Feminist organisations, backed by government
policy, are teaching young boys at school to feel guilty and ashamed of their
gender, writes Dan Bell
On
Wednesday, the Daily Mail reported that a
school in Oxford has become the first to introduce “Good Lad” workshops, in
which boys are singled out for sessions that teach them about “the scale of
sexual harassment and violence aimed at female students” and how they must
stand up for women’s rights.
The
workshops are the latest in a mushrooming series of initiatives in which
ideologically-driven activists are being invited into schools, driven by the
belief that boys need to be re-educated to prevent them from becoming a threat
to women.
In November last year, The Times reported on a
programme in London Schools in which two American women, (Deana Puccio
and Allison Havey) one a
former sex crime prosecutor, “re-programme teenage boys’ sexual manners so they
are fit for a feminist world”.
According
to the report, they start the class by asserting that “misogyny is on the
rise”, before going on to “describe real-life sex crimes that have happened to
teenagers in this area with brutal accuracy”. The article concludes –
approvingly — that by the end of the
session, the boys are “scarred for life”. (THIS IS CHILD ABUSE!)
In context of the chasm between boys’ and girls’ educational
attainment and a rising male suicide rate that is now nearly four times that of women’s, why are
schools deciding that when it comes to talking about gender, what boys need
most is an extra dose of guilt and shame?
Another
organisation, A Call to Men UK, also goes into schools, stating on its website:
“A CALL TO MEN UK believes that preventing violence against women and girls is
primarily the responsibility of men. We re-educate through trainings (sic),
workshops, presentations, school projects and community initiatives.”
And yet another, the Great Men Value Women project, frames its
mission as about helping young men, but it’s also driven by the belief that
young men need to be re-educated as feminists – not just for their own good,
but for women’s too. On the section of their website listing the organisation’s values, their final
point simply states: “Feminism: This says it all”, with a link to a video of
TED X talk entitled: “We Should All Be Feminists”.
Really?
Who says so? Most importantly though, since when was it acceptable to impose
ideology on school children? And for that matter, would we ever dare to suggest
school girls ought to be taught that Great Women Value Men?
By all
means, let’s teach children about healthy relationships, but that’s not really
what these campaigns are about. Instead there is an overwhelming emphasis on
imposing an ideological worldview that first and foremost sees young men as
potential abusers and perpetrators, while routinely ignoring and minimising the
very real threat of violence, both physical and sexual, that boys and young men
face themselves.
You’d
never know it from the rhetoric, but a man – and particularly a young man — is
around twice as likely to be a victim of violent crime as a woman. And it’s
not just drunken street violence either. A 2009 NSPCC report into domestic
violence in teenage relationships, showed teenage boys suffer
comparable rates of violence from their girlfriends as do teenage girls from
their boyfriends.
In the
same year another report, this time by Childline,
found that of the children who called to report sexual abuse, a total of 8,457
were girls (64pc) and 4,780 were boys (36pc). The charity also found boys were more
likely to say they had been sexually abused by a woman (1,722 cases)
than by a man (1,651).
At the
time, Childline founder Esther Rantzen, said the charity had specifically
reached out to boys, because they were convinced the higher number
of calls they had been receiving from girls “could not be explained by the fact
that boys encountered fewer problems than girls”.
Imagine
what it must it be like as a young man who has been beaten or sexually abused,
possibly by a woman, to then be forced to attend a workshop that tells him that
simply because he’s a young man, he should hang his head in shame as a
potential abuser?
Neither
are these activist interventions just the preserve of a few radical head
teachers: they in fact reflect official government policy.
In March,
the Government announced the introduction of new consent classes for children
aged as young as 11. The plans were launched on International Women’s Day and
the PSHE guidelines repeatedly state they are primarily part of the
Government’s A Call to End Violence Against Women and Girls strategy.
According
to a “Fact Sheet” published by one of the guidelines’ key contributors, a top
priority for the lessons is “challenging notions of male sexual entitlement”
and the lessons should be seen “in the context of a society in which gender
inequality is the norm… and girls and young women are subjected to high levels
of harassment, abuse and violence – overwhelmingly from men and boys they
know”.
Apparently,
in the eyes of the government, schoolboys don’t so much see girls as their
friends and peers, but as potential prey.
And the
indoctrination doesn’t stop when a boy leaves school, it continues when he gets
to university too – the “Good Lad” workshops in Oxford, are in fact a spin-off
from compulsory consent classes for new male students that are now springing up
across UK universities.
What
impact must all this be having on boys and young men, who are themselves at one
of the most vulnerable stages of their lives? Last year, insideMAN published findings of a
focus group of young male students, which gave a disturbing glimpse
into the ideological classroom climate faced by boys, this time told by young
men themselves.
They told
us that when it came to expressing any view that contradicted feminist
orthodoxy, they were shouted at and publicly humiliated. They said their
motives routinely came under immediate suspicion simply on account of their
gender. And they said they wanted to be protected against fundamentalism by
prominent and leading figures in the campaign for gender equality.
If boys
like these are already coming under attack in A Level English classes, what
might they expect in a PSHE lesson that – as one of the new suggested lesson
plans propose — puts them through a “conscience alley”, in which they are asked
to take on the role of a potential rapist, then walk between their classmates
who tell them what they think of their behaviour?
In 2001, novelist and feminist
icon Doris Lessing made a shocking assessment of what she had seen while
visiting a school classroom.
S
he told
the Edinburgh Book Festival, “I was in a class of nine- and 10-year-olds, girls
and boys, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars
was the innately violent nature of men.
“You
could see the little girls, fat with complacency and conceit while the little
boys sat there crumpled, apologising for their existence, thinking this was
going to be the pattern of their lives.”
Lessing
expressed deep concern that what she had witnessed was just a glimpse of an
increasingly pervasive culture of toxic
feminism in schools that was weighing down boys with a collective sense of
guilt and shame.
She had
every right
to be worried. It seems there is now a drive to make shame and guilt a formal
part of boys’