The harassment of our girls

I sat down to write this article about the fantastic new campaign by Sport England – This Girl Can – and how its impact could be harnessed by secondary schools to encourage our young girls to take part in sports. You’ve probably seen the advert? It portrays lots of different women, real women, getting sweaty and wobbly in the name of health and fitness. 

But as I scrolled to the bottom of the YouTube video to click “thumbs up”, I could see that although more than 28,500 people had beaten me to it, well over 1,600 had clicked “thumbs down”. What is there to dislike about this advert? I read a page’s worth of comments. All the negative posts I read were written by people using male usernames. And so the angle for this article was revised and I started looking into what the impact might be of the negative attitudes of boys about our girls.