When I joined university at the height of hyper-liberalism in the Year of our Lord 2017, it was not just a case of half-arsedly joining the netball club and getting on with lectures. Every fresher had to undergo a barrage of workshops, many given by older students, to ensure they didn’t rape, racially profile or misgender their way through the next three years. There was the class workshop, comically presented, when it was my year’s turn, by the double act of a world-weary wunderkind from Swansea and a West London posho with the noblest family tree in college. There was the gender workshop, where we all beatifically revealed our pronouns and listened to an hour of pseudoscientific fanfiction from a guy who wore dangly earrings. And then there was the consent workshop.
This, again presented by students in the year above, was a car crash. We splintered off into seminar rooms to be quizzed on what we thought a “healthy relationship” was, what constituted sexual assault and what was acceptable to try on in the shaded corners of nightclubs. Half the people there were probably virgins — but no matter. It wasn’t about what you believed, or what you wanted to do, but about how you intended to come across to a room of peers you’d see every day until you graduated. Because of this, there was no honesty. No belief was challenged, nothing new was learned. The real questions that the boys wanted to ask were buried by red faces and the clearing of throats; who’d want to look like a freak in front of the girls? The workshop ended, we all filed out, and over the next three years the same disasters played out, as they always do. The women were no safer. Why? Because the men who ended up assaulting them — boys in that room, partners, men in clubs, total strangers — knew it was wrong and did it anyway.
Of course, workshops delivered to 18-year-olds slam the stable doors long after the horse has bolted. But that doesn’t matter: the role of such schemes is to give educational institutions some insurance against claims that they never acted to protect girls. They make everyone in charge feel good, arses well and truly covered. All this goes some way to explaining the Government’s £20 million plan, announced last week, to tackle “the root causes of abuse” by requiring secondary schools to teach pupils “about healthy and respectful relationships”, and giving teachers extra training around sexual consent. As part of the initiative, “behaviour change programmes” will be prescribed for high-risk children to tackle their prejudice against women and girls. Labour’s pitch notes that 40% of relationships between teenagers are abusive — and that the same proportion of young men “hold a positive view of Andrew Tate”. As at my university, the premise holds that women and girls are endangered because of a lack of education, not because of men and boys’ sexual entitlement. If only potential perpetrators knew better, they would make the right choices. Instead of laying out the consequences of violating another person, or even handing young people the resources to report and be believed, the focus was then and will continue to be now the gentle coaxing of boys to do the right thing, as if they didn’t already know what that thing was.
In response to Labour’s anti-misogyny brainwave, Kemi Badenoch, finally finding her feet as a hard-headed Tory leader, called the programme a “big mess” and rather bitchily implied that it was a handwringing response just because “some people in Labour” had watched Adolescence, the Netflix hit about a schoolboy incel murderer. And indeed, the anti-misogyny workshops — the portion of the strategy which made headlines last week — do reek of well-meaning but hapless Boomerism. They are the product of a mentality which holds boys as a homogenous block of well-meaning working-class lads being led astray by a nasty bald man online; a fatherly hand on the shoulder, or a flow chart handed out by a favourite biology teacher, will set them right in no time. The reality is a demographic hotchpotch with a diverse array of sexist influences, from white Manosphere bogeymen to ultraconservative Islam to grimly objectifying rap — there’s something for everyone! The idea that a workshop held in school hours can grapple with this atomised picture of internet subcultures, ancient prejudices and imported value systems is as stretched and naive as the teachers who will no doubt be lumbered with delivering it.
Besides, the most radicalising material — that which lights a rocket under schoolboy misogyny — is viewed in secret. While Labour should be commended for introducing both age restrictions on pornography and limits on depictions of acts like choking, the Government mustn’t relax about what continues to drive violence against women and girls. Once home, the Schoolboy Sanitation subject of Jess Phillips’s fantasy will easily circumvent porn sites’ ID-verification laws and access an infinite supply of violent and degrading gooner sludge that teaches him to sexualise and despise girls in his class. The PSHE stooge’s kindly lesson on what pubic hair looks like will be forgotten after a single second of oiled and gyrating AI-generated flesh hits his retinas that evening. Porn and pornification saturates even mainstream social media: the only real way to limit children’s exposure is to boot them off sites like Instagram and TikTok entirely, with rigidly enforced age limits — 16 would be a good place to start. Getting tough with social media giants, rather than schoolchildren and their overworked teachers, would show that Labour means business. Internet pornography has now existed for decades, as has casual misogyny; the turbocharging factor is algorithms that push sexualised or woman-hating content.
“Internet pornography has now existed for decades, as has casual misogyny; the turbocharging factor is algorithms that push sexualised or woman-hating content.”
Workshops squeezed between maths and French will do little if Big Tech is permitted to run riot in the teen world. What good can they do when Jack the Bad Lad’s unrestricted access to social media since primary school has nuked his critical-thinking and interpersonal skills, or when a culture of nudes and porn one-shotted him before his age was in the single digits? In the absence of any substantial action on online culture, the patrician interventions of the Labour government ultimately try in vain to correct bad, undisciplined parenting by simulating the well-meaning mummy. The same parents who are sending children to school in nappies, shoving responsibility on reception teachers to toilet-train them, are letting their teenagers poison their brains with the guff of the internet; as a result, poor old teachers must become ersatz parents and do the hard yards of, variously, wiping bottoms and telling boys off for “undressing” classmates using AI. At what point can we start blaming Mum and Dad? If Labour won’t boot kids off social media, parents certainty should. In targeting schools, the Government flatters itself that it will reach the deep roots of boys’ anti-woman conditioning — as if children still learn the rules of society in the real world rather than online. Future generations of women will remember that assumption as hopelessly sentimental.
Yet because the true role of such workshops is to deflect accountability from institutions, none of these objections matter — and this happy-clappy initiative is destined to become yet another deflated rubber ring slung into the rising oceans of rape culture, quietly scrubbed from timetables in five years’ time when it emerges it made no difference at all. In the vast majority of cases, those who sexual assault know what they’re doing is wrong, and do it anyway. Initiatives like this, while well-meaning, do naff all. If you want my advice, kick kids off social media, spell out the punitive consequences of schoolyard misogyny, then give the police and courts enough power and funding to get justice for victims. That would be a start.
