An article was recently published and it played into the same old narrative about how girls and women should dress, and in this case the article expressed concern about the dress code of teenage girls in secondary schools, or more accurately how they spurned school dress codes to wear short skirts.

This debate is not a new one, but maybe it’s about time we deconstructed what is behind such articles and this "concern” especially around women and girls’ clothing.

On one hand, our concern for the education and well-being of young people is noble except that there is no basis on which the matter of wearing short skirts affects the education of young people, both boys and girls.

It is a little telling that with the problems plaguing our education system from inadequate infrastructure, high cost of education, and lack of enough teachers that we skip all these hurdles to hyper focus on a non-factor such as the dress code being the problem with young people’s education today.

This much is clear when the quoted Dr Irénée Ndayambaje, Director General of Rwanda Education Board, said that regardless of a school’s high performance that it remains a disconcerting matter of behaviour and preservation of "culture” with girls choosing to wear short skirts.

So, if we agree that our policing of young girls in secondary school on their clothing is not about their education then we can finally address the longstanding argument that this policing of women, particularly young women and girls, is purportedly done for their own good and moral purposes.

Hence the imposed restrictions that range from how they should dress, to curfews.

The policing of women’s bodies does not exist for teenage girls alone, minors that we are supposedly to set an example for, but also women at university, in the workplace, and everywhere else.

The policing of women’s bodies is not about culture as much as it is about the sexual objectification of women’s bodies. The entitlement of misogynistic culture to judge women based on their bodies; what size they should be, how they should dress, and the list goes on.

Women’s bodies are not their own, and this is evident from the morality squads in Iran that enforce a dress code on the basis of religion, to the matatu conductors in Kenya that stripped women for being "indecently dressed”.

In Kenya, women’s rights organizations began the #MyDressMyChoice campaign, reasserting women’s right to wear whatever they want to, and also protesting violence against women.

It is clear that the same institutions that police women’s bodies do little in regards to protecting them. The police in Uganda haven’t turned up any culprit in the wave of kidnappings and killings of women there.

Young girls and women need a shift in the culture and structural change in patriarchal norms, not regulation of their bodies, mobility, and choices. If men are uncomfortable with how young girls and women dress then the onus is on them to handle their feelings.

We need to shift the view that women must have been wearing something, must have been saying something, or they must have been doing something that led to them being raped, harassed, or groped.

We need to be aware of language that characterizes women as sexual objects up for grabs disguised as "locker room talk”. Now more than ever, we must remain vigilant of the ways in which supposed concern for women and girls is used to oppress them.