For years, schools have been silently dealing with a tricky and vile problem: Counselling sessions, often on Monday, with girls aged as young as 13, who are traumatised from sexual assault.
But in our own “me too’’ moment, and lifted by the courage of Brittany Higgins, school girls across Australia this week are speaking up to tell their own awful stories of being raped by peers while drunk at parties.
Former Sydney school student Chanel Contos is gathering the stories, and claims to now have hundreds and hundreds of sexual assault allegations.
Most of those are levelled at students of all-boy schools in Australia, but include some boys admitting their wrongdoing.
Dr Briony Scott, from Sydney’s Wenona School, highlighted that this week, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald that “the extent of peer-on-peer assault in this country and the number of sexual assaults against adolescents, within any community, is breathtaking’’.
No school principal is shocked by the rising number of allegations; they deal weekly with the trauma and heartache and shame some girls struggle with, after an encounter they can barely bring themselves to talk about.
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