Children as young as 11 who demonstrate misogynistic behaviour will be taught the difference between pornography and real relationships, as part of a multimillion-pound investment to tackle misogyny in England’s schools, the Guardian understands.
On the eve of the government publishing its long-awaited strategy to halve violence against women and girls (VAWG) in a decade, David Lammy told the Guardian that the battle “begins with how we raise our boys”, adding that toxic masculinity and keeping girls and women safe were “bound together”.
As part of the government’s flagship strategy, which was initially expected in the spring, teachers will be able to send young people at risk of causing harm on behavioural courses, and will be trained to intervene if they witness disturbing or worrying behaviour.
This is going to backfire hard. Kids aren’t stupid, they know when they’re looked down upon. These classes are going to be rejected by the boys who end up taking them, and they’ll resent what it stands for.
It reminds me of the US back in the 80s when schools pushed abstinence extremely hard. That didn’t stop kids from having sex, and this won’t stop misogyny.
The only way schools can contribute meaningfully to ending sexism is by providing a safe environment that requires young boys and girls to actually interact with each other in natural and healthy ways outside of class time.
Yep, except the opposite is happening in the schools. My Neice’s preschool punishes boys who pull girls hair (they’re four) and apparently the girls have learned if they don’t like a boy they can just start lying to get them in trouble… Wonder why misogyny is a rapidly growing movement among the youngin’s?
yep. nothing makes kids resent you more than being condescending to them or telling them something is horrible and bad and will corrupt them.
this puritanism nonsense makes zero sense. sex education should be about the facts of sex. not value judgements about waht is ‘good’ porn or not. and female students should be included. this notion that ‘women don’t watch porn’ is completely nonsense.
The more you look into what’s being planned here, the worse it gets
Ever been to saudi arabia? because… that.
Kinda like how DARE taught us what all the drugs looked like, how to spot fakes, and how to find the dealers?
After reading the article, it seems like there’s a lot more to this than just classes for boys. I struggle to draw the same comparison to 80s abstinence-only sex education, and I think schools can contribute in more ways than the one you listed, like the ones mentioned in the article.
Are we reading the same things? Here are some quotes from the article that I found problematic:
They’re trying to pin porn as the cause of misogyny and that’s really stupid for a variety of reasons.
See, these classes are not meant to be a part of the normal sex ed curriculum where they’re taught to everybody because the information is valuable. They’re specifically meant to be punitive. The idea is to signal out kids and force them to take these classes as a consequence.
To out of touch activists, this sounds good, but in reality the kids who are being sent there are going to feel humiliated in front of their peers, and they’re going to resent both the material being taught and the system that put them through it.
This is a theme that’s echoed in the entire article, and it is also reflected in the actual strategy. I could’ve quoted a bunch of different statements, but I specifically chose this one because it’s coming from the top. You have the PM here pushing the false idea that only girls can be victims and that boys are the problem.
Are you kidding me? The “manosphere” is an online slang term, Andrew Tate is a meme. How can you possibly draft policies in general, let alone ones about education, on something so vague, unsubstantiated, and unacademic?
The point is that if the entire curriculum was taught like normal sex ed where it’s apolitical, fact based, and required to be taken by all students because it contains useful information that they need to know then there wouldn’t be an issue. However, that’s not the case. It is narrative driven, it is not entirely fact based, and it’s not applied to all students across the board. The whole thing just seems unprincipled and poorly thought out. This strategy looks like something planned by radfem weirdos on Reddit, not by people who are in charge of the education system of an entire country.
Schools should focus on facts. Not political narratives about the evils of pornography necessarily leading to misogyny and sexual assault or that they are all ‘manosphere influenced’ until prove otherwise. that kind of mentality is some witch-hunt bullshit.
Porn is also incredibly diverse its content. Like video games, or comics, it’s treated as if it was this singular mass of crassness and crudeness and could never have any redemptive value. There is a vast difference between sexual assault fetish commercially produced porn and a loving couple who just wants to share tehir passion for sexual pleasure with each other with the world and make a few bucks on onlyfans. And the former is a dying breed.
You’re focusing specifically on porn, but the plan in the article doesn’t. The plan isn’t to tell boys to “just say no” to porn.
You’ll find no disagreements from me that porn isn’t necessarily the root cause of misogyny, but I don’t think anything in the article suggests that.
… the headline does
Any large scale plan, involving teachers, and students needs to be boiled down to extremely simple concepts that can be taught in a few words. Most kids have a hard time with subtraction and division. This will become simplified and resented.
bingo. that’s the fundamental flaw.
sex and sexuality is incredibly complex, subjective, and nuanced. the government can’t even teach kids the basics of math and reading… and thinks it’s somehow going to teaching 11 year olds about sex is going to magically reduce violence… 11 year olds for most of whom sex is a foreign concept and will be until for another 4-6 years of their lives.
it’s political grandstanding really. they are doing this to score points with the public at the expense of school children.
no i’m focusing on value judgement crap that assumes boys are all evil unless educated otherwise, and seeks to socially isolate them to ‘re-educate’ them.
this is the type of plan that is likely to backfire, and will probably introduce potential abusers to the tools to become better abusers. The average boy has no knowledge or interest in any of these things. it’s punishing the majority rather than addressing a minority.
also what are the specific criteria that identity a boy as a proto-misogynist? interesting how that isn’t mentioned. nor what ‘healthy relationships’ means. will this program be espousing traditional sexist gender values as ‘healthy’ ones? as if those values were not misogynistic?
I think you’re making some leaps here. Nothing in the article is suggesting that all boys are evil, or that they’re going to be socially isolated. Granted, the article doesn’t exactly give specifics about how it’ll be enacted, but I feel like you’re filling in the gaps with the worst stuff you can imagine, and then getting mad at that.
From my reading of the article, it seems like they’re just adding topics like pornography, deep-fake/image abuse, consent, coercion, peer-pressure, online abuse, etc. to the curriculum, coupled with training for teachers to be able to recognize and address misogynistic behaviors. Again, I’ll grant that the article is missing some important details like how they’re going to teach those various topics, how they’re going to empower teachers to identify problems, the checks and balances they’ll use to prevent teachers abusing the system, what they’re defining as misogyny, etc. But I feel like those details are a little too in-the-weeds for this type of overview article, and until we do know what those details are, I don’t think filling those gaps by assuming the worst is productive.
No, the policy/program makes that assumption. Guilty, until proven innocent.
the article says they will be specifically targeted for being ‘misogynists’ but says nothing about what determines that qualification.
And if it’s like any other government education program, it will produce solely negative and crappy results and just be weaponized against students and teachers both, preventing free and educational discussions of these topics and teaching them according to some illiberal and idiotic stereotypical standards the know-nothing government officials have made out of ignorance and blanket determinations of what these things ‘are’.
I’m no in the UK but I’m well aware of how horribly the USA education system deals with these topics, and how all the schools take a HR approach to the topic rather than an educational one. We weren’t even allowed to ask questions about sex or relationships and it was taught from a narrow and ignorant perspective that ignored all the insights of modern science and social science.
If this was based on scientific research, you bet that the creators would be pushing the academics that formed the policy to endorse this. This is just junk pseudo-science. Serious researchers would do small sample testing before rolling out a wide program, especially for something like this
Why so negative? I’m too lazy to read the article, but are you commenting on actual lesson plans, or on what you assume the classes will be like? It doesn’t seem like a stretch to me that this could work for some kids, especially for those whose behavior is the result of exposure to porn at too young an age.
Yeah, for those of us whose school-provided sex education was actually informative, including puberty and sexual health units in mandatory health class in multiple different grades, I don’t see why this would have to be inherently badly taught.
It’s a weird “oh it’s impossible to teach anything properly so let’s not try” attitude that applies to a lot of discussions about education, even core academic subjects like math and science and history.
I recommend you read the article, it’s a pretty quick read. The way that this is planned sets it up for failure. This sounds more like something some politicians came up with to appease the activists in their base than something made by actual experts in the field who have the kids’ best interests in mind.