Everyday Sexism Project: Dress Codes and Rape Culture

Ideas

May 22, 2015 8:00 AM EDT

Bates is the founder of The Everyday Sexism Project and the author of Everyday Sexism

Some of our most powerful and lasting ideas about the world around us are learned at school. Hard work pays off. Success comes from working together. Girls’ bodies are dangerous and harassment is inevitable.

This might sound inflammatory, but it is not an exaggeration. It is the overriding message being sent to thousands of students around the world by sexist school dress codes and the way in which they are enforced.

In the past month alone a Canadian teen says she was given detention for wearing a full length maxi dress because it violated her school dress code by showing her shoulders and back and a UK school announced plans to ban skirts altogether.

These are just the most recent cases in an ever-growing list that has seen shoulders and knees become a battleground, leggings and yoga pants banned and girls in some cases reportedly told to flap their arms up and down while their attire was inspected, or asked to leave their proms because chaperones considered their dresses too ‘sexual’ or ‘provocative’.

Many schools respond to criticism of dress codes by citing the importance of maintaining a ‘distraction free’ learning environment, or of teaching young people about the importance of dressing appropriately for different occasions.

17 of History’s Most Rebellious Women

**Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot, Russia** Members of the feminist punk rock collective were jailed after protesting Russian President Putin in a church. The group has since used its notoriety to promote human rights issues. The very name of the band is meant to turn something passive into something powerful.Yuri Kozyrev—Noor for TIME

**Tawakul Karman, Yemen** Tawakul Karman, chair of Women Journalists Without Chains — a Yemeni group that defends human rights and freedom of expression — pressured former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down from power, which he held from 1978 to 2012. She was arrested several times during her peaceful protests.Hani Mohammed—AP

**Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar** Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu has been the foremost leader in the effort to democratize the Southeast Asian nation as well as a courageous advocate for human rights and peaceful revolution. She spent 15 years under house arrest when the government refused to cede power to her after her party was elected. Alison Wright—Corbis

**Corazon Aquino, the Philippines** When Corazon Aquino's senator husband was assassinated in 1983, Aquino ran against 20-year autocrat Ferdinand Marcos in his stead. Though Marcos claimed victory, Aquino led a peaceful revolution across the nation of impoverished islands. Aquino became President of the Philippines upon Marcos' resignation.Willia Vicoy— Reuters/Corbis

**Phoolan Devi, India** Phoolan Devi began a streak of violent robberies across northern and central India, targeting upper castes. In 1981 she led her gang of bandits to massacre more than 20 men in the high-caste village where her former lover was killed. Devi negotiated her sentence with the Indian government to 11 years in jail.Getty Images

**Angela Davis, the U.S.** Angela Davis, a political activist, scholar and author, was accused of supplying the gun in the death of a federal judge. She fled, landing her a spot on the Most Wanted list. Davis was caught in New York but was acquitted in 1972, backed by activist supporters who demanded her freedom. Hulton Archive—Getty Images

**Golda Meir, Israel**Although best known as Israel's Prime Minister during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Meir made her mark on the revolutionary Zionist movement during the pre-state period when during a 1948 trip to the U.S., she raised $50 million from the Jewish diaspora community, making a state of Israel possible.Bettmann—Corbis

**Vilma Lucila Espín, Cuba** The spirit of the Cuba's communist revolution was most vividly embodied by its "First Lady," Vilma Lucila Espín. After training as a chemical engineer, Espín took up arms against the Batista dictatorship in the 1950s and debunked the notion of the docile Caribbean woman with her full army fatigues.AP

**Janet Jagan, Guyana** Chicago-born Janet Jagan and her husband founded the People's Progressive Party in Guyana, which sought to promote Marxist ideals. Her hand in protests got her thrown in jail by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. She was elected Guyana's first female President in 1997.Harry Benson—Getty Images

**Jiang Qing, China** After marrying Chairman Mao Zedong in 1938, Jiang Qing climbed the ladder of the Communist Party, eventually becoming the leader of the infamous Gang of Four. Jiang refused to apologize for the criminal charges that were eventually brought against her, instead spending a decade in prison before dying. Bettmann—Corbis

**Nadezhda Krupskaya, Russia**Along with fellow radical Vladimir Lenin, Nadezhda Krupskaya helped set up the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class in 1895. Police arrested them both, and they married while exiled in Siberia. After her release in 1901, she ran Iskra (the Spark), an international newspaper for Marxists. Hulton-Deutsch Collection—Corbis

**Susan B. Anthony, the U.S.** In 1851, Susan B. Anthony met fellow women's-rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the outspoken duo began touring the country arguing the case for women's suffrage.U.S. marshals arrested Anthony for voting illegally in 1872. She died before the 19th Amendment was passed.Frances Benjamin Johnston—Corbis

**Emmeline Pankhurst, Britain**<br Emmeline Pankhurst formed the Women's Social and Political Union in Britain, which carried out public demonstrations and did not shy away from arson, vandalism or hunger strikes. Pankhurst was routinely arrested, but she never strayed from her pursuit of women's suffrage.Bettmann—Corbis

**Harriet Tubman, the U.S.** Harriet Tubman, who was born a slave in 1820, fled Maryland for the free state of Pennsylvania. Over the years, she went on 19 missions to rescue more than 300 slaves on the Underground Railroad. During the Civil War, she was the first woman to lead a military expedition, liberating more than 700 slaves. Corbis

**Mary Wollstonecraft, Britain**In 18th century Britain, Mary Wollstonecraft made the unprecedented claim that the rights of women are equal to those of men. In her two most famous works, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1791), she takes on Edmund Burke with her then-radical feminism.Hulton Archive—Getty Images

**Joan of Arc, France** Spurred by dreams in which Christian saints would urge her to fight the English, Joan of Arc famously led the assault that lifted the English siege of the city of Orleans in 1429, turning the tide in favor of the French. But a few years later, Joan was captured and burned in a public square on grounds of witchcraft. Getty Images

**Boudica, Britain**In the 1st century A.D., Boudica, Queen of the Iceni rebelled against her daughters were raped and she was publicly flogged by Roman officials. Boudica led a coalition of tribes on a revenge mission and razed ancient London. Though her rebellion failed, she is remembered as one of Britain's original nationalist heroes.Hulton Archive—Getty Images

But at the Everyday Sexism Project, where people from around the world share their experiences of gender inequality, we have received over a hundred testimonies from girls and young women who are affected by the dress codes and feel a strong sense of injustice.

One such project entry read:

“I got dress coded at my school for wearing shorts. After I left the principal’s office with a detention I walked past another student wearing a shirt depicting two stick figures: the male holding down the females head in his crotch and saying ‘good girls swallow’. Teachers walked right past him and didn’t say a thing.”

Girls are repeatedly told the reason they have to cover up to avoid ‘distracting’ their male peers, or making male teachers ‘uncomfortable’…

“At my school our dress code dictates everything about a girls outfit: knee length shorts or skirts only, no cleavage, no bra straps, no tank tops. We can’t even wear flip flops, and girls will be given detentions and sent home for breaking any one of these rules. There’s no dress code for men, and the reasoning? Girls can’t dress “provacatively” [sic] because it could distract and excite the boys.”

I can’t help feeling there is a powerful irony in accusing a girl of being ‘provocative’ – in projecting that societal assumption onto her adolescent body – before she is even old enough to have learned how to correctly spell the word.

One student says she was given three specific reasons for the school dress code:

“1) There are male teachers and male sixth formers [high school seniors]
2) Teachers feel uncomfortable around bras etc.
3) Don’t want the boys to target you or intimidate you”.

This sends an incredibly powerful message. It teaches our children that girls’ bodies are dangerous, powerful and sexualised, and that boys are biologically programmed to objectify and harass them. It prepares them for college life, where as many as one in five women is sexually assaulted but society will blame and question and silence them, while perpetrators are rarely disciplined.

The problem is often compounded by a lack of any attempt to discipline boys for harassing behavior, which drives home the message that it is the victim’s responsibility to prevent. We have received thousands of testimonies from girls who have complained about being verbally harassed, touched, groped, chased, followed, licked, and assaulted at school, only to be told: “he just likes you”, or: “boys will be boys”. The hypocrisy is breath taking.

Meanwhile, the very act of teachers calling young girls out for their attire projects an adult sexual perception onto an outfit or body part that may not have been intended or perceived as such by the student herself. It can be disturbing and distressing for students to be perceived in this way and there is often a strong element of shame involved.

“I’ve been told by a teacher that the way I was wearing my socks made me look like a prostitute in my first year of school, making me 13, and I’ve been asked whether I’m ashamed of myself because I rolled my skirt up,” wrote one young woman.

The codes aren’t just problematic for sexist reasons. One project entry reads:

“At age 10 I was pulled out of my fifth grade class for a few minutes for a ‘special health lesson’. As an early bloomer, I already had obvious breasts and was the tallest in my class. I thought they were giving me a paper about reproductive health that’s normally given to the 12 year old girls. Instead I was told to cover my body more because I was different.”

Other incidents have also seen boys banned from school for having hair ‘too long’ or wearing traditionally ‘feminine’ fashion, from skinny jeans to skirts. A transgender student said he was threatened with having his photo barred from the school yearbook simply because he chose to wear a tuxedo to prom. Black girls are more likely to be targeted for ‘unacceptable’ hairstyles. The parents of a 12-year old African American student said she was threatened with expulsion for refusing to cut her naturally styled hair. Her mother was told she violated school dress codes for being “a distraction”.

At this point it starts to feel like such ‘codes’ are less about protecting children and more about protecting strict social norms and hierarchies that refuse to tolerate difference or diversity.

This is a critical moment. The school dress code debate will be dismissed by many for being minor or unimportant, but it is not.

When a girl is taken out of class on a hot day for wearing a strappy top, because she is ‘distracting’ her male classmates, his education is prioritized over hers. When a school takes the decision to police female students’ bodies while turning a blind eye to boys’ behavior, it sets up a lifelong assumption that sexual violence is inevitable and victims are partially responsible. Students are being groomed to perpetuate the rape culture narrative that sits at the very heart of our society’s sexual violence crisis. It matters very much indeed.