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 becoming 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 PTSD, 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.
'Explicit sexual content also bombards young people through their social media feeds, with Big Tech utilising manipulative algorithms to maximise user engagement 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.'
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’ or 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.’
In porn, boys see women treated with a complete lack of respect and even violence, with no acknowledgement of their worth as persons but only existing to be brutalised. As Michael Coney of the UK male behaviour change organisation Men at Work recently wrote on X: ‘Porn is the #1 form of misogynistic propaganda. It teaches boys the visual and behavioural grammar of male supremacy, with which it invites them to identify. It’s the eroticisation of power imbalance between male and female humans. Famous ‘toxic influencers’ stand on porn’s shoulders.’ [April 3, 2025]
Such exposure contributes to normalising boys’ treatment of 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 to maximise user engagement 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.
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 few weeks, 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 with numbers spiking in recent decades. And child sexual abuse by known adolescents is now identified as the single most common category of sexual offending against children in Australia. Violent pornography was identified as a factor.
These horrific 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, the government has introduced new legislation to criminalise the creation and distribution of image-based DeepFake Sexual Abuse (commonly referred to as ‘deepfake porn’). The NSW Legislative Council Standing Committee on Social Issues (which I addressed last month) is also examining the harms of pornography. Tech 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.
In addition, respectful relationships and consent education should continue, with a key focus on how pornography often teaches and normalises non-consensual behavior. Boys need positive models of healthy masculinity and must be encouraged to speak out rather than remain bystanders when they witness sexual bullying or the intimidation of female peers. Without urgent redress, we will see an escalating culture of misogyny and harmful sexual 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.