Teacher trolling is now a national pastime

The London Telegraph reports:

There was a predictable feminist backflash on Twitter yesterday when Tatler magazine published flirting advice for 13-year-old girls to cynically deploy on unwitting middle-aged men. ...

Yet men who work around teenage girls – and particularly teachers – live in constant terror of paedophilic allegations. For some, it can feel as if their lives are viewed through a constant prism of suspicion.

Research by Nottingham Trent and Bedfordshire Universities found that female primary school teachers still dramatically outnumber men, with fears that men will be falsely labelled as paedophiles hampering male recruitment.

I’ve spoken with many male teachers whose reputations and lives have been destroyed by pictures posted on social media by teenage girls who have deliberately set out to entrap them into looking like a “paedo”.

“Teacher trolling” is now a national pastime and some pubescent girls see capturing incriminating photos of “pervy” male teachers as a sport.

If captioned appropriately, a playground photo of a stray glance or innocent gesture can be disastrous. Posted to social media (or even used to blackmail), a compulsory suspension pending a full investigation is likely to ensue. In today’s schools, increasingly we are seeing that the power is with the pupils.

For this reason, we’re also seeing record low numbers of men applying to be primary school teachers – and record numbers leaving the secondary school profession altogether.

As a consequence – exacerbated by the rocketing numbers of single parent families that yesterday the Centre for Social Justice predicts will soar to 2 million by 2015 – we are witnessing an ever-expanding vacuum of strong male role models in young people’s lives.