Student protest: "Instead of shaming girls for their bodies, teach boys that girls are not sexual objects."

For 17-year-old Lindsey Stocker, being made to stand in front of her classmates and publicly lower her arms to see if her shorts were below her fingertips was the ultimate humiliation.

She had simply worn the shorts because the day was hot.

What she didn’t expect, was her shorts would become the start of a campaign that would make news right across the world.

Lindsay – in year 11 at Beaconfield High in Montreal, Canada — was in violation of the school’s dress code.

Teachers applied a ‘finger-length test,’ where students are asked to stand up with their arms at their sides. If the girls’ fingers hang past the length of their shorts, the shorts are considered too short for school.

Lindsay’s shorts failed the criteria.

She says that what upset her was that many of the rules in the dress code appear to specifically target girls.

Rules include no short shorts no halter tops/tube tops/bikini tops, no “excessive cleavage, no headgear of any kind either — except for religious purposes”.

Frustrated that the school officials would not listen to her argument for wearing the shorts Lindsay printed off a series of posters and hung them around the school.

The posters read: “Don’t humiliate her because she is wearing shorts. It’s hot outside. Instead of shaming girls for their bodies, teach boys that girls are not sexual objects.”

Although these were quickly removed by school authorities, photos of the poster were shared widely online.

“They should approach it in a way that doesn’t target girls at least — for starters — because that’s the first problem. They don’t really care what guys wear. They just kind of target the girls first.” she told Global News Canada.

But what upset her even more were what she felt were the wider implications of the type of rules that focus on what girls are wearing and not on boys’ behaviour. Lindsay says that she feels the system of dress code violations contributes to rape culture.

“There’s a huge rape culture that educational systems aren’t really paying attention to.”

She said that she had been affected by the recent massacre in California, where 22-year-old Elliot Rodger opened fire on a group of students after publishing a manifesto, in which he laid out his plans to exact revenge for being rejected by women.

“He didn’t pull that out of nowhere. There are girls everyday, girls in my grade, that go through, not fun thing.”

Lindsay was suspended from school for her actions – the school saying that she should have found another avenue to express herself and that she knew the dress code well.

Recent reports of other students protesting their school’s dress codes have appeared it the media.

In Ottawa, a Grade 8 student ended up in the vice-principal’s office because she was wearing a top with “spaghetti” straps that revealed her bra straps, rather than the permissible “lasagna” straps that don’t.

In March a group of girls in Illinois protested the right to wear leggings after being told they were “too distracting for the boys”.

13-year-old Sophie Hasty told Evanston Review that “not being able to wear leggings because it’s ‘too distracting for boys’ is giving us the impression we should be guilty for what guys do.”

Five hundred students signed their petition, and a group of girls wearing leggings and yoga pants (also banned) protested outside the school with signs saying, “Are my pants lowering your test scores?”

Eliana Dockterman wrote for TIME  “the argument being made by school administrators is not that distant from the arguments made by those who accuse rape victims of asking to be assaulted by dressing a certain way. We tell women to cover themselves from the male gaze, but we neglect to tell the boys to look at something else.”

Lindsay has now been allowed to return to school, but her campaign is gaining momentum online with over 2000 Tumblr blogs on dress code violations appearing in recent days.