Primary school

recovering

I am now in my 40’s and finally feel I am recovering from things that happened in early childhood. I was abused by my father, and I think guys could sense that I was a victim. When I was four, a boy peed on my at school during “naptime”. Somehow I felt it was my fault. Then when I was six, boys assaulted me during recess, tore off my clothes, and touched me. I was paralysed with fear, but again felt it was somehow my fault. From this fear and shame I never told anyone. Boys and men continued to abuse me for decades, all because I was formatted by my father’s early abuse. It has taken ten years of therapy for me to realise that was all wrong, and most of it was criminal. I now understand, thanks to people like Laura, and will not be a victim again.

Rey

This is the first time I remember experiencing sexism. I would have been four or maybe five – I was at school and we were drawing our favourite soft toy with coloured chalk. I was sitting next to a boy who looked over at my work, and saw what colours I was using (red and yellow). He turned to me (and as I said I was four or five so I can’t remember the exact words) and tells me that I should only be using “girl colours”, meaning pink and purple. Of course, because I was so young I didn’t contemplate it much, but I remember thinking: “Why are there only two girl colours, while the boy colours are the whole of the rest of the box? And why can’t I use them?”.

Corin Long

I am have just tallied up the pictures in my 5 year old daughters school work book. 21 pictures of women/girls – 93 pictures of boys/men. The icons denoting different difficulties of tasks are all men doing sports – running, cycling and Weight lifting.

R

Back at my old primary school, every year there was an event called the “Western zones”; essentially a multi-day sport contest between the eldest two years of kids from primary schools in the area, the winners of which would go on to represent the region in our city-wide games. In this, instead of track & field events, we all had to choose two sports to play in from a list of four. There was football (soccer), rugby, netball and volleyball. Now, I’ve never been an athletic person. I’m fat. I always have been. But, that’s a different can of worms. My first year, I chose football and netball. I’d never so much as stepped on a netball court during a casual lunchtime game, so I had no clue what was going on. The one time the ball actually came my way, I did manage to pass it correctly to my teammate, so I guess that went ok. But when it came to the football, I actually kinda kicked ass. I had chosen football because I genuinely enjoyed it (despite how rarely I played), and netball because I thought I “should”. It’s always been presented as a girls’ game, right? And yet, I was bored stiff during that game. In the football match, I was shooting and passing and shadowing like nobody’s business. Even this one boy, who’d been my “arch enemy” since year 2, commented on how well I was playing (this kid was English, so he was pretty much treated as an authority on the sport). And he sounded surprised. I know, it was most likely because I’d never once showed any enthusiasm for sport before this at school. But part of me always suspected it was also because I was a girl. Don’t get me wrong, that little bit of encouragement really boosted my confidence for a good while. He’d just sounded a little too amazed, if that makes sense. Either way, next year I opted for volleyball instead of netball. Would’ve made Sakura Avalon proud.

Lindsay

Attended a Mother’s Day assembly at my children’s school today. Song after song about how mums do all the cooking and the cleaning and the washing and that’s why our children love us so. Sad and cross that my children are being taught to see mothers primarily as cleaners and cooks. It is 2016 and schools are still teaching children stereotypes from the 1950’s: women cook and clean, men work. The Dads don’t get a special assembly on Fathers Day, they get a bacon butty at a pre-school breakfast because of course all the MEN have important jobs to go to whereas the mums can just put down their Marigolds and spend half the morning in school. Then a few years later schools wonder why they’re struggling to get more girls into STEM sciences. Emailed to complain, waiting to be dismissed as a killjoy.