Ending ‘rape culture’ in schools starts at home, says leading headmistress

Parents need to stop treating their children as their friends and set stricter party-going rules to help tackle the emerging schools “rape culture” scandal, a leading girls’ school headmistress has said.

Mothers and fathers are so worried about “coming across as strict” that they sometimes are afraid to intervene in children’s social lives, according to Samantha Price, head at the £40,000-a-year Benenden School in Kent.

Her remarks come as some of the country’s leading private schools have been accused of presiding over a “rape culture”, after thousands of allegations about sexual assault and harassment were published online.

A number of the schools named online have rushed to commission independent inquiries and launch reviews of their PSHE lessons in the wake of the claims.

But Mrs Price, who is the incoming president of the Girls’ School Association (GSA), said that parents could not rely on schools alone to deliver sex education and that they too had an important role to play in setting boundaries for their children.

For example, they should be finding out what kind of parties their teenage sons and daughters were going to, whether there would be adult supervision, whether there would be alcohol, whether there would be a sleepover and if so, what the boys’ and girls’ sleeping arrangements would be.

Parents sometimes lacked the confidence to do this because they were “concerned about coming across as being too strict”, she said.

Mrs Price told The Telegraph: “If they are told other parents are much more lenient, and therefore you are a bit old fashioned, and therefore you are going to find that your daughter or son is being left out from the group, that is definitely one thing.

“As parents you don’t want your teenagers to shut down on you and not tell you what they are doing, so I think that parents can sometimes be too friendly with their children as opposed to actually parenting their children.”

She explained that society was much more liberal now than it used to be, and that had extended to family relationships. “But I think with that liberalism, perhaps we have seen an erosion of the strength of value setting and expectation with teenagers that actually would be really helpful to them,” she added.

“I think that a lot of young people actually develop their values and what they understand to be acceptable behaviour from home.”

Mrs Price said that parents could find it “quite embarrassing” to discuss sex and relationships with their children, but explained that schools could play a supportive role in this.

“Where schools can help is they can train parents if you like, or offer sessions with parents, about how to approach difficult conversations with your teenage children,” she explained.

“Teenagers need consistency and they need boundaries. Where the school is telling them one thing but their family is allowing them to do something else – even if they don’t mean to be doing it – then of course that is contradictory.”

On Wednesday, Ofsted was ordered to investigate schools’ safeguarding policies in the wake of the school “rape culture” row.

The education watchdog will undertake an “immediate review” of child protection plans in both state and private schools across England. Inspectors will look at the extent and severity of sexual abuse and harassment in schools and ensure systems are in place for pupils to report their concerns.