In 2012, U.K.-based author Laura Bates, frustrated by the casual sexism she’d been experiencing for years, created a website where women and girls could share similar stories of discrimination and disrespect. The Everyday Sexism Project quickly went viral, as did Bates’s TEDx talk on the subject, which has been viewed more than 1.1 million times. She’s since become an activist and written several nonfiction books about sexism. Even Gloria Steinem is a fan. “Laura Bates has challenged the normalization of sexism,” Steinem says, “and created a place where both men and women can see it and change it.”
But there was one audience Bates wasn’t reaching: high school students. “My work takes me into hundreds of schools and universities,” Bates says. “And I have been shocked and devastated by the reality of the sexism, harassment, and abuse young women are still facing.” In an effort to reach teenagers, Bates wrote The Burning, a powerful YA novel about a high school student named Anna who is struggling with shame stemming from a mistake she made on social media. “As a teenager myself, I didn’t read much nonfiction,” Bates says. “Nobody taught me about gender inequality or the women’s movement, but the heroines of books like Little Women, Swallows and Amazons, and Anne of Green Gables taught me about standing up for fairness, defying societal stereotypes, and blazing trails for women.”
The Burning finds Anna arriving in a new town and at a new school, hoping to put her difficult past—and the offending post—behind her. It’s not an easy transition, but she manages to make some new friends before the rumors and innuendos ramp up again, online and off. Anna’s only refuge is her research for a history project about a local woman caught up in the hysteria of the 17th-century witch trials.
Bates makes the most of this powerful connection. “The more I learned about the trials,” she says, “the more I felt a chill of recognition: these stories from 400 years ago reminded me so powerfully of the issues facing the teenage girls I work with across the world today. Reading the old court transcripts, you learn about women who were shamed and harassed, faced sexist double standards, and saw their sexuality feared and policed. All this remains true today.”
And at the heart of the issue is social media. “We know that a huge number of women and girls face online abuse,” Bates says, “and for teenage girls in particular it often happens with impunity, driving them out of online spaces and pursuing them everywhere they go while the perpetrators go unpunished.” Bates believes there’s much more that Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and other social media platforms could do to curb cyberbullying and abuse. “At present, for example, even when someone breaks the law by telling someone else online they'll kill or rape them, they often don't face any sanctions,” she says, “while girls who use social media to raise awareness about issues like periods are shamed and silenced by social platforms.”
Bates believes educational institutions also need to help combat online abuse. “I think schools have a massive responsibility to tackle these issues,” she says. “Sadly, many fail to do so effectively.”
The author is optimistic, though, that Anna’s emotional and all-too-relatable story will inspire young readers of both sexes to question the concept of shame and where it’s placed—and to consider how great the impact of online bullying can be. And there’s another important takeaway from The Burning: “It's not only the actions of the survivor and the perpetrator that matter,” Bates says. “How bystanders react might have the biggest impact of all.”
“Speaking up and stepping in when you see sexual harassment or hear sexist comments and jokes is an important act,” she says, acknowledging that’s it’s not the easiest thing for an adolescent boy to do. “But unless all young people are encouraged to try to stand up and make a difference, nothing will change.”
