‘Online porn is fuelling rape threats against school teachers’

School teachers are being increasingly threatened with sexual assault due to more children watching online pornography, a teacher has warned.

A survey by the NASUWT teaching union revealed that more than one in eight of the 8,466 members surveyed (13 per cent) had been physically assaulted by a pupil in the last year.

Wendy Exton, a teacher of 28 years, told the recent NASUWT conference that in addition to violence, rape threats from pupils are also “becoming increasingly common, due to the abuse of online porn, Covid lockdown and their inability to understand acceptable and appropriate behaviour”.

Harassment

She questioned how teachers are preparing children “to move into healthy, respectful relationships if we allow them to treat teachers or figures in authority in this way”, adding: “It is not part and parcel of the job and we need to do everything to eradicate this.”

One teacher who responded to NASUWT’s survey claimed they were “upskirted”, while another respondent said they suffered verbal sexual harassment.

A further teacher said: “I regularly had a child that would throw chairs at me, threaten to kill me and my family. Say he was going to stab me.”

‘Violent’

Last month, a headteacher warned that children are also increasingly committing sexual assaults against fellow pupils because of online pornography.

The charity Dignify, which challenges the normalisation of porn, spoke to over 4,000 children between 14 and 18 years old in secondary schools across South West Hertfordshire.

Its study found that 40 per cent of those surveyed had watched porn and the average age they first watched it was twelve years old. Of those who had watched porn more than once, one in five said they had a porn “habit”, while one in eight said they were “addicted”.

A headteacher said: “We saw the number of students reporting sexual assault start to increase seven to eight years ago and at first we didn’t know why. And then working with Dignify I began to learn about the impact porn was having on our students. The correlation between sexual abuse and watching porn is very high. The majority of what they see is violent.”