What teenage girl feminist activism teaches us about school-based sexual harassment
Our ECR Spotlight series continues, now with posts that were produced through the Academic Writing for the Public workshops conducted by GENDER.ED annually to develop writing on gender and sexualities for broader publics. In this piece, Dr Minkyung Kwon asks how we can collectively transform schools into ‘safe’ spaces where girls can intervene, critique, and challenge the sexual harassment as it occurs, within their daily school contexts.
Are schools ‘safe’ for girls?
“Do you think I could maybe go and talk to the teacher about what just happened?”
“Maybe not. He’s our teacher. What if he writes bad comments on your student report?”
I was late for class. Another male student was late too. We were both made to stand in front of the class. The teacher gently tapped his shoulder, told him he could do better next time, and sent him back to his seat. I was told how terribly I did in exams and that I had a bad influence on other students.” I felt humiliated. It was unfair. During the break, I wanted to speak with the teacher and asked my friends’ opinions. They all advised me not to raise the issue, for my future. I still spoke with the teacher, he apologised, but I felt alone.
Since then, I became uncomfortable with the power imbalance in my school. I started noticing sex and gender-based violence: Boys graded girls’ bodies; a boy was caught spying on girls in the toilets; a male teacher opened up my school blouse to check if I was wearing the ‘right’ t-shirt inside. My friend was told by a teacher to break up with her partner because the boy needed to get into a good school. What discouraged me even more was that we couldn’t talk about this violence. We were told that boys are ‘naughty’ at this age, that they had promising futures not to be disturbed, and that teachers were policing us to ‘protect’ us, for our good. As a teenage schoolgirl, I often felt powerless, realising there wasn’t much I could do.
Decades have passed, but my experience still resonates with many girls in schools around the world. Schoolgirls in the UK are protesting against policing of school uniforms and feeling humiliated by staff skirt inspections. Safeguarding staff tell girls not to wear coloured bras to avoid receiving ‘unwanted comments or attention’ and girls are asked to pull their skirts down to a ‘reasonable and safe’ length. But is this really ‘safeguarding’ girls in schools? Girl activists in South Korea are responding through their powerful teenage girl feminist activism within the SchoolMeToo movement, claiming “there is no school for girls”.
SchoolMeToo movement and a girl-led social movement organisation ‘WeTee’
SchoolMeToo was initiated by girls at a high school in Seoul in 2018. They reported male teachers’ sexual harassment via sticky notes, covering windows, corridors, and blackboards with them. The movement quickly shifted to X (formerly Twitter), generating 201,600 #SchoolMeToo tweets within a week. Amidst this online movement, girl activists from “Teenager Feminist Network: WeTee” (formerly “Feminism For Youth”) organised a girl-led SchoolMeToo march, gathering 300 girls to demand government action.
WeTee originated from a small group of five teenage girl activists who initially gathered outside their schools to ignite teenage girl feminist activism, collaborating with other teenage girls who co-organised the SchoolMeToo march. Observing that teenagers’ participation in feminist protests and reading groups was often patronised by adults, and that individual teenage feminists in schools frequently faced isolation, these girl activists aimed to emphasise the importance of an intersectional understanding of their experiences, recognising their positionality both as women as well as teenagers. Once established into a girl-led social movement organisation, WeTee advocated for the recognision of teenagers’ and students’ rights alongside women’s rights, continuing their activism with a focus on reinterpreting social issues from the perspective of teenage girls. Their work included addressing the pervasive culture of school-based sexual harassment.
Viewing school-based sexual harassment culture through girl activists’ perspectives
In my ethnographic doctoral study, I spent a year with these WeTee activists to understand how they challenge school-based sexual harassment through their activism. Viewing schools through girl activists’ lens revealed multiple axes of power relations that shape an unequal culture enabling and upholding sexual harassment, while also regulating schoolgirls’ awareness and resistance against such culture. For example, the adult-centric construction of children as non-sexual and incompetent beings ‘misguided’ by feminism complicated students’ ability to name, define, and speak about sexual harassment and sexual risks. When child sexual innocence was combined with heteronormativity, binary expectations of gendered behaviour, sexual double standards, and sexual scripts, it further restricted schoolgirls’ ‘appropriate’ presentation of gender and sexually active practices often in contradictory ways. Additionally, strong anti-feminist backlash made feminist resistance difficult in schools. Even when spaces for feminist practice were found, they were only partially permitted, with conditions set by adult authority figures on what feminism should look like and what feminism should aim for.
Disrupting school-based sexual harassment culture through teenage girl feminist activism
With the aim of disrupting these gender and age-based power relations in schools that sustain the culture of school-based sexual harassment, the girl activists were leading teenage girl feminist activism, driven by both feminism and childism. Childism, which emphasises deconstructing adult-centric societal and scholarly norms and reconstructing the meaning of children and childhoods through difference-responsive approaches, was a significant driver of their activism alongside feminism, to bring their marginalised experiences to the forefront.
Their main argument was that it is the culture in schools, and the power relations that shape this culture, that need to be changed. Their specific demands for change to disrupt these power relations included: (1) acknowledging girls as sexual subjects; (2) promoting empowered inclusivity of girls as political agents; and (3) practising feminist pedagogy in child-centred ways. The girl activists argued that only by expanding the ways we envision schoolgirls’ gender and sexuality, political participation, and engagement in feminist pedagogy, can girls in schools intervene, critique, and challenge the sexual harassment as it occurs, within their daily school contexts, without having to resort to formal accusations and cases.
The questions that linger
Conducting a year-long ethnography with these girl activists was a journey that allowed me to revisit my experiences as a schoolgirl and to identify why I felt humiliated, uncomfortable, helpless, and sensed injustice in schools. I came to understand the various ways in which I was confined to a narrow image of a ‘schoolgirl’, and the complex layers of power relations that marginalised me, preventing me from being seen as a power holder of generating change.
By the time I ended the fieldwork, the girl activists described their ongoing goal as bringing their activism from outside the schools into schools. By sharing a snapshot of my doctoral study’s findings, I wanted to suggest important questions for continued research to support these girl activists’ goal: Why do girls have to address problems within schools through their activism conducted outside schools? How should schools change so that girls have the ability to generate meaningful changes within their schools? How can we, as researchers, unlearn our adult-centric and gendered perspectives to recognise existing acts of resistance by girls in schools that might otherwise go unnoticed in current research, practice, and policy frameworks?
Author bio:
Dr Minkyung Kwon is passionate about creating meaningful changes in girls’ lives through research with girls. For her doctoral project in Moray House School of Education and Sport at University of Edinburgh, she studied the practices of teenage girl feminist activism within the South Korean SchoolMeToo movement, focusing on how girl activists tackle school-based sexual harassment. In her postdoctoral project, she plans to co-produce research with girl survivors of online sextortion to listen to the meaning of ‘recovery’ and reintegration into ‘safe’ communities from the survivors’ perspectives.