The UK’s education system often allows boys’ sexually entitled behaviour to continue unchecked, and our criminal justice system mostly fails to hold adult perpetrators of serious sexual assault to account (just 1.4% of rape cases recorded by police currently result in charges or a summons, let alone a conviction). Something needs to change.

So, for my next documentary, Zara Uncovers: Rape Culture, I went back to school. I wanted to talk with young people about the culture of sexism and sexual violence that exists in schools and colleges around the UK today – including the girls and women who are raising awareness of the problem. I also wanted to investigate where this behaviour stems from and what can be done to challenge it.

I met with Soma Sara, the founder of Everyone’s Invited – an online platform sharing anonymous testimonies of misogyny or sexual abuse at UK schools and universities. After Everyone’s Invited went viral this spring (it’s now named 2,700 educational institutions where rape culture is allegedly present), Ofsted launched an urgent review of sexual abuse in schools and colleges. It found 79% of current female students said sexual assault happened “sometimes” or “a lot” between people their age. Sara has been key in pushing this problem up the political agenda.

Like Sara, many young women and girls are now firmly upholding their personal boundaries, which feels like a major shift; I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing the same when I was at school. But in other ways, girls today have it harder than my generation. Nothing drove that home for me more than meeting the family and friends of 12-year-old Semina Halliwell, who took her own life shortly after disclosing that she’d been raped by a boy of a similar age. Semina’s friends told me that extreme sexual harassment over Snapchat was a normal part of their lives by the time they were in Year 8. Sadly, I could relate to this. When I was a teenager, I was regularly pressured for nudes over BlackBerry Messenger. But online sexual harassment appears to have ramped up in recent years, and it’s now affecting children at an even younger age.

“I was sexually harassed, groped and pressured for nudes”: Zara McDermott on tackling rape culture in schools