A ‘very significant amount’ of the sexual harassment faced by children in Ireland is likely to be happening in the school environment, according to the Rape Crisis Network.

The network is calling for a new National Policy on Sexual Harassment in Secondary Schools.

On Newstalk Breakfast this morning, the Rape Crisis Network Ireland (RCNI) Executive Director Dr Cliona Sadlier said there are no official statistics on sexual violence and harassment in the school environment.

“I think it is a very significant issue but we don’t actually know because we don’t have the numbers on it,” she said.

“That is part of the problem. We are not counting it and we are not looking at it properly.”

She said the Ombudsman for Children has dealt with 400 bullying complaints since 2018, a lot of them concerning sexual assault and sexual harassment; however, the Department of Health does not compile data on sexual assault and harassment in schools.

Dr Sadlier said the RCNI has examined its own data to get a clearer picture of what is going on.

“We looked at what child survivors are telling us in rape crisis centres about sexual violence and what we found was that 37% of the child survivors coming to rape crisis centres had been abused by another child around about the same age,” she said.

“We would suspect that a very significant amount of that is happening within the schools environment one way or the other, because that is obviously where a huge amount of time is spent for children.”

Dr Sadlier said the national Action Plan for Bullying “dropped the ball on sexual harassment,” meaning there is no policy for dealing with the issue in schools.

She said the bullying plan could be used as a framework to build out a new National Policy on Sexual Harassment.

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