School environments remain fertile ground for sexual harassment of children

IOL News

07-05-2025

Dr Sheetal Bhoola is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Zululand, and the director at StellarMaths (Sunningdale). Picture: Supplied
In recent years, the South African government has engaged in campaigns to alert us about gender-based violence and power imbalances between men and women. Despite their efforts, there are continual incidents of rape and various types of sexual harassment and violence that persists in South Africa.
The alarming fact is that these incidents at schools are still very much prevalent, which indicates that we are still grooming future South Africans to be patriarchal and dismissive of respect for the female human being. More than often, it is girls who are often being targeted as victims of sexual harassment rather than males and the frequency of these incidents have normalised a notion that in South Africa, most women at some point will experience sexual harassment or a violence-related crime, based on their gender identification.
The number of sexual harassment incidents reported have only escalated in recent years despite the fact that schools are meant to be safe spaces for our children within our young democratic society.
Schools are also meant to play a pivotal role in developing the child holistically and teaching children about human rights, gender discrimination and the importance of human respect irrespective of race, gender and sexual orientation.
The recent incident involving a male educator sexually harassing a girl learner via text messages also indicates that sexual violence in schools involve the educators and other key players. These are adults that children and parents supposedly need to trust as their caregivers whilst the school day is in progress.
Girl child victims of school sexual violence have also contributed towards the high rate of girl and teenage pregnancies, which results in these young learners dropping out of school and fundamentally joining the high ratio of youth unemployment in South Africa.
The impact of a schooling environment that is deemed unsafe because of violence in schools has a detrimental impact on learners that intend to complete their secondary school qualification, but opt to dropout because they do not have the skills, emotional maturity and coping mechanisms to cope with a variety of behavioural ills within school communities.
Buildings that have been neglected and dilapidated on school grounds have given perpetrators of sexual harassment a space to 'corner or trap' their identified victims and it is in those quiet spaces where it has been reported that girls are inappropriately touched and spoken to whilst they are at school.
These spaces have also become hubs for children that opt to utilise their break period to engage in drugs, bullying and other forms of violent activities. Girls have also reported being victimised and physically harmed if they opted not to engage in a sexual relationship with a boy learner that is older than them at school.
In some instances, girls have opted to remain silent about their sexual harassment experiences as they are being financially supported by older male perpetrators. Herewith, we see the strong inter-dependency of permissive ills and poverty in our society.
Violence and sexual misconduct becomes acceptable because victims of poverty and challenging socio-economic conditions opt to be acceptable to this behaviour for the purposes of monetary game. Young teenage girls sometimes are coerced to earn money in this manner because of the lack of resources within their impoverished households.
The central problem lies in the way we perceive and normalise sexual harassment and why the boychild and young adolescent boys feel its is acceptable for them to be perpetrators of sexual violence. Schools need to make an ardent effort to ensure that there is a teaching and learning focus on gender respect, and appropriate behaviour.
Children need to understand that there are dire consequences for inappropriate conduct and that there is a great impact on victims and the perpetrators of sexual harassment and related violent behavioural patterns.
The department of Education has to engage with schools to address this amidst a flurry of other urgent issues that all seem to fall away because of the continual focus on the lack of funds. Yet again, it has been reported that Grade R teachers are yet to be paid salaries in KwaZulu-Natal and in addition, it was recently revealed that there is a cumulative debt in this sector.
The reality is that if the financial woes within the Department of Education remain unaddressed, other issues will continue to be sidelined. We attempt to prioritise early learning development of every South African child, yet Grade R teachers go without being paid timeously and we still experience unclarified and unjustified fund mismanagement within these departments.
The paradoxes continue despite the fact that educational plays a key in developing a society that is progressive, literate and economically functional. The Department of Education needs to address their multiple concerns that have culminated from the lack of good governance strategies and principles.
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