As both an educator and a parent, I was pleased to read today about Labour’s plans to introduce new approaches to tackling online misogyny and sexual harassment - and the way in which that filters down into schools.
There’s no doubt that it’s time to review what digital literacy means, and the safeguarding measures we use to address misogynistic behaviour online. This is both a pastoral and a curriculum issue.
There has been a shocking escalation in toxic behaviour permeating the interactions of young people that we should be addressing as a society. We must act now and not simply try to police the problem away with yet more calls for banning phones.
Research commissioned by Vodafone for Safer Internet Day found that the majority of boys aged 11-14 (69 per cent) have encountered online content promoting misogyny. At the same time, 70 per cent of teachers report seeing a rise in sexist language over the last year.
Parents, too, are aware of the problem. According to the research, 42 per cent of parents have heard their sons making inappropriate comments based on their consumption of misogynistic, sexual and often violent comments shared online.
This chimes with recent University College London research that detected a four-fold increase in the level of misogynistic content served to its sample audience by TikTok’s algorithm over a five-day period of monitoring.
Tackling misogyny: what can schools do?
All of this is a huge worry to school leaders. But what can they do about it?
Vodafone and children’s charity NSPCC have created a new online toolkit in conjunction with children and parents to support families in having conversations about online safety. This is just one possible intervention among the many that are needed.
In education, we are only in the early stages of understanding how social media algorithms work, and what the far-reaching effects of them are. It’s essential that we raise awareness and knowledge in this area.
It’s also important that young people, particularly boys, are involved in conversations about how to combat this problem and feel empowered to make good decisions and form healthy relationships.
Speaking recently in support of Safer Internet Day, Peter Wanless, CEO of the NSPCC, has said that “today’s children are the first generation to be truly growing up online, but decisions about the online world are still being made without them”.
Blaming boys for consuming misogynistic content is not the answer. The real difficulty we face is that we are not teaching boys that they are being groomed to have certain views.
Teaching young people media literacy
Why can’t our curriculum, as it does in Finland, explicitly teach young people media literacy? Finland is the top European country for media-related critical thinking, according to the Media Literacy Index. And research suggests that this type of misinformation-related education works.
Subjects like English and history offer plenty of opportunities to critically interrogate multimedia texts and images in the classroom. Some of this learning has been stripped out of the curriculum in recent years; we need it back.
Our young people should know the importance of recognising the difference between primary, secondary and tertiary sources. Are the references reliable, legitimate, recent or taken out of context? What is missing that corroborates or contradicts this source? These questions are just as applicable to the content young people view online as they are to the texts they analyse in class.
Plenty of schools are already also undertaking good work to improve the culture of behaviour, for example, in valuing “tender masculinity” as opposed to machismo.
Banning phones and apps are easy battle cries, but surely we’ve learned that reactive strategies rarely work. Instead, we need to get ahead of the algorithms. That means giving young people control and choices, with a curriculum that enables a healthy culture of digital content consumption.
Margaret Mulholland is the special educational needs and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders
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