The Standard

Show Respect

2024

In the summer of 2024, the Standard launched their campaign ‘Show Respect’ to tackle violence against girls in London schools.

The campaign will use £500,000 from the Standard’s Dispossessed Fund to fund workshops about healthy relationships in schools, run by charities and groups including Youth Realities, Action Breaks Silence, UK Feminista and Tender.

Following an investigation, the Standard 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 campaign aims to reach 15,000 year nine students across London, aged 13 and 14.

The Standard calls on the new government and corporates, foundations and philanthropists to back the campaign to expand its efforts.

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.”

The Youth Endowment Fund backed our initiative with £368,000, taking the total committed to £868,000. Their chief executive, Jon Yates, said: “We are delighted to be joining the Evening Standard’s Show Respect campaign. These workshops help our children to build social and emotional skills to tackle misogyny, sexual harassment and gender-based violence. Evidence from the US shows that they reduce violence against girls by 17 per cent. One of the key aims of the STOP project is to run a study to test if the intervention works here and could progress to a larger scale.”

The campaign has also received backing from June Sarpong and London mayor Sadiq Khan, who described the campaign as “vitally important.” The campaign has since been nominated for the prestigious Cudlipp Award. The judges said its “detailed reportage” explored “misogynistic attitudes of teenage boys which, it is claimed, are contributing to an epidemic of violence against women.”