What teenagers are telling us on Everyone’s Invited

Over the past month, thousands of young people, many of them schoolchildren, have gone online to talk about rape culture – that is, a pervasive culture of sexual violence – in the education system. Everyone’s Invited, a site set up for young people to share their stories, has now collected more than 14,000 testimonies. The accounts are mostly from young women, although some are from young men, and they detail incidents of misogyny, sexual harassment, assault and rape – and reveal the scale of sexual violence in British schools. 

The platform’s founder, Soma Sara (pictured above), 22, started the Everyone’s Invited movement last summer after posting on Instagram about her own experiences of sexual violence during her teenage years. The response from her peers was overwhelming – many of them had similar stories about sexualised bullying and sexual assault from their time at school. Sara decided that, for change to happen, this issue needed to be publicised. The Everyone’s Invited Instagram page now has over 40,000 followers. 

To understand more about Everyone’s Invited and the issues it raises, Tortoise journalists scraped data from the site – amounting to 3,471 testimonies on 6 April. While the official total of testimonies submitted to the site stands at 14,000, only a portion of these have been published, meaning that our dataset should be seen as a sample.

The site invites users to share their personal stories about sexism and sexual violence at school or university using an anonymous submission form. All the testimonies are anonymised, neither victims nor perpetrators are named – although users are asked to provide the name of the school, college or university concerned. According to our analysis, at least 600 different schools have been mentioned by name on the site, many of them leading private schools.

The accounts on the website are wide-ranging. Some describe cultures of sexism and slut-shaming within schools. Others detail serious offences: sexual harrasment, image-based abuse, revenge porn, sexual assault, drink spiking, rape and child sexual abuse. 

The most frequently cited age in the testimonies is 15, but some recount experiences from ages as young as seven.

In many of the accounts, women and men who had experienced sexual violence wrote that they were confused and ashamed about what happened to them, saying that it took them a long time – sometimes years – to come to terms with incidents of sexual assault and rape: 

Smartphones, SnapChat and Instagram are part of life for teenagers in 2021 and many of the testimonies mention feelings of coercion to send intimate photographs to peers. “Nudes”, pictures and photos are mentioned nearly 600 times across the testimonies analysed by Tortoise, while film and video appear 76 and 86 times respectively. Often, the testimonies reported that these images and videos are shared without consent:  

Where teachers and schools were likely aware of issues of sexual harassment and assault, the people reporting their experiences on Everyone’s Invited often felt that school authorities did little to address the problem: 

Some of the most frequently mentioned schools named on the site have issued statements in response to the allegations. A few have stated that they would refer pupils acccused of sexual assault and rape to the police. Dulwich College and the London Oratory School have taken this step and referred several cases to the police. Other schools have focussed on safeguarding training for staff, sex education for pupils and pastoral care and counselling for affected children.

A spokeswoman added:

In response to the testimonies shared on the website, the government has launched a review into sexual abuse in schools. This review will involve government officials, social care authorities, Ofsted, the schools inspectorate, and the police. Under the direction of the Department for Education, Ofsted is launching a school safeguarding inquiry. The aim of the review is to understand the scale of the problem and to ensure that children have proper access to support and reporting channels. 

Education secretary Gavin Williamson said in a statement:

Everyone’s Invited is now asking for suggestions for how to bring about positive change to tackle rape culture in schools. 

Time and again, testimonies on the site talked about the inadequacy of sex education in schools. Our data shows 29 mentions of sex education and 265 mentions of the word “consent” – often raised in reference to the absence of proper teaching about consent and respect for the boundaries of others. 

Open and thoughtful discussion about sex and informed, enthusiastic consent is necessary to bring about change. Sex education needs to inform pupils not only about protection from sexually transmitted infections and the use of contraception – equal weight should be given to discussions about healthy attitudes to sex and pleasure. 

Schools should talk more frankly about rape and sexual assault, too. Many young people who had experienced sexual violence felt that the perpetrators had not understood the harm that their actions were causing. Likewise, some victims reported that they did not understand until many years later that the sexual violence they experienced while at school was an offence. 

From September 2020, the sex education curriculum changed to include greater education about consent, respectful relationships – and the law relating to grooming, abuse, harrassment, coercion, rape and sexual assault.

These changes to sex education are long overdue: the previous sex and relationship guidance was issued by the government in 2000. But the testimonies from Everyone’s Invited show that further significant change is needed – and urgently.