More than a third of adolescent girls in the UK have been sexually harassed out in public while wearing their school uniforms, a report has found.
One in eight girls said they first experienced unwanted sexual attention or contact in a public place when they were 12 or younger, according to a survey by charity Plan International UK.
The findings – described as “horrifying” and “unacceptable” – have prompted MPs and education unions to call for immediate action to ensure sexual harassment among young girls is tackled.
The girls’ rights charity found that 35 per cent of girls have received unwanted sexual attention or contact – such as being groped, cat-called and wolf-whistled – while out in public in their uniforms.
Of those girls, one in seven have been followed while in uniform and 8 per cent have been filmed or photographed by a stranger without consent (including photographs up their school skirt).
The survey – of more than 1,000 girls aged between 14 and 21 – reveals that 37 per cent of the girls who have been sexually harassed have experienced it while travelling to or from school.
Jess, a 16-year-old from Glasgow, was sat on the train in her school uniform when a man kept trying to put his hand on her leg. She got off at the next stop to escape the situation. She was only 15.
“It was such a horrible experience. I was going to see my biology tutor and I was really upset about it,” she said. “I think the worst part was feeling guilty because I was wearing a skirt, which is stupid because it shouldn’t matter what I was wearing.”
Jessie, from Cheshire, was walking home from school when she was 16 when a car drove up behind her and a group of men began honking their horn. They began to make derogatory comments to her.
She told The Independent: “They said things like ‘look at that girl’s arse’. It made me feel really embarrassed and ashamed to be a female.
“The school badge was on there and for a millisecond I thought ‘are they going to follow me? Is something bigger going to happen?’” Jessie is now too scared to walk home alone at night.
Sarah, from Birmingham, was standing with her classmates after basketball practice when a car with two men in their mid-twenties approached them. The pupils in Year 10 were wearing their school PE kits.
“It was dark outside and we were waiting on the footpath for our teacher to come outside. Then a car randomly pulled up on the side of the road. They were asking weird questions – like ‘do you want to get in the car?”, she told The Independent.
“It wasn’t an innocent kind of a thing. It was really creepy thing to say to a bunch of 14-year-olds.”
The car drove off when the teacher emerged from the sports centre. “They could have opened the car door and dragged one of us inside,” she said. “I remember the horror on my teacher’s face.”
Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), told The Independent that she feels like routine sexual harassment of school girls is getting worse. She said: “All the gains that were made in the 1970s and the 1980s by feminism are just being eroded.
“I think we took our foot off the pedal too quickly and thought we had made these gains.
“The focus and attention in many schools has gone on to the academic curriculum, and schools not being given the opportunity and the space to do the real thinking of what sort of people do we want the current pupils to grow up into.”
Teachers are seeing girls increasingly wear shorts under their school skirts to avoid upskirting, she said.
“Upskirting” – the act of taking a photograph up a girls’ skirt – is now to become a criminal offence punishable by up to two years in prison under a proposed new law.
Ms Bousted added: “The scale of sexual harassment and sexual violence against women is just horrifying really. And the danger is that girls just accommodate that in their lives.
“It is insidious, it is demeaning and it is wrong. We have to start the fight against it all over again.”
Maria Miller, Conservative chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, told The Independent: “Most appallingly of all, girls as young as 11 are having to deal with sexual harassment out in public places. We need to have a clearer strategy to tackle this because it is completely unacceptable.”
She added: “We need clear education right from the start for children that mutual respect is the only way forward. And also look at other ways to tackle this problem in public places.”
The select committee is expected to give its recommendations to the government on how to tackle sexual harassment later this month.
Tanya Barron, chief executive at Plan International UK, said: “It is shocking and deeply concerning that girls, many of whom are clearly of school age because they are in uniform, are being targeted and sexually harassed by perpetrators in the street.
“It’s simply not acceptable that girls as young as 12 are being wolf-whistled at in public, touched against their will, stared at or even followed. This disgraceful behaviour needs to be called out and stopped.”
The charity is calling on the government to recognise harassment in public as a form of gender-based violence in its strategy to end violence against women and girls.
The Home Office has been approached for a comment.
