The Evening Standard has launched our Show Respect campaign, an initiative to tackle violence against girls, by funding workshops about healthy relationships in schools.
We are following the evidence as to what works in reducing youth violence by deploying £500,000 from the Evening Standard Dispossessed Fund to get the ball rolling.
We will be funding a group of charities and community interest companies to deliver workshops to 13 and 14-year-olds in schools across deprived areas of London. Last week we published our investigation into violence against girls in which we spoke to teenage boys and girls and revealed that:
•Sexual harassment is a daily occurrence for many girls.
•Boys aged as young as eight access pornography.
•Inappropriate images of schoolgirls are regularly shared on mobile phones.
•Girls feel unsafe walking in their local area.
•“Rating” girls and posting on social media has become normalised.
The messages of toxic influencer Andrew Tate — including that it is okay to choke women and “girls are subservient” — have had a huge impact on the psyches of young men.
Our investigation began with a single question: what would it take to end — or dramatically cut — violence against women and girls? We put this to violence reduction guru Jon Yates, head of the Youth Endowment Fund, an organisation given £200 million by the Government five years ago to examine the evidence as to which interventions work in preventing violence to young people. Yates was clear about the interventions that the evidence shows “do not work”. More CCTV, better street lighting and anti-bullying programmes are all found to have a low estimated impact on violent crime or “no effect”.
Prison awareness programmes and expensive military-style boot camps for young people convicted of an offence were actually found to increase the likelihood of engagement in violent crime. All of them, said Yates, were largely a waste of time and money.
But there was one intervention, he said, that stood out positively for three powerful reasons: the quality of evidence was high, it had been shown to reduce violence against girls by a significant amount, and it was highly cost-effective. It involved running something relatively low tech — healthy relationships workshops in schools. Based on more than a dozen studies in the US, Yates had “high confidence” that this single intervention would reduce violence against girls by “at least 17 per cent”.
About 18 months ago he took these findings to the Government, including the Home Office, and recommended they implement this. His message: put healthy relationships workshops into every school and this will go a significant way towards reducing violence against girls. The Government deliberated — but it has not acted. Today the Evening Standard can announce that we are going to lead where ministers have failed to show leadership.
Together with The London Community Foundation, who manage the Dispossessed Fund, we can announce that 12 groups will be awarded grant funding to carry out healthy relationships workshops in schools of up to £37,500 each over two years, with programmes starting in September.
The groups include Tender, Youth Realities, Milk Honey Bees, BelEve, Let Me Know, Juvenis, Shpresa, Action Breaks Silence, Anima Youth, Diverse Voices Edutainment, Lives Not Knives and UK Feminista — and jointly will have impact in almost every borough of London. Collectively the groups say they will reach an impressive 15,000 year nine students, aged 13 and 14, in scores of schools, an incredibly efficient use of our £500,000 investment amounting to just £33 per pupil. Together with The London Community Foundation, we call on whoever forms the new government — as well as corporates, foundations and philanthropists — to back us so that we can expand this pot and put healthy relationships workshops into every disadvantaged school in the capital.
There are an estimated 45,000 full-time year nine pupils attending school in disadvantaged areas of London, so a further £1 million would allow us to reach this cohort, with £3 million allowing us to reach every year nine pupil in London regardless of disadvantage.
Asked why it did not act on the Youth Endowment Fund advice given 18 months ago, the Department for Education said it was still “consulting on adding a new section on ‘addressing prejudice, sexual harassment and sexual violence’ to the draft Relationships, Sex and Health Education guidance.”
One of the few politicians ahead of the curve on this has been Sadiq Khan, who has seen violent crime on young Londoners rise over his tenure, but has made tackling violence against girls in schools one of his priorities. His initiatives include putting £1 million into creating a toolkit for teachers to tackle what he described as “an epidemic of violence against women and girls”.
Yates backed our call to arms and said: “Sexual assault is one of the worst things that could happen, and yet, one in six secondary school teachers in England know that a child at their school was sexually assaulted in the last term. This is appalling. In 2019, the Youth Endowment Fund started finding out what works to keep children safe. We now know that sessions in school on relationship violence can change things — on average, across the world, they have cut violence by 17 per cent.”
He added: “These sessions challenge poisonous ideas that can lead to harassment and sexual assault and train children to spot warning signs in relationships. Yet only one in three teachers say their school provides these sessions. We can change this. That is why the fund supports the Evening Standard’s Show Respect campaign.”
Rachel de Souza, Children’s Commissioner for England, said: “I’m pleased to see this campaign launched at such an important moment for children who face exposure to new and emerging issues like misogyny, extreme pornography or coercion — and an urgent need for better support in navigating these. One of my biggest worries has been the fall in girls’ wellbeing — in 2023 nearly two in five 16 to 17-year-old girls were unhappy with their mental health.
“This isn’t surprising when combined with other findings by my office: that children as young as nine access porn online, with nearly half of young people saying they think girls ‘enjoy’ physically aggressive sexual activity, at a time where we see the influence of misogynists like Andrew Tate. Boys and girls are crying out for high-quality relationships and sex education in school.”
