Rape Crisis and other charities wrote to England’s education secretary Bridget Phillipson and Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, last week, calling on the government to step in with clearer statutory guidance on how schools in England and Wales should address sexual violence when both the victim and the alleged perpetrator are pupils.

The charities warn that peer-on-peer abuse is increasingly widespread and is affecting younger children, including in primary schools, in part due to the prevalence of online pornography. They believe serious assaults are being mischaracterised by some schools as “exploratory play” or “age-related exploration”.

In 2021, the campaign group Everyone’s Invited collected thousands of testimonies of abuse in UK schools, while the same year Ofsted said that sexual harassment had now become such a routine part of school life that schoolchildren often didn’t bother reporting it.

Andrew Lord, a solicitor at the law firm Leigh Day who co-signed last week’s letter to ministers, said he has sympathy for schools, which he said are walking a difficult line trying to support both pupils. But he said he often works with “despairing families” who have been “left to deal with their child’s traumatic disclosure on their own or placed on a long waiting list for mental health support”.