A powerful beginning: Thank you for standing with us
An update on the Everyone's Invited Primary School Investigation - by Jack Conneely.
This past Saturday, 22nd March, we launched the Everyone’s Invited Primary School List and Investigation 2025 in The Times. This marks the first time since 2022 that Everyone’s Invited has released a schools list, and now, our focus is solely on primary schools. With this initiative, we aim to highlight the urgent need to address rape culture in these early educational settings, sharing the findings of our investigation and calling for systemic change in how we educate and protect young children.
Child survivors have spoken through the Everyone’s Invited Survivor Safe Space; now, it is time for all of us - parents, teachers, policymakers, and communities - to listen and act. Young people deserve to feel safe in their classrooms. It is our collective responsibility to protect them and to create learning environments that are equal, compassionate, and driven by empathy, ensuring that every child can learn and thrive.
Since the launch, our founder and CEO, Soma Sara, has been actively engaging with the media to discuss the motivations behind this investigation and its wider implications for education and society. Speaking on the BBC Today programme, she stressed the necessity of investigating primary schools, making it clear that prevention is happening too late - we must intervene earlier. Children are being exposed to extremist content and pornography before they even reach secondary school, shaping their behaviours in harmful ways. Discussions around child-on-child abuse should not focus on blame, but on society’s responsibility to equip children with the education, tools, and language they need to navigate these complex issues. On LBC, speaking with Vanessa Feltz, Soma addressed the distressing testimonies from teachers calling for more support. Many educators feel ill-equipped to handle the realities their students face, highlighting the urgent need for sex and relationships education that genuinely reflects young people’s real-life experiences. She emphasised the direct causal link between early exposure to pornography and sexual violence, reinforcing that education protects rather than corrupts. The reality is that these issues exist in all primary schools, across all demographics. Ignoring them is not an option. Speaking with Ayesha Hazarika on Times Radio, Soma delved further into the findings of our investigation, reinforcing the urgent need to age-down Relationships and Sex Education (RSE). If we truly want to shift from intervention to prevention, we must start earlier. Rape culture is endemic in our society, and primary schools are a microcosm of this wider reality. This is not a problem confined to secondary schools or specific communities - it is a problem we all share, and action is long overdue.
Our work has been covered in leading publications, including The Times, The Guardian, and The Telegraph, each of which has explored the scope of our findings, the testimonies we have gathered, and the broader social implications of our investigation. Since launching this initiative, we have received an overwhelming number of submissions to our Survivor Safe Space. These include retrospective accounts from men and women now in their sixties who are only just coming to terms with their experiences of childhood abuse in primary school, as well as heartbreaking testimonies from parents writing alongside their children about recent incidents they have faced. Each story represents an act of bravery, and we remain in complete admiration of all the survivors who have chosen to share their experiences with us. Our team has spent hours reading and processing these stories, and we are profoundly grateful to those who have come forward. We recognise the immense courage it takes to speak out, and we stand with every survivor.
The conversation cannot end here. We are committed to exposing rape culture wherever it exists, sharing the findings of our investigation, advocating for earlier, comprehensive sex education, and pressing policymakers to acknowledge and address the realities in primary schools. Society must wake up and take responsibility for ensuring that children are educated, protected, and empowered. We invite you to stand with us in demanding change.
If you have a story to share, please visit our website at https://www.everyonesinvited.uk/primary/submit
If you would like to donate to our prevention programme, please do so via this link: https://everyonesinvited.enthuse.com/donate#!/
