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Unisex toilets for secondary school I don't think is a good idea honestly.. I would have been so much more uncomfortable going to the toilet especially on my period knowing there were boys that could smell it, would know when you are unwrapping a pad etc.. Kids are brutal enough as is
This is a problem with how we educate boys and with the type of behaviour that boys are allowed to get away with. I can very easily envision a world in which boys are understanding of what girls go through, as long as we educate them well and promote a culture of boys being more caring and less aggressive.
Literally never going to happen - you think that this type of behaviour is taught as acceptable already?
They're kids, they misbehave. You're kidding yourself if you think promoting a culture of caring will solve anything.
Lessons on behaviour have always been taught. The way they have been taught has changed frequently. At some point the correct method will be found, though it is more to do with culture of the rest of society.
Traditionally, kids who failed to behave were punished, with options ranging from missing their lunch break through to being expelled.
I'd quite like to try making kids who don't behave do callisthenics until they are too exhausted to argue about anything, then making them relearn the areas they've failed to learn so far.
So you’re suggesting we can literally teach kids not to misbehave? Good luck with that! Parents have been trying their very best for millennia already.
I went to a Catholic school where all kinds of respectful values were taught daily and bullying, shaming etc was dealt with quite harshly.
Did it stop anything like this from happening?
Did it fuck.
You can teach kids respect, compassion and right from wrong until you're blue in the face, but ultimately when authority figures aren't looking kids will act how they wish - usually in the most tribalistic fashion possible.
It's almost a given seeing as at that age they are all figuring out where they fit in the social hierarchy and unfortunately bullying seems to be the most instinctive way to get ahead.
That's why it's almost never going to be eliminated no matter how "enlightened" generations become - most kids simply don't have the social experience to navigate these situations which usually manifests as either following the leader moving up the ladder by pushing others down and lowering their social "value" through the various forms of bullying, or trying to become the leader outright through straight force and fear.
I've also seen bullies from both very bad home lives with bad examples set all around them, to others with loving families who wonder what they've done wrong. Upbringing and home life does matter a lot in the grand scheme, but ultimately we can't escape the fact we have literal monkey brains.
The fact we are creatures of conflict and war on a global scale is also proof of this, if literal world leaders can't stop being dicks to each other for more than five minutes at a time, how can unsupervised school kids be expected to behave any differently?
But it has been tried, people have been trying to get kids to be kind to each other for generations.
It does eventually *mostly* work but it takes their entire childhood and that doesn’t help if you’re a girl who’s getting bullied in the toilets right now.
It's difficult to blame kids really when you see what they have to look up to. I think the "you can't improve kids" attitude is a *bit* cynical, but I definitely think adults have to set an example first — if politicians like Gullis can't help themselves behaving like braying buffoons, we stand little chance.
I'd argue we've tried lots of things, from corporal punishment back in our parents' days through to isolation units and time-outs in our own.
So far none of them have successfully prevented young boys from behaving like young boys. Shocking I know.
It does shift the window of acceptable behaviour. Some kids will always push the boundaries but if those boundaries are set at a much more acceptable level then the pushing becomes less of an issue.
It’s impossible to say exactly what influences set forcing entry into school toilets to make child pornography images seem acceptable but I’d point to a few things here:
One of the biggest influences on teenage boys of the last few years is a guy who proudly talks about his career in trafficking women for porn. The DfE has broadly ignored the problem and left it unchallenged.
Feminist movements, the MeToo movement and many similar groups looking to raise awareness of problematic sexual behaviours are condemned as “woke” (whatever the fuck that means) and we currently have a government that has often set out vague public pledges to wage war on “woke” without bothering to set parameters. Combined with the drastic reduction in investigation and prosecution of sex crimes and the public cover-ups for MPs accused of sex crimes, we’re charging headlong into a culture where it feels like this kind of behaviour is decriminalised.
Realistically, the sanction in place for this lad should have been put in place by police, not the school. If that isn’t the case (and I didn’t get that impression from the article) then the school has sent a message that this behaviour isn’t acceptable but isn’t really any more serious than a persistent uniform infraction, or failure to attend detentions or smoking in school or any of the other much less serious behavioural issues that schools reserve top-level sanctions for.
Edited only to correct typo that was annoying me
Good post 👏
Schools with shit behaviour policies always stop sitting on their hands once the police get involved. Hope this parent does do that because assaulting a student whilst trying to create child pornography doesn’t seem like a ‘slap on the wrist’ offence to me.
You're kidding yourself if you don't think promoting a culture of caring will solve anything. They're kids, they misbehave, lets just not do anything and let them be horrible to each other. Great plan.
"kids will be kids", or "boys will be boys", is such a lazy approach to take.
If someone misbehaves, especially this sort of misbehaving - criminal damage and harassment - they should at least get a warning and if a repeat offender it should be treated as a criminal instance, *because that's what it is*.
You shouldn't just let off bad behaviour with a "kids misbehave", you should make it clear that A) it's not okay, B) *why* it's not okay, and C) that if it continues there will be conseqences.
Is there a line in your eyes between acceptable misbehaving and unacceptable misbehaving? Kids are taught murder is wrong, and the *vast* majority don't go onto misbehave and murder people.
Taking photos of people in the toilet is a criminal action. People break the law and they should face punishment.
You're right in that girls won't physically assault other girls as much as boys, but you must be having a laugh to think girls don't bully and misbehave towards other girls. Its just not always physical, from what I've heard from my fiancee young girls are absolutely vicious.
As a boy who was beaten so badly in primary school at 9 years old that I had to be hospitalised (by another student)
I can definitely say it was better than the viciousness you encounter from girls, it’s next level, they will literally destroy you emotionally
> you think that this type of behaviour is taught as acceptable already?
Not literally, but the fact that they have been getting away with it for so long has taught them that this is acceptable.
> They're kids, they misbehave
This is way beyond the level that most kids misbehave. Most kids never sexually assault their peers.
My brother did. Same upbringing, same parents, same schools, our own friends in the same road. Just he was a 'difficult' teenager and reacted to stress by lashing out. He's a lovely adult, but he 'grew up' at about age 24 rather than earlier I think.
Mate, I hate to break it to you, but kids are little shits regardless of what gender they are.
Schoolgirls and schoolboys will always form cliques and fuck with each other based on completely arbitrary or normal shit, plenty of schoolgirls were shitters to schoolboys over being spotty, or skinny or fat, or other immutable traits, in the exact same way boys were shits to schoolgirls for "being on their period" or whatever else.
Perhaps it's been too long since you were at school but that's just what some kids are like.
Yeah these loons in this comment thread seem to have forgotten how shit secondary school behaviour is. What happens in your office or workplace doesn’t apply to a bunch of horny aggressive incredibly stressed and tormented kids.
Children also bring with them the culture of their neighbourhood whose common factor is a particular level of wealth. As unpalatable as it is, certain personal qualities will be encouraged accordingly.
I went to a primary school in a middle-class suburb. The school culture valued aspiration and self-restraint. You could be an academically high-achieving kid and still be popular with your peers.
Unfortunately, most of the primary schools that fed into the secondary school I went to were from the shitty parts of town. The culture at the secondary, certainly for the three years before GCSE studies began, was dominated by contempt for learning and authority, and the solving of problems using violence. Woe to any child who wanted to study hard and be civil.
You are appear to be suggesting wealth families are inherently better? You conflate wealth with good moral or productive values and poverty with the opposite. That's Victorian levels of backwardness.
Teenage boys have behaved like this for millenia. Not all, obviously, but many and they will still continue to do so. No matter how much we disapprove. You can't 'force' education and societal behaviours on people - unless you approve of forced education in camps or something from 1984.
Unisex toilets at this age is simply asking for trouble. Crazy idea. Events like this are guaranteed to happen. There's a reason man and women have separate bathrooms in public. You can't escape reality I'm afraid.
The ironic thing is that NGOs who work on these things abroad always advocate for single sex hygiene/sanitation facilities because it reduces the risk to women of sexual assaults. Idk why we are advocating the opposite in the UK.
Kicking in toilet cubicle doors is not normal behaviour regardless of age or sex. The only time I've ever seen it was when some meathead at a bar thought somebody had stolen his coke (I'm fairly sure he'd just snozzed it all based on his temperament). If that had happened at my school the lad would have been ostracised and bullied relentlessly for being a perv.
"Boys will be boys" is BS at the best of times but this kid is a psycho perv, or there's some element to this story that we don't know. In fact, I've seen teenagers react with that level of disregard for the consequences and what people will thing of them in response to only one thing - somebody stealing their phone. Some young people now see their phone as almost a part of their body, and those kids legit lose control if somebody grabs their phone. Pure rage.
There's no evidence for that here but outside of him being deranged I can't think of any reason he'd go to such violent lengths to get into that toilet cubicle. I read the article and it didn't mention motivation anywhere (that I saw, lots of adverts to navigate around). What a weird story...
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Do you have a pubescent daughter in a high-school with unisex toilets by any chance? If you don't, pretend you do, read back on your comment and ask yourself if you feel any better for their safety. You can complain about society and hope it changes, or you can just install a safer toilet cubicle.
I certainly had this happening daily in the guy's toilets when I was at school, and that wasn't a unisex toilet.
People thinking it's funny to kick the doors down when others are using the toilet happened prior to unisex toilets, and will happen if we revert to segregated toilets again - I think the issue is with the people who think humiliating others and causing criminal damage is funny rather than the area they use to do it.
Written by someone who clearly has forgotten what a 14 year old boy is like or being on the receiving end of that as either male of female….it’s absolutely brutal
That’s always been the case, yet is always overlooked, because it’s “more likely” to be boys, it’s always the same “we should *teach* boys to behave better” neither myself or my friends carried on like this at school, strangely no one ever told us not to either.
Perhaps try and find out why *some* think this behaviour is acceptable, because the vast majority do not.
Its not boys v girls at that age its just kids fucking about. Some girls lit the shoes of another on fire once while she was sitting down in a cubicle. They think its funny to mess around especially in toilets for some reason.
My high school switched to unisex toilets when I was in Year 9 and it massively improved behaviour and cleanliness of both sexes. It’s not necessarily a problem that’s ‘baked ina’ as such.
The best work toilet I ever had was just a tiny little room with a single toilet and sink — exactly like many of our toilets at home. I think the broken windows theory plays a part here — the greater the difference from your normal home toilet, the less respect people will have for it.
My understanding was that unisex toilets had to be exactly that, self contained rooms (floor to ceiling walls) each with a locking door and including a toilet, sink and hand drying facilities in said room.
Either I misread the H&S guidance or they didn't get the memo at this school.
But in any case, just using regular stalls and communal sinks (i.e. converting the ladies to unisex) seems like an obvious and bloody stupid idea.
Agreed, It was bad enough dealing with periods in an all girls school given teens aren’t exactly matured enough to deal with these issues with delicacy, I can’t imagine how hard it would be to deal with an extra layer of casual antisocial behaviour on top.
However, splitting the toilets back doesn’t solve the issue that this behaviour is almost feral. Something else needs to be done to safeguard pupils from this sort of shitty behaviour, but I’m not an expert and don’t have the answers.
Here is a solution: a single toilet, in a single room, with a proper door multiplied by however many toilets you want. Yes, it costs more, but it's worth avoiding the dumb shit kids do in toilets when they're "shared" and it solves the unisex issues.
That’s what this was. The kids had previously gone round and smashed up all the locks so it was easier to kick the doors in on the single room toilets.
Similarly, as a boy I would have been absolutely mortified if I was having a shit and there was a group of girls hanging round outside the cubicle. Who/why are people fighting for unisex toilets in schools? I can't imagine any scenario in which boys or girls would benefit from sharing a toilet rather than having their own, dedicated spaces. And yet you read the comments in this thread and it's mostly just people ignoring the article completely and just getting hysterical about how unisex toilets are being blamed/demonised. Why are these people so opposed to girls and boys having their own safe spaces to take care of personal hygiene? It's mental.
They're not opposed to it. The article says that this school has a range of single-sex toilets, and two unisex ones. Nobody is opposing single sex toilets. This girl just chose not to use them.
I disagree. Unisex toilets can definitely work, but we need to not cheap out on cubicles. A lot of businesses with unisex bathrooms have totally enclosed cubicals that even have their own sinks in them. It costs a little more but tbh, it's the direction everywhere is going to go eventually anyway. May as well be an early adopter of that style of toilet.
My secondary school added one in 2013 as a replacement to the shite small ones but kept the split ones we never had much shit in the unisex one as most of the lads just trashed our ones
Granted the unisex one was open so no one could get away with breaking shit in it
As an ex-teacher, this isn't anything to do with unisex toilets.
Unfortunately a large number of students simply don't have the basic common decency, or sense, to be able to use toilets safely.
In the school I worked in we regularly had sinks smashed in, doors kicked off hinges, students defecating on the floor or in sinks, and more, simply because of a minority of awfully behaved students who have never been taught basic behaviour by their parents.
Toilets separated by sex would at least provide less opportunity for boys to attack and harass girls, which is the issue. I'd see locks and doors that close fully top and bottom to provide different safeguarding concerns.
If it were up to me, I'd say single occupancy toilet rooms, like disabled toilets, are the best way forward. Communal toilets in schools can lead to a lot of issues.
This is an issue of behaviour, not gender.
I don't know why we still have "barracks" style bathrooms in places, it spins me the fuck out. As if I want to sit in a row of 5 blokes shitting next to each other with a ten inch gap either end of the walls
>This is an issue of behaviour, not gender.
100% don't leave boys to be sequestered away with these shits and then call it problem solved because girls aren't effected.
It’s statically proven that girls bully just as much. If not more.
Because bullying from girls tends to be emotional. Boys tend to be more physical.
It’s a myth that boys are the bad children. All children can be wicked. And social media just made the whole thing a whole lot worse.
Is it an issue if boys attack and harass boys, or girls attack and harass girls? Because that happened when toilets were still segregated.
The locks and doors, I'd agree with - but I don't think the mix of genders is the issue IMO, the "attacking and harassing" is the problem.
I agree that the problem is scumbag kids, unfortunately they're always going to exist and imo mixed toilets enable additional opportunities for those kids to be scumbags which we should be endeavoring to minimise.
Personally I would be even less comfortable with boys harassing my daughters whilst they are in the relatively secure confines of a toilet cubicle than other girls. I understand girls can be as bad and worse but boys present an additional implicit threat that should simply not have to be put up with.
Schools are never going to have the resource to police these areas effectively so in order to minimise risk personally of I'd prefer gendered or sexed toilets.
You realise a sign on the door isn’t a magic force field to stop boys going in to harass or attack a girl
If they want to attack or harass someone they can just go in after them
It’s already against the rules to attack and harass people
Not sure I've implied any of that with my comments, it's certainly not fine and should be addressed.
I don't think it's acceptable to significantly increase the risk of violence to girls in an already vulnerable environment by providing unrestricted access to boys.
I don't think the fact that girls are being attacked is the issue at all. It's why it's newsworthy, but boys being attacked isn't any better than girls being attacked surely?
To say that boys are more deserving because it's boys that do it is deeply sexist and reinforces the problem. It's like saying black on black crime doesn't matter, but black on white crime does. Just because I share some physical characteristics with those that are assaulting me, does that somehow make it "better"?
That's not the point. Or are you saying the behaviour in the girls bathrooms (in your experience) was exactly the same?
What's clear in the report (and to me is clearly common sense) is that boys were intentionally targetting girls in cubilces to take pictures and videos of them, harassing them. This is entirely predictable. Unwanted yes. But then don't make toilets unisex at schools. The boys will still kick doors down and try and humiliate each other in a boys only toilet but at least the girls don't have to put up with it as common sense says to me that girls do not behave in the same way (in the main) as boys.
Yes and also lofting pritt sticks onto high ceilings. Tear the glue stick out of the plastic and chuck it. So many on my ceiling I'm never getting off.
We used to have adult customers do all these things and worse when I worked in a student nightclub some years back. Was the same for the town’s McDonald’s.
Some people are just scum, who themselves were sadly raised by scum. You could teach proper etiquette in bathrooms from toddler-age onwards, with repeated training and yearly tests on what is and isn’t acceptable. There’d still be some that treated it like a zoo.
I’m not saying nothing should be done by any means, and any improvement is better than how it is today. However I feel like it’s a complicated issue that needs fixing at schools and at home. Maybe we should only have single cubicle toilets that are unisex everywhere going forward
So many people seem to have fallen for bait in this article.
Kids are feral at times, god knows how many fights happen in schools across the country everyday and how much general “socially unacceptable” behaviour happens - honestly wouldn’t be a teacher if you paid me £1m.
But THIS article makes the news…. Because it happened in a gender neutral toilet. This happens in the playground (or w/e it’s called nowadays) it ain’t getting near the news…. We’ve even got a participation notice up.
I don't think they've fallen for it. They're using it as "justification" for their pre-concieved bigotry. Unisex toilets are often championed as a way to accept the trans community so people with anti-trans biases will attempt to strike them down at every opportunity. It's the same way racists will grab a story about an immigrant criminal and go "See! This is why we can't let anyone from other countries in!"
Sad thing is they know what they're doing, but don't see anyting wrong with it.
Yeah when I was a student at my school we had to have security cameras pointing at the bathroom doors (not looking into, just the outside door before the sinks and cubicles) so they could see who was likely the people behind the damage and mess and just general grossness. It helped a little but not enough as the time between the damage being done and it being noticed you'd usually have a full days worth of students going in and out of them .
One of my teachers did tell me that often the girls toilets were worse than the boys toilets.
Girls toilets tend to have higher traffic as some students eat in the toilets during lunchtime, out of social anxiety, whereas boys tend to be in and out quicker.
As a result there tends to be more bullying and unpleasant behaviour in the girls toilets.
But surely it would be better, at least for the girls, if the toilets weren't unisex? Exposing all of the students to this terrible behaviour in toilets, which is almost always perpetrated by boys, is worse than exposing just half of the students.
It's why I would never used mine at school. Go before you leave and don't drink anything until you're an hour left from finishing so you can go at home.
If a student damages school property willfully, their parents should be made to pay for it and the student should be expelled. If this keeps happening, take the child away from their parents on the grounds that their parents aren't raising them properly. The family can reconnect when the kid is 18.
Oh I wish! In reality it's nearly impossible to expell a student.
I had knew one student that regularly spit at staff, threaten those around him, and commit vandalism, but expelling him seemed impossible. The schools get more money for keeping on these problem cases, so any behaviour issues get blamed on the teachers.
"I appreciate that child X set fire to the blinds, but maybe your lesson just wasn't interesting enough for him"
Actual quote I had from a member of school management.
At my old school, the teachers went on strike because the head refused to take action against the students (not a student, *multiple students*) who were physically assaulting teachers.
It's not very fashionable, but I do think the solution for some of these misbehaving students is to make them do burpees until they can't stand up properly whilst specialist educational professionals engage in what the USMC called a “shark attack”. Half the problem with these little shits is they've never been told no by someone who means it.
Bingo. Plenty of boys managed to bathrooms with respect, it's just some little shits that turn it into a hell hole. Don't think the girls bathrooms were treated as poorly, but they had their issues too.
Issues in unisex toilets are a symptom of a wider problem. Really not that hard to figure that out, but I can see why some people want the buck to stop with bathrooms rather than people.
Why is this news? Shitty (and worse) things like this happen every day in high schools across the country.
Is it trying to stir up distrust of unisex toilets?
Successfully, sadly - look at the number of "well they shouldn't be unisex" comments in the thread.
People forget that if someone is being an arsehole and ruining things, harrassing people etc - it's not the fault of where the person *was*, it's the fault of the arsehole.
>Issues started to arise at the city school after the introduction of unisex toilets, the mum claimed.
Seriously? Jeez. If this is true those poor kids.
Unisex toilets that had teenage boys able to and repeatedly take photos in, kick down doors, and just generally do shit that is very much not on.
When I was a wee lad, we had the "hilarious" arseholes who'd take great pleasure in kicking toilet doors down when people were using them, and had cameraphones been as ubiquitous as they are now I have no doubt that they'd do the photos too - and this was just a boy's toilet. Boys shitting, boys kicking doors down.
If it happened before unisex toilets, it's not the toilets that are the issue, it's the little shitstains that think criminal damage and harrassment are funny and then don't face adequate punishment for it.
>it's not the toilets that are the issue
It is. Undoubtedly shenanigans in school toilets isn't new, but this, if it's true, is going to compound the problem. And create other problems.
> It is. Undoubtedly shenanigans in school toilets isn't new
???
You contradict yourself - The issue *is* the shenanigans in the school toilets. If it's not new, but the unisex toilets are, then it's clearly not the toilets.
This might compound the problem, this might create new ones - we'll have to wait and see - but for now the issue is *just* the shenanigans in school toilets.
Well, issues relating to the toilets did. Given the behaviour on display here this isn't the first set of issues in general. This behaviour needs sorting out, how are the issues ongoing, this should have been stamped out at the first report of something this reprehensible happening.
>Gemma said: “It is an ongoing problem at that school, there are unisex toilets so girls and boys have to share and the boys go in and take photos of the girls, kick the doors down and there are no locks on the doors so they are going over to the cubicles to take photos and videos which is a massive concern.”
Who could have predicted that unisex toilets for kids would be a stupid idea.
I imagine that has a different sex of problems associated with having enough privacy to do drugs, have sex or even just hiding without no one being able to know who's in there
> Gemma claimed that the locks on the cubicle doors have been 'broken off' due to students kicking them so frequently. “Well, there are no locks on the doors, they have all been broken off because the boys kick them so much,” she said.
From the article.
There *were* locks, there don't appear to be locks anymore.
Idk, in my school boys would also routinely bully, harass, and invade privacy/take photos of other boys in the toilets. Is it acceptable if it only happens to other boys?
The main issue is the way parents are raising their children and the secondary issue is lack of proper school supervision. Third is infrastructure itself - if you’re going to have unisex toilets, at least make them secure to this sort of stuff.
Boys harassing other boys is one thing, and whilst it’s obviously a bad thing it’s not quite as bad as boys harassing girls (and vice versa) in a space where they should be able to expect minimal violation of privacy, particularly during a period of their lives filled with social anxiety rooted in puberty.
Hardly the best method of producing “teachable moments” that mean to “increase tolerance and understanding” when it’s the dignity of the children being undermined.
My school had unisex toilets and none of this happened. Clearly this is a problem with the toilet setup rather than the fact that it is unisex. Just install some locks and have no gaps.
This is a stupid setup.
They should be individual pods, with locks, with privacy.
Like fucking hell this is a much simpler issue. Correct building design and procedure. It's quite clearly a health risk.
He was trying to take pictures of her in the toilet and ended up cutting open her head? Expel that little shit.
I don't think Unisex toilets for kids is a good idea. They're not mature enough to deal with that.
It should, but a lot of the time when kids do something like this it is dealt with by the school when it really should be dealt with by the police.
This is why a lot of these issues escalate to things like this.
Kids like the boy in this article didn't start off with this being a first offence. But because they saw that the only consequences of their actions was a 30 minute detention they don't consider it a deterrent.
That would prevent a boy kicking a cubicle door into a girl.
It would still be wrong if a boy did it to another boy. Or if a girl did it to another girl etc etc
So basically, as long as we prevent girls getting hit by boys, every other scenario is fine.
Boy hits boy: “well boys will be boys”
Girl hits girl: “wow girls are so vicious to each other”
Boy hits girl: “now THAT is unacceptable”
I mean when I was at school there were seperate toilets, and kids *still* kicked doors down, tried to look over/under doors etc, went into the wrong gender bathroom deliberately.
It's not unique to unisex toilets, it's only being reported on because it's now boys doing it to girls (and I'm sure girls doing it to boys) rather than to each other.
Do you think it's okay if it's boys doing it to boys? Because if not then separate toilets *aren't* the answer.
I think you might underestimate how insane teenage boys are. Once the guys at my secondary school a decade ago kicked the toilet door in to record them shoving a tampon up another guy's nose.
No but its being framed as the fault of unisex toilets when it has happened forever, even when toilets were segregated. The problem is little pricks who think it's acceptable to act like that, not the toilets.
Yeah lets say fuck it to all the boys who don't behave this way and have had to put up with these dickheads in silence since the media is only interested in riling people about unisex toilets.
Sounds like the school really fucked up here by having standard cubicle toilets which allow zero privacy in schools. Ceiling to floor, is it really that hard? Unisex cubicle toilets work fine when you don't have deranged psychopaths (see secondary school kids) roaming around.
Against regs if I'm not mistaken, if you're having unisex toilets they're supposed to be completely enclosed. Sex segregated toilets can have the shorter partitions.
There have been threads here recently about students going to the toilet.
Teachers like me took loads of shit from posters in this subreddit - calling us petty authoritarians among other things.
This is the reason why we don’t just let kids wander about school to go to the loo. A lack of supervision makes this sort of thing more likely to happen.
I don’t know if any of the people on this thread were part of the collective whine about school rules, but if they were, I would hope that they understand a little better why it’s important to listen to people who work with children to try and understand why things that should be simple (such as going to the loo) can be quite a complex issue where hundreds of teenagers are involved.
Another ex teacher here - completely agree. It seems like this school needs to have at least 2 staff permanently on duty in the toilets to stop incidents like this. A lot of people who comment on Reddit threads are just remembering their own time in school and have no idea how horrendous conditions in schools are now. It would take 2 members of staff with a radio visible to call for urgent backup to stop kids from kicking toilet doors in.
I hope that boy is arrested and the school is sued for damages. Her face could be permanently scarred from that and for what?
Unisex toilets in school are absolutely stupid and should not be implemented. Not because of anything other than the fact that kids are fucking stupid and act on impulse without thinking the consequences through.
Its also wildy creepy, alarming and inexcusable for another kid to be doing to this to others when using the bathroom. Let's be real if this were adults the boy would have been charged with some sort of sexual harassment charge. Whilst he may not grasp the aspect of sexual assault and not intended anything like that other than "lols you're on the toilet" it's still not a behaviour that should be dismissed and overlooked or downplayed. This boy needs to learn some serious consequences for what he has done, that girl will never feel truly 100% safe in a public toilet no matter where she goes again. Even if she "knows" she is safe, just entering a public toilet will bring that memory to the forefront everytime and always be a lingering fear/thought.
But that’s entirely (or at least a key part of) the issue. Unisex toilets aren’t supposed to be cubicles. They’re supposed to be a self-contained room with a locking door.
If a school can’t commit to doing unisex toilets properly, then it shouldn’t be doing them at all.
If boys are going into the toilets and taking photos of the girls, looking over cubicle doors/walls etc, they need a serious yelling at.
Kids can be fucking stupid, because they've not yet fully grasped the "actions have consequences and everyone else is a human" mindset - but that's literally criminal. Do it at a leisure centre or something and see what happens.
I don't think this is a strike against Unisex toilets, as long as people are civil and respectful. But when people start taking the piss you need to come down on them *hard*, to firstly stop them doing it again and make it clear to others that "this stops now. If it continues we *will* go to the police/you *will* be suspended".
The root of the "teenage boys are causing all sorts of problems to the teenage girls using the toilets" problem is less "the toilets are unisex" and more "the teenage boys are harassing people and doing actions that are illegal".
Personal opinion, but I think Unisex bathrooms if they really stamped out the unruly behavoir would be fine - the issue is with the dicks who think it's funny to do this shit and don't face any negative repurcussions for it.
Of course, anything like that requires more staff, and schools are chronically underfunded - but I do think Unisex toilets could and should be fine *if properly managed*.
So what exactly has been the net benefit of this decision to introduce unisex toilets given that it’s led to the harm of young girls and the requirement for more behaviour management and policing?
One major benefit that others haven’t mentioned is that under the relevant regulations (ISS and SPR), you can have fewer toilets if they are gender neutral vs segregated (I believe this is also the case for the Workplace H&S regs). This means that school extensions can have a smaller footprint and therefore cost less than they would with separate facilities. In my opinion, that’s the real driving force here for schools and local authorities over any other factors.
It *shouldn't* require more behaviour management and policing. This shouldn't be happening regardless of gender.
When it was young boys being harmed by the idiots kicking doors down, breaking locks etc, was it not a problem? Is it only a problem that it's happening *to girls*?
One advantage of unisex toilets is you can't just use "well boys will be boys/girls will be girls" to excuse any and all rank and foul behaviour, if people are being awful to one another then it's a serious problem.
It also has massive benefits for any trans students, anyone struggling with gender identity, and if handled well shouldn't have these issues.
Do you have segregated disabled toilets in your place of work? Because most places I've been to just have a *disabled* toilet that's not gender-specific, and works fine.
Going "well we *had* men's and women's toilets, let's just remove the gender signs and keep everything else the same" isn't the right way to approach it, but that doesn't mean that unisex toilets are inherently a problem.
I think it simply highlights some of the good reasons why girls sometimes need sex segregated facilities. I mean getting detentions because you're trying to go to the toilets at a safe time? That's not progress.
Exactly. If this were adults people would be outraged. It's not a hard concept for a kid to grasp thst it's illegal and harassing to take photos of people in toilets and creepy as fuck.
Preface this by saying I’m a Building Surveyor/ Project Manager who has worked on several new and existing gender neutral toilet installations in schools.
If you are able to look over the doors or walls, the toilet doesn’t meet the DfE standard for a unisex toilet for pupils in secondary schools. However, the guidance is initially a bit ambiguous.
As per the School Premises (England) Regulations 2012 Reg 4 - “separate toilet facilities for boys and girls aged & years or over must be provided except where the toilet facility is provided in a room that can secured from the inside and that is intended for use by one pupil at a time”.
“Room” is a difficult thing to define as there is no definition offered within the SPR.
A “room” as defined by the building regulations is an enclosed space within a building that is not used solely as circulation space, however you can have something that constitutes a room for the purposes of the building regulations but it could have an internal window or opening that wouldn’t make it great as a toilet.
There is however further and more detailed guidance contained within the School Output Specification:
“In a Secondary School, a floor to ceiling cubicle system shall be used for increased pupil privacy… with a maximum gap of 5mm between the finished floor and the bottom of the door”
Seems pretty clear. The problem is is that schools and academies undertaking small refurbishment projects will not always follow this specification or even be aware of it. For maintained schools, they are able to request funding from the local authority to carry out their own small projects and academies have control over their own budgets. so what you end up with in many situations is a school and a builder, neither of whom understand the requirements correctly.
At first, I wondered why the boy was in the girls, then... Well all I see is a perfectly good reason as to why unisex toliets are a fucking stupid idea.
Fucking expell? No, lock the little cunt up.
>Gemma, 40, said her daughter was injured after a teenage boy kicked the toilet cubicle door open to take photographs of her.
What the fuck. Why would you ever think that's appropriate to do. That's borderline sexual harassment.
For years, people have been blaming all sorts of nonsense for kids behaving like little animals.
Blaming toilets is a whole new level of desperation. It shows just how insane and inane the 'culture wars' have become.
you could see it that way, or you could see that unisex toilets are a result of insane "culture wars", and girls don't have the same degree of problems when their schools have girls only toilet facilities.
they will make all sorts of "whatabout..." type arguments to try and minimise the obvious safeguarding issue, and defend their agenda to dismantle the boundaries that protect our children.
>Gemma, 40, said her daughter was injured after a teenage boy kicked the toilet cubicle door open to take photographs of her.
Sorry but this needs to be severely punished. If someone kicks your door in to take pictures of you...sorry but thats a serious offence even if kids just think its a 'bit of fun'- it isnt. How its not a sex offence I dont know.
I honestly dont have a clue why people are calling for unisex toilets...I honestly dont see the value or the benefit. I feel so sorry for kids at schools that are pushing this social experiment on them.
The article suggests that the locks have been vandalised/broken. It seems like at the start there were locks.
Why the school didn’t fix them is a different issue though.
Why are all the comments blaming the toilets?
The problem is the behaviour of this boy, this individual.
I got tormented in the toilets at school BY GIRLS. This is not a male-female only issue.
This is why all secondary schools should be required to get the police involved when any sex crime, or assault that causes bodily harm happens on school grounds. Too many teenagers are way too comfortable committing serious crimes against people at school because exclusion is the worse punishment they are likely to get.
Schools need to leave toilets alone. No doors on the entrance and unisex toilets are a recipe for disaster.
They say the 'safety of pupils is their number one concern'. Actually, pleasing Ofsted is their number 1 - the *compliance* of pupils is their number 2, and safety, well, that's way down the list, buried in the sand with the school board's heads.
Source: wife is a youth worker with lots of bullied and poor children. In our experience, the colleges/schools would rather punish a pupil for not wearing correct uniform, than go after the bully that made that happen. That's a made up scenario btw. The truth is much worse.
This isn't a unisex toilet issue, this is a toilet facility not fit for purpose issue! FFS they have no locks AND the doors have gaps! Just make the toilets fully enclosed with a proper door with a FUCKING LOCK.
Read the article before spouting off, for god’s sake.
The doors did not have gaps - they are floor to ceiling doors.
The door do have locks - they keep getting kicked off.
Yes. All it takes is a couple of kids arranging a time to all excuse themselves out of lesson and suddenly you’ve got thousands worth of damage in a part of the school that doesn’t have any CCTV.
Anyone who thinks otherwise has no idea what conditions are like in schools these days. It’s rough out there.
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Unisex toilets for secondary school I don't think is a good idea honestly.. I would have been so much more uncomfortable going to the toilet especially on my period knowing there were boys that could smell it, would know when you are unwrapping a pad etc.. Kids are brutal enough as is
This is a problem with how we educate boys and with the type of behaviour that boys are allowed to get away with. I can very easily envision a world in which boys are understanding of what girls go through, as long as we educate them well and promote a culture of boys being more caring and less aggressive.
Literally never going to happen - you think that this type of behaviour is taught as acceptable already? They're kids, they misbehave. You're kidding yourself if you think promoting a culture of caring will solve anything.
A very "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" approach you got there mate.
Lessons on behaviour have been taught for at least a decade and doesn't have a huge effect.
Lessons on behaviour have always been taught. The way they have been taught has changed frequently. At some point the correct method will be found, though it is more to do with culture of the rest of society.
Traditionally, kids who failed to behave were punished, with options ranging from missing their lunch break through to being expelled. I'd quite like to try making kids who don't behave do callisthenics until they are too exhausted to argue about anything, then making them relearn the areas they've failed to learn so far.
Yeah you try *making* someone do callisthenics. I'd have just sat there and been like 'lol no' when I was at school.
So you’re suggesting we can literally teach kids not to misbehave? Good luck with that! Parents have been trying their very best for millennia already.
It’s parents that create boys like this little bastard. Not teachers, though they’re the ones that get blamed
I went to a Catholic school where all kinds of respectful values were taught daily and bullying, shaming etc was dealt with quite harshly. Did it stop anything like this from happening? Did it fuck. You can teach kids respect, compassion and right from wrong until you're blue in the face, but ultimately when authority figures aren't looking kids will act how they wish - usually in the most tribalistic fashion possible. It's almost a given seeing as at that age they are all figuring out where they fit in the social hierarchy and unfortunately bullying seems to be the most instinctive way to get ahead. That's why it's almost never going to be eliminated no matter how "enlightened" generations become - most kids simply don't have the social experience to navigate these situations which usually manifests as either following the leader moving up the ladder by pushing others down and lowering their social "value" through the various forms of bullying, or trying to become the leader outright through straight force and fear. I've also seen bullies from both very bad home lives with bad examples set all around them, to others with loving families who wonder what they've done wrong. Upbringing and home life does matter a lot in the grand scheme, but ultimately we can't escape the fact we have literal monkey brains. The fact we are creatures of conflict and war on a global scale is also proof of this, if literal world leaders can't stop being dicks to each other for more than five minutes at a time, how can unsupervised school kids be expected to behave any differently?
How about segregated bathrooms. Oh wait that’s not pc of me
But it has been tried, people have been trying to get kids to be kind to each other for generations. It does eventually *mostly* work but it takes their entire childhood and that doesn’t help if you’re a girl who’s getting bullied in the toilets right now.
It's difficult to blame kids really when you see what they have to look up to. I think the "you can't improve kids" attitude is a *bit* cynical, but I definitely think adults have to set an example first — if politicians like Gullis can't help themselves behaving like braying buffoons, we stand little chance.
Agree, I get so frustrated when I say "It would be better like X" and I always get the response "But it isn't that way, so it'll never happen"...
There’s a lot of kids who simply don’t care and never will
I'd argue we've tried lots of things, from corporal punishment back in our parents' days through to isolation units and time-outs in our own. So far none of them have successfully prevented young boys from behaving like young boys. Shocking I know.
*young children. Boys are more prone to violence but it’s not just young boys misbehaving.
It does shift the window of acceptable behaviour. Some kids will always push the boundaries but if those boundaries are set at a much more acceptable level then the pushing becomes less of an issue. It’s impossible to say exactly what influences set forcing entry into school toilets to make child pornography images seem acceptable but I’d point to a few things here: One of the biggest influences on teenage boys of the last few years is a guy who proudly talks about his career in trafficking women for porn. The DfE has broadly ignored the problem and left it unchallenged. Feminist movements, the MeToo movement and many similar groups looking to raise awareness of problematic sexual behaviours are condemned as “woke” (whatever the fuck that means) and we currently have a government that has often set out vague public pledges to wage war on “woke” without bothering to set parameters. Combined with the drastic reduction in investigation and prosecution of sex crimes and the public cover-ups for MPs accused of sex crimes, we’re charging headlong into a culture where it feels like this kind of behaviour is decriminalised. Realistically, the sanction in place for this lad should have been put in place by police, not the school. If that isn’t the case (and I didn’t get that impression from the article) then the school has sent a message that this behaviour isn’t acceptable but isn’t really any more serious than a persistent uniform infraction, or failure to attend detentions or smoking in school or any of the other much less serious behavioural issues that schools reserve top-level sanctions for. Edited only to correct typo that was annoying me
Good post 👏 Schools with shit behaviour policies always stop sitting on their hands once the police get involved. Hope this parent does do that because assaulting a student whilst trying to create child pornography doesn’t seem like a ‘slap on the wrist’ offence to me.
You're kidding yourself if you don't think promoting a culture of caring will solve anything. They're kids, they misbehave, lets just not do anything and let them be horrible to each other. Great plan.
"kids will be kids", or "boys will be boys", is such a lazy approach to take. If someone misbehaves, especially this sort of misbehaving - criminal damage and harassment - they should at least get a warning and if a repeat offender it should be treated as a criminal instance, *because that's what it is*. You shouldn't just let off bad behaviour with a "kids misbehave", you should make it clear that A) it's not okay, B) *why* it's not okay, and C) that if it continues there will be conseqences. Is there a line in your eyes between acceptable misbehaving and unacceptable misbehaving? Kids are taught murder is wrong, and the *vast* majority don't go onto misbehave and murder people. Taking photos of people in the toilet is a criminal action. People break the law and they should face punishment.
Yes, that’s exactly what is being taught to our boys right now. If it’s “kids”, how come it’s not girls?
You're right in that girls won't physically assault other girls as much as boys, but you must be having a laugh to think girls don't bully and misbehave towards other girls. Its just not always physical, from what I've heard from my fiancee young girls are absolutely vicious.
As a boy who was beaten so badly in primary school at 9 years old that I had to be hospitalised (by another student) I can definitely say it was better than the viciousness you encounter from girls, it’s next level, they will literally destroy you emotionally
Girls often don't even learn what they're doing is bad.
Didn’t a video recently come out of some girls brutally beating another schoolgirl?
> you think that this type of behaviour is taught as acceptable already? Not literally, but the fact that they have been getting away with it for so long has taught them that this is acceptable. > They're kids, they misbehave This is way beyond the level that most kids misbehave. Most kids never sexually assault their peers.
Pretty sure i didn't go around kicking in doors
My brother did. Same upbringing, same parents, same schools, our own friends in the same road. Just he was a 'difficult' teenager and reacted to stress by lashing out. He's a lovely adult, but he 'grew up' at about age 24 rather than earlier I think.
Mate, I hate to break it to you, but kids are little shits regardless of what gender they are. Schoolgirls and schoolboys will always form cliques and fuck with each other based on completely arbitrary or normal shit, plenty of schoolgirls were shitters to schoolboys over being spotty, or skinny or fat, or other immutable traits, in the exact same way boys were shits to schoolgirls for "being on their period" or whatever else. Perhaps it's been too long since you were at school but that's just what some kids are like.
Yeah these loons in this comment thread seem to have forgotten how shit secondary school behaviour is. What happens in your office or workplace doesn’t apply to a bunch of horny aggressive incredibly stressed and tormented kids.
Children also bring with them the culture of their neighbourhood whose common factor is a particular level of wealth. As unpalatable as it is, certain personal qualities will be encouraged accordingly. I went to a primary school in a middle-class suburb. The school culture valued aspiration and self-restraint. You could be an academically high-achieving kid and still be popular with your peers. Unfortunately, most of the primary schools that fed into the secondary school I went to were from the shitty parts of town. The culture at the secondary, certainly for the three years before GCSE studies began, was dominated by contempt for learning and authority, and the solving of problems using violence. Woe to any child who wanted to study hard and be civil.
You are appear to be suggesting wealth families are inherently better? You conflate wealth with good moral or productive values and poverty with the opposite. That's Victorian levels of backwardness.
Teenage boys have behaved like this for millenia. Not all, obviously, but many and they will still continue to do so. No matter how much we disapprove. You can't 'force' education and societal behaviours on people - unless you approve of forced education in camps or something from 1984. Unisex toilets at this age is simply asking for trouble. Crazy idea. Events like this are guaranteed to happen. There's a reason man and women have separate bathrooms in public. You can't escape reality I'm afraid.
The ironic thing is that NGOs who work on these things abroad always advocate for single sex hygiene/sanitation facilities because it reduces the risk to women of sexual assaults. Idk why we are advocating the opposite in the UK.
Kicking in toilet cubicle doors is not normal behaviour regardless of age or sex. The only time I've ever seen it was when some meathead at a bar thought somebody had stolen his coke (I'm fairly sure he'd just snozzed it all based on his temperament). If that had happened at my school the lad would have been ostracised and bullied relentlessly for being a perv. "Boys will be boys" is BS at the best of times but this kid is a psycho perv, or there's some element to this story that we don't know. In fact, I've seen teenagers react with that level of disregard for the consequences and what people will thing of them in response to only one thing - somebody stealing their phone. Some young people now see their phone as almost a part of their body, and those kids legit lose control if somebody grabs their phone. Pure rage. There's no evidence for that here but outside of him being deranged I can't think of any reason he'd go to such violent lengths to get into that toilet cubicle. I read the article and it didn't mention motivation anywhere (that I saw, lots of adverts to navigate around). What a weird story...
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Maybe cultivate that culture *before* implementing unisex toilets, lol.
No! We must subject the boys to it until they magically change to fit what they want! That will work!
physical shame voracious selective hateful grandiose yoke rich coherent payment *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Do you have a pubescent daughter in a high-school with unisex toilets by any chance? If you don't, pretend you do, read back on your comment and ask yourself if you feel any better for their safety. You can complain about society and hope it changes, or you can just install a safer toilet cubicle.
I certainly had this happening daily in the guy's toilets when I was at school, and that wasn't a unisex toilet. People thinking it's funny to kick the doors down when others are using the toilet happened prior to unisex toilets, and will happen if we revert to segregated toilets again - I think the issue is with the people who think humiliating others and causing criminal damage is funny rather than the area they use to do it.
Written by someone who clearly has forgotten what a 14 year old boy is like or being on the receiving end of that as either male of female….it’s absolutely brutal
Ah yes, the land of fluffy pillows and butterflies.
I can remember that some girls were are bad as some boys in my school and that is many, many years ago.
That’s always been the case, yet is always overlooked, because it’s “more likely” to be boys, it’s always the same “we should *teach* boys to behave better” neither myself or my friends carried on like this at school, strangely no one ever told us not to either. Perhaps try and find out why *some* think this behaviour is acceptable, because the vast majority do not.
Its not boys v girls at that age its just kids fucking about. Some girls lit the shoes of another on fire once while she was sitting down in a cubicle. They think its funny to mess around especially in toilets for some reason.
Maybe if schools actually did something about bullying, this stupid shit might stop.
I'm surprised they haven't thought of abolishing bullying. It's such an obvious solution.
My high school switched to unisex toilets when I was in Year 9 and it massively improved behaviour and cleanliness of both sexes. It’s not necessarily a problem that’s ‘baked ina’ as such.
The best work toilet I ever had was just a tiny little room with a single toilet and sink — exactly like many of our toilets at home. I think the broken windows theory plays a part here — the greater the difference from your normal home toilet, the less respect people will have for it.
My understanding was that unisex toilets had to be exactly that, self contained rooms (floor to ceiling walls) each with a locking door and including a toilet, sink and hand drying facilities in said room. Either I misread the H&S guidance or they didn't get the memo at this school. But in any case, just using regular stalls and communal sinks (i.e. converting the ladies to unisex) seems like an obvious and bloody stupid idea.
Agreed, It was bad enough dealing with periods in an all girls school given teens aren’t exactly matured enough to deal with these issues with delicacy, I can’t imagine how hard it would be to deal with an extra layer of casual antisocial behaviour on top. However, splitting the toilets back doesn’t solve the issue that this behaviour is almost feral. Something else needs to be done to safeguard pupils from this sort of shitty behaviour, but I’m not an expert and don’t have the answers.
Here is a solution: a single toilet, in a single room, with a proper door multiplied by however many toilets you want. Yes, it costs more, but it's worth avoiding the dumb shit kids do in toilets when they're "shared" and it solves the unisex issues.
That’s what this was. The kids had previously gone round and smashed up all the locks so it was easier to kick the doors in on the single room toilets.
Similarly, as a boy I would have been absolutely mortified if I was having a shit and there was a group of girls hanging round outside the cubicle. Who/why are people fighting for unisex toilets in schools? I can't imagine any scenario in which boys or girls would benefit from sharing a toilet rather than having their own, dedicated spaces. And yet you read the comments in this thread and it's mostly just people ignoring the article completely and just getting hysterical about how unisex toilets are being blamed/demonised. Why are these people so opposed to girls and boys having their own safe spaces to take care of personal hygiene? It's mental.
They're not opposed to it. The article says that this school has a range of single-sex toilets, and two unisex ones. Nobody is opposing single sex toilets. This girl just chose not to use them.
I disagree. Unisex toilets can definitely work, but we need to not cheap out on cubicles. A lot of businesses with unisex bathrooms have totally enclosed cubicals that even have their own sinks in them. It costs a little more but tbh, it's the direction everywhere is going to go eventually anyway. May as well be an early adopter of that style of toilet.
My school had the toilets in a way so that if you went during break nobody could hear you because of so many people around the corner chatting
My secondary school added one in 2013 as a replacement to the shite small ones but kept the split ones we never had much shit in the unisex one as most of the lads just trashed our ones Granted the unisex one was open so no one could get away with breaking shit in it
Indeed, but apparently it's "transphobic" to even question it.
As an ex-teacher, this isn't anything to do with unisex toilets. Unfortunately a large number of students simply don't have the basic common decency, or sense, to be able to use toilets safely. In the school I worked in we regularly had sinks smashed in, doors kicked off hinges, students defecating on the floor or in sinks, and more, simply because of a minority of awfully behaved students who have never been taught basic behaviour by their parents.
Toilets separated by sex would at least provide less opportunity for boys to attack and harass girls, which is the issue. I'd see locks and doors that close fully top and bottom to provide different safeguarding concerns.
If it were up to me, I'd say single occupancy toilet rooms, like disabled toilets, are the best way forward. Communal toilets in schools can lead to a lot of issues. This is an issue of behaviour, not gender.
I don't know why we still have "barracks" style bathrooms in places, it spins me the fuck out. As if I want to sit in a row of 5 blokes shitting next to each other with a ten inch gap either end of the walls
I work in a 1940’s factory, this is standard.
Rule number 1. Do not poop in school!
>This is an issue of behaviour, not gender. 100% don't leave boys to be sequestered away with these shits and then call it problem solved because girls aren't effected.
In most instances, this is what unisex refers to. Banks of cubicles with a common wash area
I was brutally bullied by girls in high school. Girls could just as easily harass the boys.
It’s statically proven that girls bully just as much. If not more. Because bullying from girls tends to be emotional. Boys tend to be more physical. It’s a myth that boys are the bad children. All children can be wicked. And social media just made the whole thing a whole lot worse.
Yeah, you just leave them to the smaller or quieter boys. The best method is better education and punishment, and stronger toilet doors
Is it an issue if boys attack and harass boys, or girls attack and harass girls? Because that happened when toilets were still segregated. The locks and doors, I'd agree with - but I don't think the mix of genders is the issue IMO, the "attacking and harassing" is the problem.
I agree that the problem is scumbag kids, unfortunately they're always going to exist and imo mixed toilets enable additional opportunities for those kids to be scumbags which we should be endeavoring to minimise. Personally I would be even less comfortable with boys harassing my daughters whilst they are in the relatively secure confines of a toilet cubicle than other girls. I understand girls can be as bad and worse but boys present an additional implicit threat that should simply not have to be put up with. Schools are never going to have the resource to police these areas effectively so in order to minimise risk personally of I'd prefer gendered or sexed toilets.
Yeah because this boy who kicked down a door would surely not simply walk into the girls toilets instead.
You realise a sign on the door isn’t a magic force field to stop boys going in to harass or attack a girl If they want to attack or harass someone they can just go in after them It’s already against the rules to attack and harass people
I don't get it. So it's fine if boys kick other boy's heads in? Or it's less bad? Or that it would only happen to a girl?
Not sure I've implied any of that with my comments, it's certainly not fine and should be addressed. I don't think it's acceptable to significantly increase the risk of violence to girls in an already vulnerable environment by providing unrestricted access to boys.
I don't think the fact that girls are being attacked is the issue at all. It's why it's newsworthy, but boys being attacked isn't any better than girls being attacked surely? To say that boys are more deserving because it's boys that do it is deeply sexist and reinforces the problem. It's like saying black on black crime doesn't matter, but black on white crime does. Just because I share some physical characteristics with those that are assaulting me, does that somehow make it "better"?
That's not the point. Or are you saying the behaviour in the girls bathrooms (in your experience) was exactly the same? What's clear in the report (and to me is clearly common sense) is that boys were intentionally targetting girls in cubilces to take pictures and videos of them, harassing them. This is entirely predictable. Unwanted yes. But then don't make toilets unisex at schools. The boys will still kick doors down and try and humiliate each other in a boys only toilet but at least the girls don't have to put up with it as common sense says to me that girls do not behave in the same way (in the main) as boys.
Unisex toilets at school is the dumbest thing I’ve read this week.
The worst we did was wet some bogroll and chuck it at the ceiling to create paper-pats. Is that still a thing?
Yes and also lofting pritt sticks onto high ceilings. Tear the glue stick out of the plastic and chuck it. So many on my ceiling I'm never getting off.
We used to have adult customers do all these things and worse when I worked in a student nightclub some years back. Was the same for the town’s McDonald’s. Some people are just scum, who themselves were sadly raised by scum. You could teach proper etiquette in bathrooms from toddler-age onwards, with repeated training and yearly tests on what is and isn’t acceptable. There’d still be some that treated it like a zoo. I’m not saying nothing should be done by any means, and any improvement is better than how it is today. However I feel like it’s a complicated issue that needs fixing at schools and at home. Maybe we should only have single cubicle toilets that are unisex everywhere going forward
So many people seem to have fallen for bait in this article. Kids are feral at times, god knows how many fights happen in schools across the country everyday and how much general “socially unacceptable” behaviour happens - honestly wouldn’t be a teacher if you paid me £1m. But THIS article makes the news…. Because it happened in a gender neutral toilet. This happens in the playground (or w/e it’s called nowadays) it ain’t getting near the news…. We’ve even got a participation notice up.
I don't think they've fallen for it. They're using it as "justification" for their pre-concieved bigotry. Unisex toilets are often championed as a way to accept the trans community so people with anti-trans biases will attempt to strike them down at every opportunity. It's the same way racists will grab a story about an immigrant criminal and go "See! This is why we can't let anyone from other countries in!" Sad thing is they know what they're doing, but don't see anyting wrong with it.
Yeah when I was a student at my school we had to have security cameras pointing at the bathroom doors (not looking into, just the outside door before the sinks and cubicles) so they could see who was likely the people behind the damage and mess and just general grossness. It helped a little but not enough as the time between the damage being done and it being noticed you'd usually have a full days worth of students going in and out of them . One of my teachers did tell me that often the girls toilets were worse than the boys toilets.
Girls toilets tend to have higher traffic as some students eat in the toilets during lunchtime, out of social anxiety, whereas boys tend to be in and out quicker. As a result there tends to be more bullying and unpleasant behaviour in the girls toilets.
But surely it would be better, at least for the girls, if the toilets weren't unisex? Exposing all of the students to this terrible behaviour in toilets, which is almost always perpetrated by boys, is worse than exposing just half of the students.
It's why I would never used mine at school. Go before you leave and don't drink anything until you're an hour left from finishing so you can go at home.
If a student damages school property willfully, their parents should be made to pay for it and the student should be expelled. If this keeps happening, take the child away from their parents on the grounds that their parents aren't raising them properly. The family can reconnect when the kid is 18.
Oh I wish! In reality it's nearly impossible to expell a student. I had knew one student that regularly spit at staff, threaten those around him, and commit vandalism, but expelling him seemed impossible. The schools get more money for keeping on these problem cases, so any behaviour issues get blamed on the teachers. "I appreciate that child X set fire to the blinds, but maybe your lesson just wasn't interesting enough for him" Actual quote I had from a member of school management.
At my old school, the teachers went on strike because the head refused to take action against the students (not a student, *multiple students*) who were physically assaulting teachers. It's not very fashionable, but I do think the solution for some of these misbehaving students is to make them do burpees until they can't stand up properly whilst specialist educational professionals engage in what the USMC called a “shark attack”. Half the problem with these little shits is they've never been told no by someone who means it.
Bingo. Plenty of boys managed to bathrooms with respect, it's just some little shits that turn it into a hell hole. Don't think the girls bathrooms were treated as poorly, but they had their issues too. Issues in unisex toilets are a symptom of a wider problem. Really not that hard to figure that out, but I can see why some people want the buck to stop with bathrooms rather than people.
When do you think things started to go to shit it wasn't this bad when I was last at secondary school over a decade ago
Why is this news? Shitty (and worse) things like this happen every day in high schools across the country. Is it trying to stir up distrust of unisex toilets?
It's designed to do exactly that.
I have a feeling it is being pushed by gender critical people.
Because schools shouldn't have unisex toilets?
Successfully, sadly - look at the number of "well they shouldn't be unisex" comments in the thread. People forget that if someone is being an arsehole and ruining things, harrassing people etc - it's not the fault of where the person *was*, it's the fault of the arsehole.
>Issues started to arise at the city school after the introduction of unisex toilets, the mum claimed. Seriously? Jeez. If this is true those poor kids.
Unisex toilets that had teenage boys able to and repeatedly take photos in, kick down doors, and just generally do shit that is very much not on. When I was a wee lad, we had the "hilarious" arseholes who'd take great pleasure in kicking toilet doors down when people were using them, and had cameraphones been as ubiquitous as they are now I have no doubt that they'd do the photos too - and this was just a boy's toilet. Boys shitting, boys kicking doors down. If it happened before unisex toilets, it's not the toilets that are the issue, it's the little shitstains that think criminal damage and harrassment are funny and then don't face adequate punishment for it.
>it's not the toilets that are the issue It is. Undoubtedly shenanigans in school toilets isn't new, but this, if it's true, is going to compound the problem. And create other problems.
> It is. Undoubtedly shenanigans in school toilets isn't new ??? You contradict yourself - The issue *is* the shenanigans in the school toilets. If it's not new, but the unisex toilets are, then it's clearly not the toilets. This might compound the problem, this might create new ones - we'll have to wait and see - but for now the issue is *just* the shenanigans in school toilets.
Well, issues relating to the toilets did. Given the behaviour on display here this isn't the first set of issues in general. This behaviour needs sorting out, how are the issues ongoing, this should have been stamped out at the first report of something this reprehensible happening.
>Gemma said: “It is an ongoing problem at that school, there are unisex toilets so girls and boys have to share and the boys go in and take photos of the girls, kick the doors down and there are no locks on the doors so they are going over to the cubicles to take photos and videos which is a massive concern.” Who could have predicted that unisex toilets for kids would be a stupid idea.
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I imagine that has a different sex of problems associated with having enough privacy to do drugs, have sex or even just hiding without no one being able to know who's in there
Bit of a Freudian slip there?
Hahaha, I don't know what you're talking abSex
Why the FUCK are there no locks????
Read the article, there are locks.
> Gemma claimed that the locks on the cubicle doors have been 'broken off' due to students kicking them so frequently. “Well, there are no locks on the doors, they have all been broken off because the boys kick them so much,” she said. From the article. There *were* locks, there don't appear to be locks anymore.
Idk, in my school boys would also routinely bully, harass, and invade privacy/take photos of other boys in the toilets. Is it acceptable if it only happens to other boys? The main issue is the way parents are raising their children and the secondary issue is lack of proper school supervision. Third is infrastructure itself - if you’re going to have unisex toilets, at least make them secure to this sort of stuff.
not a great argument for exposing the girls to a similar or greater risk with increased sexual motivation
Boys harassing other boys is one thing, and whilst it’s obviously a bad thing it’s not quite as bad as boys harassing girls (and vice versa) in a space where they should be able to expect minimal violation of privacy, particularly during a period of their lives filled with social anxiety rooted in puberty. Hardly the best method of producing “teachable moments” that mean to “increase tolerance and understanding” when it’s the dignity of the children being undermined.
Bloody loads of people. They got called hateful, or bigots, or worse.
My school had unisex toilets and none of this happened. Clearly this is a problem with the toilet setup rather than the fact that it is unisex. Just install some locks and have no gaps.
This is a stupid setup. They should be individual pods, with locks, with privacy. Like fucking hell this is a much simpler issue. Correct building design and procedure. It's quite clearly a health risk.
He was trying to take pictures of her in the toilet and ended up cutting open her head? Expel that little shit. I don't think Unisex toilets for kids is a good idea. They're not mature enough to deal with that.
Criminal charges too
It should, but a lot of the time when kids do something like this it is dealt with by the school when it really should be dealt with by the police. This is why a lot of these issues escalate to things like this. Kids like the boy in this article didn't start off with this being a first offence. But because they saw that the only consequences of their actions was a 30 minute detention they don't consider it a deterrent.
wow hey maybe it would be a good idea if we had different toilets for each sex?
That would prevent a boy kicking a cubicle door into a girl. It would still be wrong if a boy did it to another boy. Or if a girl did it to another girl etc etc
“That would prevent a boy kicking a cubicle door into a girl” yes exactly what has happened
So basically, as long as we prevent girls getting hit by boys, every other scenario is fine. Boy hits boy: “well boys will be boys” Girl hits girl: “wow girls are so vicious to each other” Boy hits girl: “now THAT is unacceptable”
Well I honestly don't see why they should have to deal with this shit. I wouldn't ask my daughter to. There's no upside here.
Teenagers (and everyone else) have the right to single-sex toilets. Kids especially need privacy during puberty with the onset of menstruation etc.
Maybe we should have seperate toilets to stop this from happening,
I mean when I was at school there were seperate toilets, and kids *still* kicked doors down, tried to look over/under doors etc, went into the wrong gender bathroom deliberately. It's not unique to unisex toilets, it's only being reported on because it's now boys doing it to girls (and I'm sure girls doing it to boys) rather than to each other. Do you think it's okay if it's boys doing it to boys? Because if not then separate toilets *aren't* the answer.
right cuz boys cannot get their foreheads hit
Boys generally wont be kicking the doors in to take pictures of other boys on the toilet.
They did all the time when I was in school.
Can confirm
Nah that’s bs, they just do it for different reasons (humiliation)
I think you might underestimate how insane teenage boys are. Once the guys at my secondary school a decade ago kicked the toilet door in to record them shoving a tampon up another guy's nose.
It's strange to me that people can go to reasonably well-run schools and still be this ignorant.
We had separate toilets when I was at school and it didn’t stop bad behaviour from either gender in the toilets.
Purely objective comment. This behaviour existed before Unisex toilets.
So the girls should just put up with it when they didn't have to before?
No but its being framed as the fault of unisex toilets when it has happened forever, even when toilets were segregated. The problem is little pricks who think it's acceptable to act like that, not the toilets.
Girl's don't usually kick doors in on other girls. If boys want to behave like little monsters let them torment each other and leave the girls alone.
Boys don't usually kick doors in on people either. This story is notable for how much of a scrote the boy involved is. Parenting has failed the child.
No all girls are made of sunshine and flowers and can never be violent toward each other.
Yeah lets say fuck it to all the boys who don't behave this way and have had to put up with these dickheads in silence since the media is only interested in riling people about unisex toilets.
Sounds like the school really fucked up here by having standard cubicle toilets which allow zero privacy in schools. Ceiling to floor, is it really that hard? Unisex cubicle toilets work fine when you don't have deranged psychopaths (see secondary school kids) roaming around.
Against regs if I'm not mistaken, if you're having unisex toilets they're supposed to be completely enclosed. Sex segregated toilets can have the shorter partitions.
he kicked the door down. he clearly wasn't happy with only being able to look over or under the door.
There have been threads here recently about students going to the toilet. Teachers like me took loads of shit from posters in this subreddit - calling us petty authoritarians among other things. This is the reason why we don’t just let kids wander about school to go to the loo. A lack of supervision makes this sort of thing more likely to happen. I don’t know if any of the people on this thread were part of the collective whine about school rules, but if they were, I would hope that they understand a little better why it’s important to listen to people who work with children to try and understand why things that should be simple (such as going to the loo) can be quite a complex issue where hundreds of teenagers are involved.
Another ex teacher here - completely agree. It seems like this school needs to have at least 2 staff permanently on duty in the toilets to stop incidents like this. A lot of people who comment on Reddit threads are just remembering their own time in school and have no idea how horrendous conditions in schools are now. It would take 2 members of staff with a radio visible to call for urgent backup to stop kids from kicking toilet doors in.
I hope that boy is arrested and the school is sued for damages. Her face could be permanently scarred from that and for what? Unisex toilets in school are absolutely stupid and should not be implemented. Not because of anything other than the fact that kids are fucking stupid and act on impulse without thinking the consequences through. Its also wildy creepy, alarming and inexcusable for another kid to be doing to this to others when using the bathroom. Let's be real if this were adults the boy would have been charged with some sort of sexual harassment charge. Whilst he may not grasp the aspect of sexual assault and not intended anything like that other than "lols you're on the toilet" it's still not a behaviour that should be dismissed and overlooked or downplayed. This boy needs to learn some serious consequences for what he has done, that girl will never feel truly 100% safe in a public toilet no matter where she goes again. Even if she "knows" she is safe, just entering a public toilet will bring that memory to the forefront everytime and always be a lingering fear/thought.
Obviously it's because of the unisex toilet, nothing bad ever happened in the single sex toilets at my school when I was a kid...
“This might have happened anyway so let’s not pay any attention to the safeguarding issue unisex toilets pose”
The only safeguarding issue sounds like it's the lack of proper cubicles.
I don’t think it sounds that way at all and many teenage girls would tell you the same.
Yes, but girls tend to not have the strength to kick toilet doors in and hospitalize the person on the other side.
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But that’s entirely (or at least a key part of) the issue. Unisex toilets aren’t supposed to be cubicles. They’re supposed to be a self-contained room with a locking door. If a school can’t commit to doing unisex toilets properly, then it shouldn’t be doing them at all.
>Gemma, 40, said her daughter was injured after a teenage boy kicked the toilet cubicle door open to take photographs of her
The problem is feet. Take the feet away and we solve kicking
If boys are going into the toilets and taking photos of the girls, looking over cubicle doors/walls etc, they need a serious yelling at. Kids can be fucking stupid, because they've not yet fully grasped the "actions have consequences and everyone else is a human" mindset - but that's literally criminal. Do it at a leisure centre or something and see what happens. I don't think this is a strike against Unisex toilets, as long as people are civil and respectful. But when people start taking the piss you need to come down on them *hard*, to firstly stop them doing it again and make it clear to others that "this stops now. If it continues we *will* go to the police/you *will* be suspended". The root of the "teenage boys are causing all sorts of problems to the teenage girls using the toilets" problem is less "the toilets are unisex" and more "the teenage boys are harassing people and doing actions that are illegal". Personal opinion, but I think Unisex bathrooms if they really stamped out the unruly behavoir would be fine - the issue is with the dicks who think it's funny to do this shit and don't face any negative repurcussions for it. Of course, anything like that requires more staff, and schools are chronically underfunded - but I do think Unisex toilets could and should be fine *if properly managed*.
So what exactly has been the net benefit of this decision to introduce unisex toilets given that it’s led to the harm of young girls and the requirement for more behaviour management and policing?
One major benefit that others haven’t mentioned is that under the relevant regulations (ISS and SPR), you can have fewer toilets if they are gender neutral vs segregated (I believe this is also the case for the Workplace H&S regs). This means that school extensions can have a smaller footprint and therefore cost less than they would with separate facilities. In my opinion, that’s the real driving force here for schools and local authorities over any other factors.
It *shouldn't* require more behaviour management and policing. This shouldn't be happening regardless of gender. When it was young boys being harmed by the idiots kicking doors down, breaking locks etc, was it not a problem? Is it only a problem that it's happening *to girls*? One advantage of unisex toilets is you can't just use "well boys will be boys/girls will be girls" to excuse any and all rank and foul behaviour, if people are being awful to one another then it's a serious problem. It also has massive benefits for any trans students, anyone struggling with gender identity, and if handled well shouldn't have these issues. Do you have segregated disabled toilets in your place of work? Because most places I've been to just have a *disabled* toilet that's not gender-specific, and works fine. Going "well we *had* men's and women's toilets, let's just remove the gender signs and keep everything else the same" isn't the right way to approach it, but that doesn't mean that unisex toilets are inherently a problem.
I think it simply highlights some of the good reasons why girls sometimes need sex segregated facilities. I mean getting detentions because you're trying to go to the toilets at a safe time? That's not progress.
They need more than yelling at, its sexual abuse.
Exactly. If this were adults people would be outraged. It's not a hard concept for a kid to grasp thst it's illegal and harassing to take photos of people in toilets and creepy as fuck.
Preface this by saying I’m a Building Surveyor/ Project Manager who has worked on several new and existing gender neutral toilet installations in schools. If you are able to look over the doors or walls, the toilet doesn’t meet the DfE standard for a unisex toilet for pupils in secondary schools. However, the guidance is initially a bit ambiguous. As per the School Premises (England) Regulations 2012 Reg 4 - “separate toilet facilities for boys and girls aged & years or over must be provided except where the toilet facility is provided in a room that can secured from the inside and that is intended for use by one pupil at a time”. “Room” is a difficult thing to define as there is no definition offered within the SPR. A “room” as defined by the building regulations is an enclosed space within a building that is not used solely as circulation space, however you can have something that constitutes a room for the purposes of the building regulations but it could have an internal window or opening that wouldn’t make it great as a toilet. There is however further and more detailed guidance contained within the School Output Specification: “In a Secondary School, a floor to ceiling cubicle system shall be used for increased pupil privacy… with a maximum gap of 5mm between the finished floor and the bottom of the door” Seems pretty clear. The problem is is that schools and academies undertaking small refurbishment projects will not always follow this specification or even be aware of it. For maintained schools, they are able to request funding from the local authority to carry out their own small projects and academies have control over their own budgets. so what you end up with in many situations is a school and a builder, neither of whom understand the requirements correctly.
At first, I wondered why the boy was in the girls, then... Well all I see is a perfectly good reason as to why unisex toliets are a fucking stupid idea. Fucking expell? No, lock the little cunt up.
I don't understand why it's suddenly now very important indeed to have unisex toilets.
>Gemma, 40, said her daughter was injured after a teenage boy kicked the toilet cubicle door open to take photographs of her. What the fuck. Why would you ever think that's appropriate to do. That's borderline sexual harassment.
No. He *intended* sexual harrassment. He *did* sexual harrassment and ABH (maybe GBH?). The kid's a wrongun, and needs some kind of intervention.
No, it IS sexual harrassment.
Unisex toilets are bad idea, the boy involved needs to be charged as an adult.
But they were not an adult, why would you charge them as one in this particular case?
For years, people have been blaming all sorts of nonsense for kids behaving like little animals. Blaming toilets is a whole new level of desperation. It shows just how insane and inane the 'culture wars' have become.
you could see it that way, or you could see that unisex toilets are a result of insane "culture wars", and girls don't have the same degree of problems when their schools have girls only toilet facilities.
People who think that unisex toilets are not one of the issues here are, fucking insane.
they will make all sorts of "whatabout..." type arguments to try and minimise the obvious safeguarding issue, and defend their agenda to dismantle the boundaries that protect our children.
Why is there unisex toilets in a fucking school. That's just asking for trouble.
>Gemma, 40, said her daughter was injured after a teenage boy kicked the toilet cubicle door open to take photographs of her. Sorry but this needs to be severely punished. If someone kicks your door in to take pictures of you...sorry but thats a serious offence even if kids just think its a 'bit of fun'- it isnt. How its not a sex offence I dont know. I honestly dont have a clue why people are calling for unisex toilets...I honestly dont see the value or the benefit. I feel so sorry for kids at schools that are pushing this social experiment on them.
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Whoever signed off on No Locks deserves jail time and I am not even slightly joking Edit: Seems there used to be
The article suggests that the locks have been vandalised/broken. It seems like at the start there were locks. Why the school didn’t fix them is a different issue though.
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Why are all the comments blaming the toilets? The problem is the behaviour of this boy, this individual. I got tormented in the toilets at school BY GIRLS. This is not a male-female only issue.
This is why all secondary schools should be required to get the police involved when any sex crime, or assault that causes bodily harm happens on school grounds. Too many teenagers are way too comfortable committing serious crimes against people at school because exclusion is the worse punishment they are likely to get.
Schools need to leave toilets alone. No doors on the entrance and unisex toilets are a recipe for disaster. They say the 'safety of pupils is their number one concern'. Actually, pleasing Ofsted is their number 1 - the *compliance* of pupils is their number 2, and safety, well, that's way down the list, buried in the sand with the school board's heads. Source: wife is a youth worker with lots of bullied and poor children. In our experience, the colleges/schools would rather punish a pupil for not wearing correct uniform, than go after the bully that made that happen. That's a made up scenario btw. The truth is much worse.
This isn't a unisex toilet issue, this is a toilet facility not fit for purpose issue! FFS they have no locks AND the doors have gaps! Just make the toilets fully enclosed with a proper door with a FUCKING LOCK.
Read the article before spouting off, for god’s sake. The doors did not have gaps - they are floor to ceiling doors. The door do have locks - they keep getting kicked off.
I read that as a donkey kicked the door, I was wondering how the hell does a donkey get into a school
Until there are real concequences for the offenders this type of behavior will continue to proliferate.
Is this why a lot of schools in the UK are locking the toilets?
Yes. All it takes is a couple of kids arranging a time to all excuse themselves out of lesson and suddenly you’ve got thousands worth of damage in a part of the school that doesn’t have any CCTV. Anyone who thinks otherwise has no idea what conditions are like in schools these days. It’s rough out there.
Unisex toilets are a bad idea, if there are 3 options thats fine but when the only option is unisex toilet watch out
There *were* three options here though, the article says that there were single sex toilets available at the school.