By insisting girls as young as four wear ‘modesty shorts’, we are letting down our daughters – but also underselling our sons

In the same week that the prime suspect in the Sarah Everard murder pleads guilty to rape and kidnapping, it is both enraging and depressing that we are still debating the role of girls in their own harm

A message is seen among the flowers on Clapham Common where floral tributes were placed for Sarah Everard (Getty Images)

They’ve existed in the back of my mind for close to 30 years. Mostly silent these days, they sometimes pop into my thoughts; the near-faceless memories of long-ago horrors which started as bullying and ended up closer to actual crime. Malevolent whispers rolling like mist off the back of yet another dead girl in the news, to remind me that we really haven’t come that far.

“Just checking you’re a girl!” They’d sneer, shoving grubby teenage hands into my shirt. “Coz we can’t tell from your ugly face,” they’d spit, close enough to count their acne scars as I struggled and screamed.

Other days it was a hand up my skirt as I walked past, or a bear-hug from behind, thrusting against me as I stood in line for class. Apropos of nothing, they’d pull my hair hard enough to leave bruises and, on one occasion, a day of rape threats was followed up by a brick through my bedroom window. Teachers responded with frustration and the suggestion that, “maybe they’re flirting with you!”

If this week’s Loose Women debate is to be believed, then it was all my fault. If only I’d been wearing modesty shorts from the age of four, these 13 year olds would have learned some respect. In the same week that the prime suspect in the Sarah Everard murder pleads guilty to rape and kidnapping, it is both enraging and deeply depressing that we are still debating the role of girls in their own harm.

Setting up the discussion on Twitter, the Loose Women team asked whether modesty shorts should be made compulsory “as a precaution to protect girls as young as four”. Protect them from what exactly? The lecherous gaze of five-year-old boys who still think girls are icky, but have been so awestruck by a split-second flash of Peppa Pig underwear they are now forever corrupted? Or perhaps we are protecting them from their own illicit nature; after all, it is well documented by everyone from Revelations to Nabokov that women are the cause of their own downfall.

By insisting that girls as young as four are at risk from the male gaze, we are letting down our daughters but also underselling our sons. We do not hold mothers’ meetings to debate the shirtlessness of men and boys; their bodies are free to enjoy the world and its good weather without fear of hypersexualisation. If the patriarchy is to be believed, then the bodies of boys are a machine run by a wild animal – working to perfection with the implicit understanding they have instincts they cannot control.

When we hide away our daughters’ bodies, we are telling both them and their male friends that boys are not to be trusted; they are and will always be predators and it is therefore up to us to do the best we can to protect ourselves. For some men this may be true – there will always be those determined to see us as a commodity and take what they want – but it is one hell of a burden to place upon a five-year-old boy.

Page one in the Big Book of Patriarchal Pulchritudes tells girls that we are responsible for male behaviour – it is our job to raise them as Good Men, our job to fix them if their mother didn’t do a good enough job and our job to ensure we hide their shortcomings behind our apron strings and modesty shorts. By following these simple steps, we will be guaranteed to raise yet another generation of boys who are convinced that nothing is their fault and a generation of men clinging desperately to the Biblical notion that they were led astray and could not have prevented any violence against women, as it is simply in their nature.

Call me controversial, but I believe it is time we replaced the inevitability script with one of accountability and consent. Primary age children are capable of understanding both if presented correctly. Likewise, little boys are perfectly capable of comprehending that girls wear underwear too and that it’s not acceptable to grab them without asking or point and stare. I would also suggest that we move away from the idea that girls are “icky” but let’s not overreach ourselves.

The world has enough ways of telling adult women we are worthless and of blaming us for our own attacks. Every news article announcing that an otherwise “good man” snapped and stalked his ex-wife before stabbing her 20 times, lets us know loud and clear who matters. We owe it to our children to let them grow up in a world where they see each other first and foremost as human beings; fellow sojourners in life, not objects to be feared, coveted or destroyed.