Teenage girls document pervasive misogyny at school, including 'rape lists'

On a school day in Tyneside, a group of teenage girls sat down to describe what it feels like to move through their own hallways afraid. They made a film about the language they hear every day—threats wrapped in jokes, violence proposed as banter, lists compiled by boys ranking which girls they wanted to rape. The experience has left them feeling, as one put it, worthless. Frightened. Unsure whether the people around them mean what they say.

The film emerged as part of work with This Life Collective, an organization providing therapeutic support to young people. It has since been shared with the Department for Education and Prime Minister Andy Burnham. What the girls documented is not isolated to their school. Catherine Marchant, who leads Impact Family Services in South Tyneside, said the pattern appears across the region in every school she works with. The North East has the highest rate of violence against women and girls anywhere in England. Experts warn that when these attitudes go unchallenged, they calcify into something worse—girls begin to accept abuse as normal in their first relationships, and boys never learn that their behavior is wrong.

One girl described the rape list with precision. Boys had ordered girls by who they wanted to rape most and least. "It is frightening because you don't know people's real intentions," she said. Another explained how she has changed the way she moves through the world as a result. She takes the long route home instead of the quick way. She stays in groups. She moves through the night with a kind of vigilance—fight or flight made into daily habit. "It shouldn't have to be like that," she said. "I should just be able to walk home the quick way."

Marchant described what she sees in her work: young women aged fifteen, sixteen, seventeen recognizing for the first time that they have been abused. They think this is what relationships are supposed to feel like. They see it online, hear it in music, and if no one tells them it is wrong, they assume it is how the world works. She spoke of thirteen-year-old girls being raped by thirteen-year-old boys—children who have never been told this is not acceptable, and girls who have never been told they should refuse it.

Sue Davison, a specialist teacher with three decades in schools, attributed some of the shift to social media influencers promoting what she called toxic masculinity. The language, she said, is becoming more violent and more aggressive. But she also offered a counterpoint: roughly nine out of ten boys do not participate in this behavior and are made deeply uncomfortable by it. The concern is the one in ten who might take it further. Dr. Alex Blower, a researcher who founded Boys' Impact, a network focused on young men from working-class backgrounds, praised the girls for their courage and called for a different approach to boys themselves. For forty years, he argued, there has been clear messaging about empowerment for girls and young women. But boys have been left in a void, one that online actors have filled with their own definitions of what successful manhood looks like. Schools need to create conversations about the kind of man a boy wants to become, not assume something is inherently wrong with being male.

The government announced it is committing sixteen million pounds to pilot targeted interventions in schools. From September, every school will teach a new Relationships, Sex and Health Education curriculum that includes material on healthy relationships and harmful behaviors. The girls who made the film hope it will be shown in schools across the country, that it will spark the conversations that have not yet happened, that it will help challenge the attitudes that have become so normalized they feel like weather—something you simply endure rather than something that can change.