In the Little Feminist Book Club, we don’t read a lot of books. The group, set up by former students at our school, is more about reading poems and articles, analysing song lyrics, discussing the issues that matter to us and, most importantly, campaigning. Our current campaign – the one you might have heard of – is to ban school uniform from pornographic content.
Simply put, we want to end the depiction of school uniform in pornography to ensure that minors are not viewed as anything other than what they are: children. We were shocked when we realised that this content is currently legal – most of the adults we’ve spoken to agree that it is wrong. But apparently it falls to us – students aged 14 and 15 – to take action.
A new law, due to come into force on 6 November, will ban pornography that shows sexual activity involving anyone pretending to be under 16. But it won’t outlaw the depiction of adults dressed as older schoolchildren. We want to remove this grey area in order to stop normalising the sexualisation of school uniforms.
We believe children and children’s clothing should not be associated with sexual acts. Therefore, we believe that school uniform should not be shown as something “sexy”, regardless of the actual age of the person wearing it. Previous members of the Little Feminist Book Club, working with Tools for Change, successfully campaigned for better access to period products in our school.
We then heard about another school feminist group who had campaigned to get school uniforms banned from sex shops. We were appalled that they were being sold in that context, yet somehow not surprised. From an early age, some of us had noticed that school uniforms are depicted in ways that sexualise women wearing them.
Mae recalls: “For me it started when I was 12, watching TV with my mother. A female character put on a school uniform to turn on a man and I thought, ‘I’m going to have to wear a uniform like that tomorrow.’” No 12-year-old should feel uncomfortable about going to school in a uniform that is designed to promote unity and community and safety. It made us question how we would be perceived when we left the house in our uniforms.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
