9 - Critical education policy studies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2024
Summary
Introduction
In the wake of the abduction and subsequent murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer in London in March 2021, the issue of physical and reputational violence against women has become a focus of intense and sustained public debate. People came forward to give testimony, and included within this are accounts about how and why educational organisations can be unsafe. This is not new, where name calling and double standards are regarded as: ‘ordinary, expected and public’ (Bell 2008: 3). However, McBain (2021) reports that the failure to engage seriously means that the Everard and other cases has now produced ‘the reckoning’ illustrated by the public response to ‘Everyone’s Invited’, an Instagram account set up in June 2020 by Soma Sara, a 22-year-old UCL graduate, to gather anonymous accounts of sexism and sexual abuse at UK schools, and she goes on to say:
By early April it had collected thousands of testimonies (by late September it had 54,000) which implicated some of the country’s most prestigious schools in perpetuating what Sara describes as ‘rape culture’. By this, she means the normalization of sexist jokes, sexual harassment and online abuse, which creates the conditions for more extreme violence. In March students at Latymer and Highgate, two private schools in London, staged walkouts to protest rape culture. In June, Everyone’s Invited released a list of almost 3,000 English schools that had been named in testimonies: around one in ten schools, state and private. (Soma Sara)
The segregation of the provision of and access to educational services means that the habitual rank ordering of the self and others is based on individual and corporate fabrications that demean and damage everyone. This physical and mental violence is evident in schools, and policy violence creates, sustains, and routinises it. Successive UK governments have a stake in segregated provision: in the name of modernisation the unmodern that sexualises female bodies is perpetuated as legitimate; governing by knowledge production authorises the acceptance of sexual savagery; and intelligent knowledgeabilities are deployed under the banner of aspiration but are used to keep bodies in their predetermined and correct place.
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- Information
- A Political Sociology of Education Policy , pp. 128 - 144Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2023