Tackling rise of misogyny in schools begins here

Since Netflix drama ‘Adolescence’ aired just over a year ago there have been increasing calls for action. Well-meaning but wrong-headed ones, often. But there’s a recognition, at least, of a troubling trend.

Despite being a work of fiction, Adolescence’s depiction of an otherwise ‘ordinary’ lad from a typical lower middle-class family committing the vengeful murder of a female classmate who sexually rejects him, tapped into parental concerns about the offline effects of an online world many have never encountered.

Fuelled by online subcultures pushing a malign understanding of ‘masculinity’, it is argued, teenage boys are victims of troubling messaging they’re ill-equipped to parse.

The solution suggested by many? Chuck the subject on the curriculum, treat Adolescence as if it’s a documentary, and get teachers to talk to pupils about how wrong hating women is. It’s such an obviously insufficient answer to a more complex cultural problem, one which teachers alone cannot possibly solve.

Not least because – as reported by The Scotsman’s Catriona Stewart this week – a new study from teaching union NASUWT shows female teachers are facing misogynistic abuse from such teenagers in their own classrooms. The numbers reporting discriminatory behaviour from pupils have doubled in the past four years.

Read more: 'Boys call me love': Rising misogyny crisis in Scotland's schools

From making rape jokes about classmates, to sharing AI-generated pornographic images of female teachers, the experiences of many educators are abysmal, described variously as threatening, demeaning, and humiliating.

Matt Wrack, the general secretary of NASUWT, in response to the findings said: “If female teachers are reporting that they cannot contain gender-based aggression in their classrooms – and that is exactly what they are telling NASUWT – then we have a ticking time bomb on our hands.”

“These pupils are the same boys and young men who will go on to be husbands, fathers, and colleagues in the workplace.

“We must help them and their victims – including teachers – before it is too late.”

Having been a teacher just over a decade ago, I faced a few incidents of male aggression and know how frightening – for both staff and pupils – it can be.

Those were the days before ‘incel culture’, and the rise of online forums dedicated to woman-hating, though; before we really grasped what was going to be unleashed by social media, which for most was still simply a useful way to keep in touch with family and friends.

It was well before AI became yet another tool for misogynists to weaponise in a bid to sexually demean and undermine female authority.

Making women feel small, and unworthy of any autonomy, is part and parcel of the message the most malign ‘manosphere’ influencers – most infamously, Andrew Tate - are selling. But that’s not their only message, and his is at the extreme end of the woman-hating scale.

As seen in Louis Theroux’s recent documentary ‘The Manosphere and Me’, also on Netflix, an almost nihilistic self-obsession, combined with rapacious capitalist ambition, are key features of the form of masculinity being presented.

A cocksure aggression that promotes total self-reliance - usually by exploiting and controlling others - also features in the worldview peddled for clicks and cash by young men who themselves appear fairly damaged by the world they’ve immersed themselves in.

Obviously, not all teen boys are sitting around jacked in to the rather depressing and lonely world of the ‘manosphere’. However, theirs isn’t the only source of misogyny on offer.

Any thesis about how teenagers are growing up now, which ignores the sheer amount of violent pornography – and violent content generally – that many young men in particular are consuming, will always fail to address the problem of woman-hatred.

We’re talking about a generation – both male and female - that is likely to have seen the most extremist porn, often unwittingly, before they’ve had their first kiss. The depravity of this pornography, in the words of Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel’s recent study ‘Pornocracy’, “is beyond all but the most diseased imagination of our ancestors.”

We’re talking, too, about a generation who’ve often first been traumatised and then de-sensitised to witnessing real-life murders, war crimes, or street violence on their screens.

Social media was never a benign tool, which adults are only really belatedly grappling with ourselves. Our young people, meanwhile, have never known any different.

This is all bleak stuff, the unenviable task of addressing it a difficult one for parents. It starts with admitting a crucial truth: would any of us who grew up without social media or easy access to the internet seriously want to go back and do our teenage years while navigating all of this? I know I wouldn’t.

What, then, to do? On the one hand, teachers are told to be more attuned to signs of online radicalisation in teenagers, who live in a radically online world they – teachers - barely understand themselves. It’s likely training will be needed, as NASUWT have called for, to assist teachers to do this. For those blissfully unaware of the fora causing so much harm, it may be a shocking experience.

Meanwhile, politicians of all parties appear committed to banning smartphones in schools, a long overdue policy that will assist teachers enormously with classroom management.

In truth, we’re only at the start of providing a necessary corrective to the last fifteen years of what has been an often unhinged, reckless live experiment.

As Matt Wrack of NASUWT concludes: “Our young people are being exploited to feed tech billionaires’ endless appetites for profit and power, and our education system is under attack as a result.”

Agreed. And that’s no small fix. The bell has rung to signal it’s time to get started.