I fear for young girls. The sexism I encountered as a child is much worse now

In order for girls to flourish in today’s perilous world, boys need to be educated in the virtues of respect and equality

You might not know this, but Friday is International Day of the Girl. It’s not a wheeze dreamed up by L’Oreal or Dove or Always pads with wings, blurring the lines between campaigning and commerce. No, it is a day set aside by the United Nations.
I’m not going to even bother with a chirpy aside about Boys Having Every Other Day because that would be facetious. Perpetrating Us vs. Them battlelines is where the rot sets in. The bitter truth is, girls’ losses are boys’ losses – everyone’s losses. If only we could see it.
But first, to the picture. Thanks to the global charity Inspiring Girls International, it has become customary for women to post a picture of themselves under the hashtag This Little Girl Is Me and give their younger selves the advice they so badly needed.
Well, here goes. This is me. Cecil Beaton wasn’t available that day so I can only presume a neighbour took this snap in our front garden. My father had a camera but he had died a couple of years earlier, after which photographs were vanishingly rare.
I guess I must be about five. It is the early 1970s and I am wearing a fifth-hand dress (the curse of the youngest sister), grey socks and Start-Rites, like the royal children did.
Widowhood thrust my mother into the indigent middle class; my three elder sisters were at boarding school yet we lived in a council house. There was somehow always money for proper shoes and school trips but not much else.
My family would recognise not just the 1960s frock but the happy hoyden yelling from the swing. Their word to the wise would be – the fringe! In the name of John Frieda, sort out the fringe! Our mother brandished her scissors on all of us with the same brisk asymmetry; it never once occurred to me that I could neaten it up. Duh.
Then again, nobody teased me at school because everyone’s mum cut their hair. Nobody bullied me online because, guess what kids, mobile phones hadn’t even been invented. Not even Motorolas. Talk about the good old days.
My advice to me would be to pull my skirt down and not show my knickers. But then the first time a man flashed me, some five years later, I was in a duffle coat. Aged 15, I was in my jeans when I was first grabbed and groped by a man on a bus – I complained to the driver who got annoyed and ordered me to move.
Three years after that I was asleep at a party when I was first sexually assaulted and then thrown down a flight of stairs when I woke up and objected. Everyone told me it was my fault for being drunk and declined to call the police.
A lot of firsts. Let’s leave them there. Besides, that rambunctious little tomgirl – no not a misprint, I’m wise to the ways of the wokerati and I wouldn’t put it past the transmob to transition me retrospectively into a boy – she has no business knowing what’s to come.
Given the perilous world that today’s girls are growing up in, I find it hard – indulgent even – to wallow in my past when it is their future that demands a clear focus.
Barely a day goes by without proof that sexism and its even uglier, deadlier allotropes are on the rise. Andrew Tate may no longer be making news headlines but his toxic brand of self-proclaimed misogyny is still spewing into the “manosphere” – platforms typically sought out by men and boys – every minute of every day.
Earlier this year, research by Vodafone revealed that, on average, boys aged 11 to 14 are exposed to harmful, hateful views within 30 minutes of being online. One in 10 is being pushed vile content, which can include coercive, controlling porn generated by AI algorithms within 60 seconds.
Little wonder 42 per cent of parents have heard their sons make inappropriate comments of a sexual, violent and degrading nature. Not because they want to provoke – but because it has been normalised.
As recently as this summer the National Police Chiefs’ Council declared violence against girls and women in the UK had reached such “epidemic” levels that it constituted “a national state of emergency”.
Between 2018 and 2023, there was a 37 per cent increase in violent crimes against them. Last year over one million such offences were recorded in England and Wales – constituting 20 per cent of all documented crime.
Just this week, Girlguiding published an annual survey of attitudes aged seven to 21. The organisation itself described the results as “devastating”; 59 per cent of those aged 13 and above have witnessed or experienced sexual harassment; 85 per cent of those over 11 run the gamut of daily sexism.
Almost half feel unsafe, less confident and anxious about their futures. A full 77 per cent have experienced online harm; from cyberstalking to unwanted sexual images and contact with individuals pretending to be someone they are not.
I’m not a man hater; I don’t treat every boy my daughters meet as a potential predator. But can we genuinely keep referring to these physical and psychological attacks as a girl problem?
Take a look at the data and it’s blindingly obvious that until our boys are educated – re-educated – in the ineluctable virtues of equality and respect, it doesn’t matter a jot what girls do.
To start with, the movement to introduce a smartphone-free childhood needs to be given support at the highest level. Personally I would unplug TikTok and lose the cable but it needs, at the very least, to be far more tightly regulated.
Nobody under 18 should be able to access videos online they wouldn’t be legally allowed to watch in a cinema. There also needs to be a greater emphasis in schools on giving boys and young men better outlets for their natural competitiveness and testosterone on the sporting field or gym, rather than competing in the mega-misogyny stakes.
Take another look at that fierce little face in the photograph. In all honesty, what can she do to avoid being punched in the breast by a stranger in broad daylight? Being insulted, treated like a second-class citizen, inappropriately touched by a locum GP?
The only way she can alter her behaviour is by staying home. Forever. The reality is that in order for girls to flourish, we urgently need to reframe masculinity, so boys will leave them be. It might not sound much. But it is everything.