When Ava Vakil posted an open letter to her Instagram earlier this week, she had no idea it would go viral. The letter, addressed to Andrew Halls, headmaster of King’s College School in Wimbledon, southwest London, detailed what she described as the school’s ‘cultural problem of misogyny’ and accused it of being ‘a hotbed of sexual violence’.
Since the letter was posted online, it has been shared countless times on social media and hit national news headlines for its shocking allegations. ‘I couldn’t ever have expected the extent of the response, it’s been incredible,’ says Ava, speaking exclusively to Glamour. ‘But if anything, it’s shown me how much more there is to be done. Since I posted the letter, I’ve had about double the number of testimonies come in.’
In the letter, Ava calls on Halls to ‘publicly admit the extent of [the] problem’ at the leading private school and ‘display a proper attempt to address it’. The 11-page letter includes a long list of testimonies from girls, invited by Ava to share their experiences of sexual violence and harassment at the hands of students from King’s. These range from reports of rape jokes, cat-calling and the non-consensual circulating of nude photos on group chats, to ‘stealthing’ (removing a condom mid-intercourse without consent), spiking of drinks and even threats of necrophilia.
Ava’s letter was written in the wake of a new campaign, Everyone’s Invited, which asks students and former pupils to report claims of sexual harassment. Many schools have been implicated since; Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith, west London, is understood to have reported several allegations to the police.
Ava isn’t sorry that her letter has proved to be such a bombshell. ‘If the only time they deal with it properly is because they have PR pressure, then so be it,’ she tells Glamour. ‘I’m not interested in naming names, I want to see institutional change. We know how much there is to be done, but it’s really difficult to work out what you as an individual can do. I thought the best way that I could make a change was to focus on something I know, that’s local to me. But this was always about the systemic problem, rather than individual incidents.’
The allegations, however, are undeniably shocking: Ava, who is now 19 and in her second year at university in Oxford, attended Wimbledon High School, ‘which is a sort of informal sister school to King’s… from about year five or six, we had discos with them’. In her letter, Ava details horrific stories, including boys allegedly surrounding girls in the street to grope them, pressuring them into sex and calling them ‘sluts’, ‘yats’, ‘slags’ and ‘whores’. Depressingly, she says, the incidents were commonplace.
‘The majority of people my age aren’t altogether that shocked by these testimonies,’ says Ava. ‘I’d known about some of these experiences for a long time, anecdotally and from friends, but I didn’t realise the extent of the problem. Hearing what happened to girls – from the age of 12 – has been really heart breaking. It’s motivated me even more to make sure we have some actual change, as I understand how voiceless these girls feel. I just want to help give a platform to these stories.’
For Ava, the Everyone’s Invited movement (an anti-rape movement organisation focused on exposing rape culture through conversation, education and support) has helped with that. ‘It feels really validating,’ she says. ‘It’s like people are finally listening and more people are paying attention to the problem. It feels like change is about to come.’ A spokesman for King’s told The Times: ‘We are very far from complacent and see that from the troubling testimonies of girls and women who have come forward there is clearly more work we can and will do.’ Ava is meeting with Halls next week and says she’s ‘happy that King’s seems to be listening,’ telling Glamour that the school has discussed plans for an independent review, ‘which is extremely encouraging’.
Change, however, must be ‘deep-rooted and long lasting’ to have an effect, she explains. ‘I think the way that’s achieved, predominantly, is through PHSE, because that’s a fantastic access point to speak to young boys and girls about their experiences at school. It’s about encouraging students and empowering them to recognise and speak out about this kind of behaviour. I want to see schools take some action and talk to students properly about rape culture and the importance of social media in that, because I often feel our education system hasn’t caught up with technology as quickly as it should have done.’
In short, neither Ava nor her peers will settle for so-called ‘change’ that doesn’t actually make a difference. ‘In the last few years, since the #MeToo movement, the world has tuned in a bit more to issues of sexual violence and harassment and we’re slowly seeing that trickle down into all walks of life,’ she says. ‘This is a point at which we can get young people together, to educate them. I can’t really think of anything more powerful.’
GLAMOUR has donated to The Survivors Trust for use of imagery