If you were running a school, would you put a teenage girl in the same classroom as a boy who had allegedly raped her? Would you do that even though you knew that the boy had been arrested on suspicion of rape and only released on bail on the condition that he didn’t have any contact with his alleged victim?

This is not an invented scenario: it happened - and the boy was placed back in the same class as his alleged victim. Then there’s the secondary that failed to safeguard a girl from a boy who allegedly sexually exploited her in school, even though school leaders knew the teenager had been accused of two earlier rapes. Or the horrifying story of a primary where a six-year-old was raped in the playground by two other young pupils, despite staff being present during the sexual attacks. The school staff not only failed to recognise what was happening but also ended up reprimanding the victim.

All three are incidents - reported on by Tes - in which schools failed to protect a victim of “peer-on-peer abuse”, the somewhat sanitised term for sexual abuse where both the victim and perpetrator are children or young people. It covers a spectrum of harmful pupil behaviour, ranging from the extreme examples of rape mentioned above to exploitative relationships and sexual harassment.

Detailed guidance has been available to help schools deal with such cases since December 2017, and it acquired statutory force in September 2018.

However, Rachel Krys, co-director of the charity End Violence Against Women - which ends up supporting many of the victims of peer abuse - says schools are “still getting it catastrophically wrong”. The second case highlighted above occurred after the Department for Education’s revised guidance was published.

Why are schools still letting down victims? And what must they do to get it right?

While the incidents described above are extreme, peer abuse is a subject that weighs heavily on the minds of many school leaders. Exact data is difficult to come by, but there are indications that it is on the rise (see box, opposite), with many people blaming unfettered access to online pornography, as well as the new risks posed by social media and ubiquitous smartphone ownership.

Pepe Di’Iasio, headteacher of Wales High School in Rotherham, and chair of the Association of School and College Leaders’ ethics, inclusion and equality committee, says it is “definitely a growing problem”. However, he thinks that awareness of the new guidance, and how to respond to cases of peer abuse, remains low. “I don’t think the guidance is on headteachers’ radars,” he says. “When you get an incident of peer-on-peer, you get engrossed in resolving that incident; you don’t necessarily think ‘Where is the guidance on this?’ ”

But school leaders need help. Cases of peer abuse are often complex and contentious. David Smellie, a partner at the law firm Farrer, which advises schools on how to deal with incidents of peer abuse, says it is important “to understand how difficult these cases can be”.

He says a “classic situation” is one where a pupil alleges a sexual assault, and the school reports this to the police, but the alleged victim declines to cooperate. The victim’s parents then demand that the school excludes the alleged perpetrator.

“More often than not, the abuse has occurred outside of school. So the school cannot possibly investigate a criminal offence which, if the victim changed their mind, would warrant a police investigation. [Without] an investigation by the police or the school, natural justice makes it impossible to exclude the perpetrator lawfully.”

At this point, Smellie says, a school needs to develop a “safety plan” - a system where both pupils remain in school, but with their timetables and movements managed to ensure they don’t come into contact with one another. As you might imagine, this isn’t easy. He adds: “Not infrequently, the victim or parents remove themselves from the school, either actively or through illness absence, because they feel the safety plan is not enough … the prospect of the accuser bumping into the accused in school is too much to bear.”

An impossible task?

There are often extra layers of complexity. “Both victim and alleged perpetrator frequently seek legal advice and can be just as vehement in their position as the other,” says Smellie. “Also, if the children are young enough, it is possible that you have children’s services supporting the victim and the accused, and each arguing strongly in their own child’s interests. So competing parents, conflicting evidence, competing social work advice and no power to investigate a criminal allegation.”

And if this wasn’t enough, there are “lots of GDPR issues” restricting how much information can be shared about the pupils, not to mention that victims of sexual offences have a statutory right to anonymity for life.

Given all the above, responding to peer abuse might sound like an impossible task for schools. But while it helps to be realistic about how tricky these cases can be, Smellie is not offering a counsel of despair. He has advice that school leaders can use to navigate this complex territory. Of course, preventing harassment and abuse altogether - or at least picking up on harmful relationships early - can spare victims a huge amount of anguish.

It is also an area where schools can make a genuine difference. Relationships education for primary pupils, and relationships and sex education for secondary pupils - both a compulsory requirement from September 2020 - provide a perfect opportunity to educate children about abusive relationships, and how they can keep themselves safe.

Just as importantly, by teaching what is an appropriate relationship and what is unacceptable behaviour, it can also help to prevent young people becoming perpetrators.

Alana Ryan, a senior policy adviser at the NSPCC, sees this new requirement as a “welcome development”.

“For the first time, it’s really standardising and quality-assuring those discussions in classrooms,” she says. “The curriculum guidance is clear that teaching should be covering from primary school what constitutes a healthy relationship and what kind of abuse would be an aberration or fall outside of that. In secondary, it builds on that learning and it includes more specific information around pornography and online harm and sexting.”

Using the curriculum

Di’Iasio already uses the PSHE curriculum to equip his pupils against risks. “We work really hard with our students around online safety, around making sure that you’re aware of how you can protect yourself,” he says.

Ryan advises that when teachers are delivering the RSE curriculum, they should be aware that some pupils may wish to confide in them. “Teachers will need to recognise that these subjects can be quite triggering for pupils,” she says. “There may be students in that classroom who have already experienced these forms of abuse or harassment, and it’s so important that teachers understand how to deliver the new curriculum in a trauma-informed way, which seeks to ensure that all children feel that they are safe and supported in the classroom environment to raise any concerns they have and to potentially speak to a teacher confidentially.”

But teaching children about healthy relationships extends beyond RSE. “You’ve got to take a whole-school approach,” says Krys. It’s crucial not to dismiss sexual harassment and bullying as “banter”.

“There is no point talking to the children about sexual harassment and bullying and sexualisation on a Tuesday, and then letting stuff go on a Thursday,” she says.

And tackling toxic behaviours should not be confined to the safeguarding policy - it needs to permeate a school’s behaviour and bullying policies, and be backed up with meaningful teacher training.

“In the past six months, I have spoken to people who have been to safeguarding training, and peer-on-peer abuse has not been mentioned once,” Krys says.

Responding to peer abuse is a daunting prospect. But heads and teachers should know they are not alone. A key piece of advice - offered by Krys, Smellie and Ryan - is that schools should tap into local expertise. “Schools need to be encouraged to get in touch with their local women’s centres, rape crisis centres,” says Krys. Such organisations can talk to students, train teachers and provide advice on referral pathways.

Ryan says: “More close working between schools and other partners would help to ensure that we can prevent harm occurring, but also have the right support in place for children who have already been victims of abuse.”

Will Hazell is a reporter at Tes

This article originally appeared in the 21 June 2019 issue under the headline “When pupils are abused by their peers”