘I had always wanted to be a teacher. I’ve only been in the job six months, but I’m getting out. I didn’t come to teaching to be sexually harassed every day.’
As her colleagues dispersed at the end of the staff professional development session I had just delivered, a young female teacher stayed behind, waiting for the others to leave before approaching me. She had only graduated from teacher’s college six months before, and had started out at this NSW school with high hopes. But her enthusiasm soon plummeted as she endured multiple instances of highly sexualised behaviour directed at her, such as a Year 10 boy asking her to join him in the gym’s storage room for sex. She developed anxiety and insomnia. ‘It’s taken all the enjoyment out of teaching,’ she told me. ‘I just can’t do it anymore.’
Since then, more female teachers have told me they were abandoning the teaching profession for similar reasons. The litany of their experiences is confronting. One was asked by a male student why she ‘loved c--k so much’. Another was told to ‘suck my d---', and another that she had ‘a mouth that belonged on Pornhub’. Yet another was called the ‘c’ word on many occasions. One learned she’d been ‘upskirted’ under her desk. One discovered her photo had been morphed into a deepfake porn image, and another had a fake account set up in her name offering sexual services. All felt powerless to stop the harmful behaviours directed towards them, let alone to protect their students from similar violations.
It is no mystery that schools are bleeding teachers, with sexualised behaviours like those described above becoming increasingly routine. There is also a perceived lack of safeguarding of teachers and students most at risk, as well as a lack of appropriate response and redress.
Harmful Sexual Behaviour (HSB) in the classroom, school grounds and on school transport puts affected teachers and students at significant risk of negative health outcomes, including PTSD, anxiety and depression. Children and young people subjected to HSB are vulnerable to having their social and emotional development disrupted. Some parents feel they have no choice but to pull their child out of school (as in a recent case of a 12-year-old girl subjected to rape ‘jokes’ and threats by boys the same age at their public Victorian High School (‘Mum’s horror at rape threat