A mother has spoken out and alleged that her 13-year-old daughter was physically assaulted in the unisex washrooms at her secondary school in Coventry.
The girls mother, Gemma Brennan, told CoventryLive that her daughter had been injured in an incident at Caludon Castle School in Wyken on Tuesday, February 28. She reported that her daughter had to be taken to hospital after the alleged assault happened.
Brennan explained that a teenage boy had kicked the toilet cubicle door open to take photographs of her daughter while she was using the facilities. He kicked the door so hard that it hit the teen in the face, leaving her with marks on her arm and a large cut on her forehead.
“She went into the cubicles and one boy kept donkey kicking the door. It hit her on the arm and then he did it again and it smashed her right in the face,” Brennan said.
The incident is said to have occurred after parents had raised concerns about the schools’ new unisex toilets. However, Brennan explained that these concerns had “fallen on deaf ears” and not been taken into consideration by the administration.
“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,” Brennan explained.
The school Brennan’s daughter attends is not the only facility to implement unisex or gender neutral bathroom facilities.
Schools across the United Kingdom are opting to replace single sex toilets with unisex toilets, despite ongoing protests from parents and students alike.
Schoolgirls in particular have organized protests and in some cases even vandalized school property to make clear their opposition to the new mixed-sex facilities. Many of these acts of protest have been documented and uploaded onto the social media app TikTok by the students themselves. Students often use TikTok to help coordinate their activism. The videos of these protests, which often rack up hundreds of thousands of views, have inspired students at other schools to do the same.
Most recently, one school suspended 34 students after they protested unisex toilets and posted videos of the debacle to TikTok. Students at Mountain Ash Comprehensive in Wales skipped classes and triggered fire alarms as they joined in the protests being co-ordinated on social media around England and Wales.
Students at Mountain Ash Comprehensive also reported that the toilets were being locked during class time. The school has denied this claim, but many parents have supported the students efforts despite condemnation from school officials.
Following the rash of protests, the school issued a letter condemning parents and carers who “glorified and praised … appalling behavior.” They were also instructed to “warn their children against being manipulated by TikTok trends, which are an increasing problem for schools across the UK at present.”
But parents were not the only ones to show support to the protesting students, members of the public — particular women — have praised the youth’s efforts to reject the implementation of unisex toilets. Many female social media users responded to Mountain Ash Comprehensive’s tweet about the incident by citing their own experiences as young women dealing with female-specific issues.
“I’m furious that you made this decision. Did you engage with the pupils how they felt about unisex toilets. I fully support the students actions. As a young girl going through periods … changing pads this is embarrassing,” one woman tweeted in response to the school. “I used to be crippled over in the toilets with what I later found out was endometriosis at school I assumed it was just cramping but I could barely stand my friends would sometimes gather me and hold me up can you imagine the mortification as a girl having that with boys around? Have you put yourself in that position?”
“I menstruated on my clothes in school. I used the female-only bathroom to wash the blood from my clothes so I didn’t have to walk around in a bloodied skirt. Are you going to force girls to walk around in bloody clothes or to undress in front of boys to wash the blood out,” another woman tweeted.
Many pro-woman campaigners are pushing back against the switch to gender neutral toilets and changing facilities in schools, businesses, and gyms.
One such business that came under fire was the fashion retailer Primark, after a video went viral of a young woman tearfully explaining how she was deliberately intruded upon by two men while using their unisex changing room.
“I was trying on some clothes, and it was a unisex changing room — which, I am for because it makes every feel really included… But, twice, two men walked in on me. Opened the curtain and walked in on me … It was two different men but they were with the same group,” the woman explained, clearly emotionally distressed while recording the video in her vehicle.
After the video began to circulate, women on Twitter started a #BoycottPrimark campaign, with the hashtag briefly trending on social media. But this was hardly the first incident to occur in a Primark unisex changing room. In another horrific case, a 4-year-old girl was sexually abused while her mother was shopping for clothes at the Watford Primark.
Last year, a London Metropolitan police officer avoided jail time after he secretly filmed a woman in a unisex Primark fitting room. He was also caught in possession of hundreds of “disgusting and extremely distressing” pornographic images and videos of children and animals.
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