Spare a thought for Katie

Screen capture from Netflix “Adolescence” – Aired 13 March 2025

“Do you know what I don’t like about all this? The perpetrator always gets the front line: A man raped a woman. We’ve followed Jamie’s brain around this entire case. Right? Katie isn’t important. Jamie is. Everyone will remember Jamie. No one will remember her. That’s what annoys me. That’s what gets to me.”

– Detective Sergeant Misha Frank

“Our aim was to try and tell Jamie’s story as fully as we possibly could, and maybe trying to tell (Katie’s) story would dilute that in some way…”

– Adolescence producers

It was a school day like any other. How was she to know it would be her last?

MTR in Eureka Street

Content warning: This article discusses sexual violence.

'I had always wanted to be a teacher. I’ve only been in the job six months, but I’m getting out. I didn’t come to teaching to be sexually harassed every day.’

As her colleagues dispersed at the end of the staff professional development session I had just delivered, a young female teacher stayed behind, waiting for the others to leave before approaching me.

She had only graduated from teacher’s college six months before, and had started out at this NSW school with high hopes. But her enthusiasm soon plummeted as she endured multiple instances of highly sexualised behaviour directed at her, such as a Year 10 boy asking her to join him in the gym’s storage room for sex. She developed anxiety and insomnia. ‘It’s taken all the enjoyment out of teaching,’ she told me. ‘I just can’t do it anymore.’

Since then, more female teachers have told me they were abandoning the teaching profession for similar reasons. The litany of their experiences is confronting. One was asked by a male student why she ‘loved c–k so much’. Another was told to ‘suck my d—‘, and another that she had ‘a mouth that belonged on Pornhub’. Yet another was called the ‘c’ word on many occasions. One learned she’d been ‘upskirted’ under her desk. One discovered her photo had been morphed into a deepfake porn image, and another had a fake account set up in her name offering sexual services.

All felt powerless to stop the harmful behaviours directed towards them — let alone to protect their students from similar violations.

It is no mystery that schools are bleeding teachers: with sexualised behaviours like those described above, increasingly routine. There is also a perceived lack of safeguarding of teachers and students most at risk, as well as a lack of appropriate response and redress.

Harmful Sexual Behaviour (HSB) in the classroom, school grounds and on school transport  puts affected teachers and students at significant risk of negative health outcomes, including PTDS, anxiety and depression. Children and young people subjected to HSB are vulnerable to having their social and emotional development disrupted. Some parents feel they have no choice but to pull their child out of school (as in a recent case of a 12 year old girl subjected to rape ‘jokes’ and threats by boys the same age at their public Victorian High School (‘Mum’s horror at rape threat to Melbourne schoolgirls' Herald Sun, March 13, 2025) 

The stark reality of so many schools becoming sites of abuse is laid bare in a report published late last year by Collective Shout in partnership with author and parenting educator Maggie Dent. The Sexual Harassment of Teachers (SHoT) report is an analysis of data from a national survey circulated through our networks, social media posts and email promotions. The survey was prompted by anecdotal accounts of sexual harassment Maggie and I were hearing in our engagement with schools (some of these accounts published in Eureka Street in 2022). The aim was to get an idea of the prevalence of sexual harassment in Australian schools.

The survey went live in November 2022, and responses were collected until the survey closed in June 2023. Of 1012 respondents, 93.9 per cent were women, 5.6 per cent were men, and the remaining 0.5 per cent identified as non-binary/non-conforming or preferred not to say. Given 2023 data showing women comprise over 74 per cent of the teaching workforce (ACARA, 2023) and studies overwhelmingly demonstrating that sexual harassment disproportionately impacts women, it is unsurprising that the majority of survey respondents were women.

Most of the survey responses reported incidents of male students engaging in inappropriate sexualised behaviours towards female teachers and female students. The teachers described being propositioned, threatened with rape, subjected to sexist slurs, demands for nudes, and mimicking of sex acts. Nearly half of respondents had also witnessed the sexual harassment of a colleague.

Almost 80 per cent of survey respondents were seeing more sexualised behaviour in schools. Peer-to-peer sexual harassment was found to be on the rise, with two-thirds of respondents reporting having witnessed the sexual harassment of a student by another student. As well, more than half reported having received at least one disclosure from a student about being sexually harassed.

Problematic sexualised behaviours were being observed even in primary school-aged children.The survey found that 12.7 per cent of reported sexual harassment incidents were perpetrated by students in Years 4 to 6, and 3.2 per cent were perpetrated by students in kindergarten to Year 3. Behaviours included the use of sexually explicit language and imitating sex acts seen online. One survey respondent described Years 5 and 6 students sending nudes after being continually asked to do so by their male peers, with the photos then being passed around to other boys.

One respondent noted incidents of children showing other children pornography, making sexual noises, choking other children in the playground, and simulating sex on other children from as young as the age of 4.

A significant number of teachers attributed increased incidents of HSB to students’ exposure to explicit imagery online. In line with research that pornography is a primary source of sexual ‘education’ for young people, survey respondents reported that students were accessing Pornhub to ‘learn about sex’, and that children were accessing pornography on social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and Twitter — even from their school iPad.

Survey data revealed that sexual moaning and groaning was common. ‘Teachers reported this behaviour as one of the most frequently occurring forms of sexual harassment witnessed in their classrooms,’ the report states. Just over half of survey respondents who had been sexually harassed at school said they experienced sexual groaning noises made at them. One respondent wrote: ‘The sexualised noises are the worst because nobody seems to take it seriously! Yet my classes are constantly interrupted by moaning, groaning, choking, gagging noises.’

Teachers are also reporting a growing number of incidents involving deepfake image-based sexual abuse, in which faces of female teachers and students taken from social media or even official school group photos are morphed into porn using readily available AI tools and nudifying/undressing apps.

AI is being weaponised against women and girls and acting as an accelerant to sexual harassment, intimidation and control. Sex crimes are being monetised, with boys even selling these deepfake sexual forgeries to other boys.

Teachers were alarmed by the predatory and threatening attitudes expressed by a growing number of boys: ‘Girls in year 7 are being told by boys that they will be raped’, and ‘older boys [state] they intend to rape their future partners when they grow up.’ One teacher responded, ‘I had a student tell his girlfriend about his rape fantasies involving me. He also threatened to rape his girlfriend if she told anyone.’

Boys see women treated with a complete lack of respect and even violence in porn, with no acknowledgement of their worth as persons but only existing to be brutalise. As Michael Coney of the UK male behaviour change organisation ‘Men At Work’ recently wrote on X (April 3, 2025): ‘Porn is the #1 form of misogynistic propaganda. It teaches boys the visual & behavioural grammar o male supremacy, with which it invites them 2 identify. It’s the eroticisation of power imbalance between male & female humans. Famous ‘toxic influencers’ stand on porn’s shoulders.

Such exposure contributes to normalising boys treating their female teachers and classmates with disrespect, and objectification – and rarely with empathy. In this porn-flooded ecosystem the developing sexual templates of young people are particularly vulnerable, with growing concern regarding the impacts of viewing porn on brain structure and function and, consequently, behaviour.

Explicit sexual content also bombards young people through their social media feeds, with Big Tech utilising manipulative algorithms for clicks as part of a larger digital culture that collectively influences youth behaviour. What many people do not realise is that social media platforms popular with young people are significant conduits of porn-themed imagery.

The 2023 report A Lot of it is Actually Just Abuse, by the UK Children’s Commissioner, found social media was a significant site of exposure to pornography for young people, with Twitter the most likely platform followed by Instagram and Snapchat. The average age of first exposure was 13. By age 18, 79 per cent had encountered violent pornography online.

An experiment by The Wall Street Journal found content from adult sex content creators was being pushed to 13-year-olds after just three minutes of creating test accounts with an age restriction of 13. The feeds were dominated by sexualised content within 20 minutes if the sexually suggestive content was watched to the end. The study demonstrated that Instagram continues to provide children with inappropriate adult-oriented content.(in the last week I’ve reported multiple porn videos on TikTok as well).

A report by France’s equality watchdog, the High Council for Equality between Women and Men, found 90 per cent of porn featured violence against women, with much of it amounting to torture. There is substantial evidence of an association between exposure to violent and/or misogynistic pornographic content and harmful sexual attitudes and behaviours towards women. Pornography use is associated with (and predictive of) sexual aggression, teen dating violence, and experiences of sexual victimisation.

This societal hellscape has set large numbers of boys on a trajectory into hostile and often criminal behaviours.

Adolescent males have been identified as the cohort with the highest rate of sexual offending. (Recorded Crime - Offenders, 2018–19. Customised report. Canberra: ABS., as cited by Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2020. Sexual assault in Australia. Cat. no. FDV 5. Canberra: AIHW0.  And child sexual abuse by known adolescents is now identified as the single most common category of sexual offending against children in Australia.  Mathews, B., Finkelhor, D., Pacella, R., Scott, J. G., Higgins, D. J., Meinck, F., Erskine, H. E., Thomas, H. J., Lawrence, D., Malacova, E., Haslam, D. M., & Collin-Vézina, D. (2024). Child sexual abuse by different classes and types of perpetrator: Prevalence and trends from an Australian national survey. Child Abuse & Neglect, 147, 106562). Violent pornography was identified as a factor.

These horror findings are the outcome for a society that has failed to make child protection and women’s safety a priority. We have come too late to recognise the pathway of violence, sexual abuse, harassment and coercive control, includes the grooming and indoctrinating role of pornography.

There are, at last, some overdue efforts being made to reverse government’s dereliction of duty.

An age verification trial is at last underway in Australia after the Federal Government reversed an earlier decision against it. In another welcome move, a bill criminalising the creation and distribution of Image Based DeepFake Sexual Abuse (commonly referred to as ‘deepfake porn’) has been passed. The NSW Legislative Council Standing Committee on Social Issues (which I addressed last month) is also examining the harms of pornography. Big Tech mega corporations – which have facilitated predators, groomers, sextortion, porn and the eroticisation of underage children -are being called out, with tougher restrictions likely through online safety reviews and new industry codes to be announced soon.

Our leaders would do well to examine and adapt to the Australian context, recommendations of the independent review Creating a Safer World: the Challenge of Regulating Online Pornography, undertaken for the UK government and led by Baroness Bertin, released on 27 February. The recommendations are: 1) tackling violence against women and girls, creating a culture of positive masculinity; 2) increasing accountability and onus on platforms for harmful pornographic content; 3) protecting those most vulnerable to exploitation and harms; 4) strengthening enforcement of pornography offences; 5) future-proofing against tech-enabled harms; and 6) strengthening governance and oversight.

As well, respectful relationships and consent education should continue, with pornography’s role as teaching non-consent a central plank. Boy’s must be modelled healthy visions of masculinity and discouraged from being bystanders and ignoring sexual bullying and intimidation of female peers.

Without urgent redress, we will see an escalating culture of misogyny and harmful sexual socialisation and behaviours in our schools. And female teachers will continue to make a dash to the exits.

Melinda Tankard Reist is an author, speaker, media commentator, and Movement Director of Collective Shout: for a world free of sexploitation. She is co-edited with Maha Melhem of the SHoT report. Melinda is working on her eighth book, No is a Complete Sentence: a boundary-setting guide for girls.

Reprinted from Eureka Street, April 11, 2025

Our Movement Director Melinda Tankard Reist appeared before the NSW Standing Committee on Social issues examining the ‘Impacts of harmful pornography on mental, and physical health’ at its first public hearing Monday. This was her opening statement.

The pornography industry is significantly responsible for the harmful sexual socialisation of a generation of young people.

The world’s largest department of education has contributed to rising rates of violence against women, harmful sexual behaviours/peer-on-peer sexual abuse at levels never before seen. 

A generation of boys exposed to rape porn, sadism, torture, incest porn, at the click of a button.

The French equality watchdog found 90% of porn features violence against women with much of it amounting to torture.

30–60 percent of all incidents of childhood sexual abuse are carried out by other children and young people.  Data from the landmark Australian Child Maltreatment Study (ACMS) state: “Child Sexual Abuse by known adolescents [in non-romantic relationships] is by far the single most common category of offending.”

Professor Michael Salter in the Child Light submission, states: “The widespread availability of pornography appears to be driving the increased perpetration of sexual violence by children, particularly boys. 

Girls report routine sexual harassment and abuse by male students: touching, rape threats, sexual bullying, body shaming, sexual moaning and sexual gestures and boys trying to choke them. Boys commonly share porn at schools, airdropping it to kids on the bus, sending girls live masturbation videos.

79.9% of teachers were seeing more sexualised behaviour in schools from as young as Year 2 including children simulating sex acts on other children as documented in our report ‘Sexual Harassment of Teachers’ [SHOT] released by Collective Shout and author and parenting expert Maggie Dent late last year.

Many teachers identified pornography exposure as a significant driver of the rise in harmful sexual behaviours in schools. One said:

“I believe there is an increasing disconnect between women as human beings, and women as objects and I attribute this corrosion of respectful and boundary driven relationships to unfettered access to pornography.” 

We urge you to use every lever at your disposal to ameliorate these harms.

Read our Submission on the Impacts of Harmful Pornography on Mental, Emotional and Physical Health here.

See also: Sexual Harassment of Teachers’ [SHoT] report, Collective Shout/Maggie Dent, here.

Movement Director Melinda Tankard Reist addressed the Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society this week, arguing in support of age verification for social media platforms. Our participation in the inquiry attracted national media coverage – you can read some highlights below.

We are excited to announce that members of the Collective Shout team will heading to Washington, DC next month for the 2024 Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation Summit, hosted by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) and Phase Alliance. The theme is “The Great Collision: Emerging Tech, Sexual Exploitation, and the Ongoing Pursuit of Dignity.”

Movement Director Melinda Tankard Reist and Campaigns Manager Caitlin Roper will be presenting.

Age assurance technology could help enforce raising the age of social media access from 13 to 16

Collective Shout movement director Melinda Tankard Reist, who has been campaigning the Australian government to implement age verification for years to stop children being exposed to pornography, said while the technology was still evolving, the $6.5m trial should be commenced without delay.

For more than 10 years we have been campaigning for politicians to take serious action regarding young people's exposure to pornography. We had a big win recently with the Federal Government finally committing to an age verification trial. 

In the lead up to the Government's announcement our Movement Director Melinda Tankard Reist was interviewed on ABC Radio to discuss the links between porn and violence against women and the impact this is having on young people. Listen here. 

MTR Eureka Street essay

When the moaning stops: How p*rn is damaging young people

In July last year, Eureka Street editors asked me to join selected Australian thinkers and commentators – to contribute a long-form essay on a major social issue. I chose to write on the malign impact of pornography on a generation of young people, drawing from alarming stories girls were sharing with me in schools across the country, and from the global literature. The 6000 words are a lament, yes, but go beyond that, pointing to some hopeful signs and a better path forward for our young people. While originally subscriber access only, Eureka has kindly agreed to allow me to reprint the essay in full and make it available to a wider readership.

Content warning: This article discusses sexual violence.

The noise greets her the moment she walks into the classroom. The sound is guttural, a low, insistent moaning. It begins with one boy. Quickly others join in, enjoying her confusion and embarrassment when she understands the intended meaning. It is a daily sport. I first became aware of the phenomenon of sexual moaning in our institutions of learning when visiting a large public school in regional Queensland early in 2021. I asked the girls what messages they would like conveyed to their male peers.

‘Please ask the boys to stop making sexual moaning noises in class.’ This was new to me. ‘How many of you have heard boys make these noises?’ I asked. In unison, 300 girls raised their hands.

It wasn’t just in the classroom either, they told me. It was on the school bus. At weekend sport. At a party. In the line-up at Maccas. While walking down the street. Even at home, where an older brother had trained the younger in the art of sexual groaning. But this community was not an outlier.

From then on, I asked every female student in every school I was able to enter in the COVID-disrupted year that followed if they had been similarly confronted. ‘Yes, of course we hear these noises.’ ‘It’s normal.’ ‘We thought we just had to put up with it.’ They think this practice of boys simulating the noise of orgasm at any female in their midst is normal. Not unusual, not rare, not out of the ordinary, but normal.

I added ‘Please ask boys to stop making sexual moaning noises’ to other messages girls routinely asked me to relay, including:

Please ask the boys to stop telling us about the porn they watched last night. Please ask the boys to stop ranking us according to the bodies of porn stars. Please ask the boys to stop making jokes about our bodies. Please ask the boys to stop rubbing up against us in the corridors. Please ask the boys to stop sending us dick pics. Please ask the boys to stop pressuring us for nudes.

These everyday sexual affronts tell us a great deal about how entrenched the objectification of girls is. They also tell us how widespread is the callousing of our young men, the erosion of empathy, the decay of civil behaviour, and the social arson caused by mass pornography saturation.

‘These everyday sexual affronts tell us a great deal about how entrenched the objectification of girls is.’

At a NSW Christian School just before the June 2021 lockdown, girls said boys were filming themselves simulating masturbation using hand sanitiser bottles.

At a Perth public school, girls arrived on their first day back after lockdown to be greeted with photocopies of boys’ penises taped to their lockers. And the most recent story, from a regional NSW public school: boys were masturbating on the school bus in front of girls.

Choking, bruising, bondage, whipping, rape-play: p*rn-driven expectations

Exposure to pornography has been linked to an increase in in sexually aggressive behaviour and adolescent dating violence. Boys wanting to enact the signature acts of pornography on girls has also become more common. More young men expect facials (ejaculation on the face), anal, and oral sex. Debby Herbenick, a leading sex researcher at Indiana University, advises students, ‘If you’re with somebody for the first time, don’t choke them, don’t ejaculate on their face, don’t try to have anal sex with them. These are all things that are just unlikely to go over well.’

More girls tell me boys expect to choke them: ‘He put his hands around my neck without even asking.’ Young women experience fear and some suffer injuries after young men carry out porn-inspired sex acts on them, including anal sex and strangulation. Strangulation is not ‘kink’; it is a red flag for homicide and should be treated as such.

A UK study found that girls were being coerced into anal sex they didn’t want and found painful. The main reason they gave for engaging in the act was that boys ‘wanted to copy what they saw in pornography’.

‘If I have a girlfriend, do I need to strangle her when I have sex with her?’ queried a boy, as recorded in a 2016 report by UK Labour MP Sarah Champion titled Dare2Care: national action plan for preventing child abuse and violence in teenage relationships.

Allison Pearson wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald about a conversation she had over dinner: ‘A GP, let’s call her Sue, said: “I’m afraid things are much worse than people suspect.” In recent years, Sue had treated growing numbers of teenage girls with internal injuries caused by frequent anal sex; not, as Sue found out, because they wanted to, or because they enjoyed it, but because a boy expected them to.’

And yet Teen Vogue has published an anal sex guide for teens, further normalising the practice.

These porn-inspired behaviours spill over into TikTok. ‘KinkTok’, a popular genre within TikTok, has 6.2 billion views on a platform where more than 30 per cent of users are minors. There you will find teens promoting choking, whipping, bondage, sadism and submission. A 15-year-old is depicted fantasising about being choked. Many girls present themselves covered in bruises from rough sex. Growing in popularity is the ‘consensual/non-consensual’ (con-non-con) genre, also known as ‘rape play’.

Our Watch, Australia’s peak body addressing violence against women, notes the concerns of young people themselves in their background paper Pornography, young people, and preventing violence against women, including: ‘that pornography could create uncertainty and demands around sexual relationships from their male peers and partners’ and ‘that young men may pressure young girls to perform unwanted, degrading, painful or violating sexual acts that they have seen in pornography’. As one 17-year-old female observed: ‘I am worried about the effect porn has on boys my age i.e. the expectations they will place on me and other women as a result of viewing porn.’

Girls are expected to provide sex acts for tokens of affection. Asked, ‘How do you know a guy likes you?’, a Year 8 female student replied: ‘He still wants to talk to you after you suck him off.’ A male high school student said to a girl: ‘If you suck my dick I’ll give you a kiss.’

Young women are saying yes when they mean no — what Katherine Kersten in the Star Tribune describes as ‘the default of the yes’. They don’t want to appear inexperienced or unwilling or anything other than ‘sex positive’, even when it means compliance with degrading acts that leave them feeling cold and used.

The culture around young women tells them that depersonalised, hurtful sex is actually hot and this is what empowerment looks like, so you really should be up for it and if you’re not, there is something wrong with you.

The ubiquity of porn also leads to girls being classified based on how they compare, which is taking a toll on their mental health. UK author, journalist and mental health advocate Rachel Kelly writes:

While both sexes have ready access to pornography, girls tend to be more objectified by it. Studies suggest that porn use can reduce the capacity for intimacy, feed body shame or encourage coercion into unwanted sexual acts. According to [David] James [deputy head of Lady Eleanor Holles, a private girls’ school in south-west London], ‘Girls are objectified and classified more quickly and publicly than ever before.’

The behaviours described should not surprise us. They are the inevitable outcome of a generation of young people having grown up alongside the global commodification of sexuality: coming-of-age in a society in which the sex industry, harnessed to aggressive consumerism, has popularised the selling of female flesh.

P*rn’s grooming starts young

Parents and carers share with me distressing stories that demonstrate the gangrenous impact of porn on children, and how it influences children’s ideas of sexuality. One mother writes a harrowing account about how her child’s life unravelled after being exposed to porn from the age of eight. I’m told of children inappropriately touching other children, using sexual language, playing ‘sex games’, requesting sexual favours:

‘My 10-year-old granddaughter was approached by a boy while waiting for the school bus and asked, “do you do arse?”’ 

‘My eight-year-old found a note in her school bag which read, “Ready for sex?”’

‘An eight-year-old boy told my eight-year-old girl he wanted to “f**k you hard”’

‘A 10 year-old boy told my 10-year-old daughter that he was going to break in and rape her.’

‘My daughter was sexually assaulted at her primary school, aged six, in a four-month campaign of violence by six boys in her class and the year above. They called her a bitch, hit, punched, kicked and pushed her over as well as touching her genitals to frighten her. The school called it rough play — I wonder where all the men got the idea that sexist terrorism was play?’

MTR delivers a virtual presentation at the Commission on the Status of Women in New York

Movement Director Melinda Tankard Reist featured on MelbourneCatholic.org