Will Teaching Teenage Boys That Masculinity is Toxic Really Reduce Violence Against Women and Girls?

Many concerns are raised today about bias in education. These often take the form of research showing how few academics are conservative. At times there are also concerns about the promotion of transgender ideology in schools, or about the one-sided, miserabilist history taught to children. No wonder, critics exclaim, that we find ourselves in a country where barely 10% of young adults would fight for their nation – one that has been depicted as forever racist. And that is all before we discuss ‘sustainable geography’ or the way universities grade their degree programmes (in Scotland at least) through a prism of DEI and sustainable ‘quality enhancements’ forms.

However, there is another bias developing in education that is rarely discussed but is possibly an even greater problem – and that is the bias and prejudice about boys.

The big issue around boys – especially white working-class boys – should be about how they are failing in education, or perhaps more accurately, how education is failing them. But this barely gets a mention, particularly once we have watched the “documentary” Adolescence and concluded that the real problem is how ‘toxic’ boys have become. It is as if these ‘experts’ have never met a teenage boy before.

The extent to which this problem has entered the mainstream was brought home to me when I read an uncritical article in the Telegraph about the website Everyone’s Invited. A kind of #MeToo for children, the site claims to prove that “rape culture is everywhere… and is prevalent in all schools”.

The headline of the Telegraph article was ‘Rape culture exists at 1,600 primary schools, report finds’, with one of the ‘findings’ being that misogynistic rhetoric and harmful gender norms are ingrained from as early as nursery.

The term ‘captured’ is often used, especially by those who rightly identify transgender ideology being imported into schools. But rarely, if ever, is it applied when feminist organisations, third-party providers or the school curriculum are used to promote the idea of ‘toxic masculinity’.

A term that barely existed until a few years ago, ‘toxic masculinity’ now trips off the tongue of all right-thinking (and right-feeling) professionals. It is being incorporated into our schools at a blistering rate that would make BLM badge manufacturers blush.

It is no surprise, then, to find that at least one council – Perth and Kinross in Scotland – has decided to employ, at a salary of £50,000, a Toxic Masculinity Project Officer.

Replying to a concerned constituent, Scottish Liberal Democrat councillor Peter Barrett explained that this was being done because “misogyny is on the rise in Scotland, worryingly so”.

The worker will link up with existing staff and projects related to Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) and the Equally Safe government policy, to promote “positive role models to tackle misogyny and toxic masculinity and promote a whole-school approach to preventing gender-based violence”. Additionally, the post “will develop a curriculum in our primary and secondary schools to sit alongside our other equalities curricular inputs – for example around anti-racist education”, Barrett explained.

So, no Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for you, young man – off you go to toxic masculinity training, and don’t forget to pop into the white privilege class on your way back.

It does astonish me how our activist elites are able to manufacture relentlessly ideas and even research that invariably shows things getting worse. Nobody appears to have noticed that attitudes about women and their role in society have in fact grown steadily more liberal.

Today, we no longer even talk about sexism. Much preferred is the far darker, more hostile concept of misogyny – another term whose use has skyrocketed – one that literally means the hatred of women.

Councillor Barrett justifies his claims about rising misogyny by pointing to social media and to what he says is a doubling of the number of girls feeling unsafe in schools.

An alternative explanation for this fear, if it exists, is that girls are themselves being educated – online and in school – to understand young boys through the Adolescence prism, aided by the victim-feminist activists and ideology already embedded in our schools.

One tragedy in all of this is that rather than ‘toxic masculinity’ coming under attack, one gets the sense that masculinity itself is the target. Rarely, for example, do we hear calls for strong male role models in schools, or for the idea that boys should aspire to become gentlemen, or that self-control and self-discipline are essential to becoming a successful young man.

In our therapeutic age, ‘positive masculinity’ appears to mean forever ‘opening up’, ‘sharing your feelings’ and embracing a new restorative and ‘kind’ way of being. Were all of this to succeed in transforming the nature of boys – which it will not – we would need to worry not only about the very few young men willing to fight for their country, but about whether they could cope with anything more demanding than a non-competitive sports day.

The gravest concern about all of this is not simply that it is happening, or that it has become normal for ‘experts’ to re-engineer our culture, but that almost nobody is saying anything about it.

Even conservative politicians and the press have become so single-minded on the issue of VAWG that there is almost no pushback, no barrier, no TERF-style resistance to this profound form of indoctrination – the colonisation, indeed, of the private lives of young boys and young girls alike.

Aided perhaps by our own collaboration with feminists over transgender ideology, conservatives appear to have looked away from the dangerous indoctrination and bigoted attitudes that accompany victim feminism – the kind that promotes the idea that not only men or adolescents, but even toddlers, are ‘toxic’ and a serious threat to women and girls.

This, I would suggest, is today’s most powerful and elitist prejudice – and one that needs to be exposed and stopped.

Dr Stuart Waiton is an academic and Chair of the Scottish Union for Education. He is writing here in a personal capacity.