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One of the groups we have selected to deliver healthy relationships workshops in schools is the charity Tender, who operate in 33 state secondary schools across the capital and say our funding will help them engage a further 600 year nine pupils in more schools across five London boroughs with high levels of domestic abuse.
We joined them at St Mary Magdalene Church of England school in Greenwich to observe a mixed gender workshop with 13 year nine pupils, part of Tender’s whole-school programme that is geared towards “violence prevention” and that is already yielding positive results.
Shauna O’Briain, a Tender workshop facilitator, explained their approach: “A video went viral this year that said, ‘if a girl comes to my house and I paid for the Uber and for the food and she don’t put out, I’m locking the doors’. A pupil brought it to our workshop and we unpacked it and where the young people got was to call it out as rape. Our sessions use scripts and real-life examples to help young people come to their own understandings — and to educate each other.”
Shauna and her co-facilitator Ben Salmon were deploying a script called “party” which the pupils acted out and identified red flags as to the subtle ways that boys could manipulate girls into doing things they don’t want.
The pupils sharply called out tactics like “gas lighting”, “coercion”, “objectification” and “over-controlling behaviour” and talked about “predatory” and “toxic masculinity” and Andrew Tate.
Asked afterwards what he had learned from the session, Josiah said: “It helps me realise how not to approach a girl. I learned not to force myself on them, to not be dominant.” Rebecca said: “Girls can feel they have no option other than to say yes to boys, but I learned I can offer other options. It’s good to be able to spot warning signs and to see when someone is trying to put you under pressure.”
Jermaine Gayle, assistant principal at St Mary Magdalene, was impressed by his pupils. “The words they used, their understanding of the concepts, it’s sophisticated and entirely due to the journey our school has been on with Tender over the past year,” he said.
“Sexist abuse is the new frontier. The misogyny faced by girls is like the racism we faced when we were growing up. This is a deep issue in society. School assemblies aren’t enough, they are too one off, too tokenistic. We need day-to-day embedding through healthy relationships workshops.”
Susie McDonald, CEO of Tender, said: “Every year on international women’s day, Labour MP Jess Phillips gets up in parliament and reads the list of women murdered that year. Prevention is a less dramatic story to tell but it is the most effective. Every domestic homicide costs the state about £1 million, whereas a structured programme of intervention like ours costs around £40 per child. This Evening Standard campaign is not only incredibly timely but it is the most efficient way of equipping teenagers to understand healthy relationships and become articulate and confident ambassadors, spreading the word among their peers.”
