Good afternoon and welcome to the Women and Equalities Committee. Today we are holding an oral evidence session on misogyny among young men and boys, as part of our wider inquiry work on community cohesion. I am really delighted to be able to welcome our first panel. We have Jack Thorne, creator, writer and executive producer of “Adolescence”, among other things, and Emily Feller, executive producer of “Adolescence”. Welcome to you both and thank you so much for taking the time to come to our Committee. First, if there is anything that you think you want to follow up on after this Committee, or if you want to give a wider or longer answer, please do not kick yourself afterwards that you did not say it. Please write to us afterwards; you can always add that in as written evidence. I know that whenever I leave a room, I think, “I could have asked that. I could have said this.” Please do not worry about that. I guess my first question to you, Jack, and then Emily, is what inspired you and Stephen Graham to make “Adolescence” and why now?

It started with a really basic thing from Stephen, which was that he read a lot about knife crime being on the rise, particularly knife crime among teenagers, and knife crime from boys to girls. He wanted to understand it and look at it dramatically. We took that and then tried to create a drama around it and create a drama using the one-shot template—that was baked in from the very beginning—and we tried to tell a specific story about a kid who commits this act.

Once Stephen and Jack had had a conversation, Warp Films got involved alongside our co-production partners. Our role is really to work with the broadcaster and the writer-creators and then help to deliver that project. We were involved from the beginning, through the storytelling, the production and the edit, and we felt just as passionately as Jack and Stephen did about the storytelling. We felt connected and engaged as parents to want to be involved in the show.

Jack, what research did you carry out when developing and making the show? What did you learn, and did anything surprise you or stand out to you in your research?

The start of all this stuff is to research as much as possible, and basically you plunge your head into books, the internet, talking to people and trying to get a sense of everything. Actually, what my research started on at first was how Jamie would be processed through the criminal justice system, in particular that first day. I knew that I had an hour to get him to an interview, and I had to do that as authentically as possible. That was my initial aim. The question was always why did Jamie do it? We knew that we wanted it to be a drama in which by the end of episode one, you knew that he had done it. We wanted to do a whydunit, not a whodunit, which is the way we grandly described it. But answering that question was very complicated and involved a whole number of other factors. Stephen said to me right at the beginning, “I don’t want to make this easy. I don’t want this to be the sort of show where, oh, it’s because he had an alcoholic father, or it’s because he had an abusive mother,” which are the sorts of drama tropes that you normally get in these sorts of shows. That was a difficult thing to engage with because the drama tropes are actually very helpful when you are working on a show. We then set about trying to work out a whole number of factors that would have affected Jamie, but I was still not finding something that felt right; I was not finding a complete character. Then someone who worked with me, Mariella Johnson, said to me, “I think you need to look at incel culture, and I think you need to look at the manosphere.” As soon as I looked at that, that was the final missing piece. Now, Jamie is not a criminal because of the manosphere, he did not do what he did because of incel culture, he did what he did because of a whole number of different factors in his life. There are about 60 people who could have changed what happened to him. But that was the missing ingredient for me. That was the thing that surprised me. By the way, Jamie does not describe himself as an incel, he is described as an incel by other people in the show. But I looked at incel culture and at that key statistic—80% of women are attracted to 20% of men—and I thought that if I was a teenager, that would have made a lot of sense to me. That would have made sense of my isolation, my loneliness, and the awkwardness I felt a lot of the time. That was the thing that made me realise that I know how to write him now, and I know what has influenced him, and I know about this ideology that concerns me, which I feel like I can lean into.

Did that then feed into the different themes for each of the episodes? We noticed that each episode touches on a different theme. You have one that focuses on his school, for example, another on social media and things like that. Is that how you came about that route?

Yes, though a lot of those things were in place before I even worked out the motive. The thing was always how do we create this complicated perpetrator? We always knew we had to look inside his brain—the psychology episode—we had to look inside his schooling, the education system and how that has let him down, and we had to look at his parents. Those were all the key spheres of responsibility that we needed to understand. And his friends, who linked through all those episodes.

I just wanted to come back to that. You had those clear themes of where the responsibility lay or the interventions could have happened, at school, at home or with friends, but not social media or influencers. Was that a deliberate choice not to have that kind of theme?

It is a theme, and it runs through the whole thing. Like I say, it was part of the sphere of responsibility for Jamie, but that came out in different chunks in different places. As a dramatist, you are always trying to work out ways to tell a story authentically where you can get inside something, and then little bits come out in different ways. Social media felt like it could come out in all sorts of different ways through all the episodes.

What I meant was that it is not a specific influencer. Where he describes pornography, for example, anybody can see pornography. It was not the outside influence. It was the influence on social media among friends that was the biggest influence. It was not a named influencer, for example.

No. There were lots of things that made up Jamie’s complicated brain. If I were to describe to you what Jamie’s brain looked like, it would take me nine years to describe it because he is a complicated mess of things, as we all are. All these things play a role in his head. The social media thing was particularly interesting because there were ideas within it. When I talk to kids, which is the crucial thing, there are ideas within it that really trouble me. In terms of naming influencers, that was deliberate. A couple of people talk about Andrew Tate, but they are the adults. The kids do not talk about Andrew Tate. When I was on my deep dive trawling through the internet, changing my algorithm and trying to understand what was being consumed by Jamie, if you have your Andrew Tates at the top of the waterfall, the people who concerned me were the ones in the middle or the bottom. It was the 15, 16-year-olds, it was the 13, 14-year-olds, talking to each other, talking within the peer group. That was the bit that I thought would have the most effect on him. It is people who get 5,000, 6,000 hits on their stuff, rather than 10 million or whatever it is. That was the stuff that I thought was most troubling. I thought that was the stuff that Jamie would take most seriously.

That is a really interesting take because in terms of the media and politics in general, we talk about the big names and the influencers who are adults, like you just said. It was really interesting that there was none of that. As you say, it was the friends and the middle to lower-level influencers who were having the impact. Emily, did you want to add anything to that?

It is how Jack described it. The dependence on social media when looking for answers and understanding is across everybody, in all the characters. The father, Eddie, talks about looking online for the gym and what exercises he is going to do. Everyone is using social media. But one of the key elements and themes was how younger people, who are still developing their ideas and understanding their own identity, are being influenced by everyone else around them of a similar age and are still trying to understand their own identity. That is where we got to with that.

I will start with you, Jack, and then perhaps you can add to this, Emily. You said you wanted to, “Cause discussion and make change.” What conversations did you want to start as part of the show, and what messages did you want to convey?

First things first, we are dramatists, right? We were not thinking like politicians when we were making it. We were trying to make a compelling drama that people would watch. If Stephen were here, he would say that these things are not as important to him as they are to me, because there were different things that were important to Stephen in the telling of this show. For me, I like drama as the starting point of conversation. Drama works best when it poses a question. The best bit about drama is the conversation that happens afterwards. I have always wanted to be someone who spoke to stuff. When I was growing up, things like “Boys from the Blackstuff” and “Cathy Come Home” spoke to me heavily. I have always wanted to make the sort of shows that provoke those conversations. In terms of the conversations that I hoped would happen after the show, they have happened at a faster rate than I could ever possibly have imagined. The conversations work on all sorts of different levels. There are the conversations on the sofa; I grew up watching “EastEnders” with my mum and talking about it with her afterwards. I still remember the stuff that we talked about, what it provoked in me, and the lessons it taught me about my own humanity. Then there are conversations in the classroom, and I have been lucky enough to be part of some conversations in the classroom since the show aired. It has been really interesting because the things that have been provoked through those conversations have led to a little change in the way that classroom management might work at the national level, at government level. We need to think about children’s access to social media. What Australia is doing in terms of social media age of consent is really exciting, and we should be talking about that because it is the wild west out there. Both boys and girls are hearing things that are really troubling and affecting them. Not just in the sense that they go out and do harm to other people, but they also do harm to themselves. I have talked to many boys before and since about the way they look, and what they are supposed to look like, and how long they are supposed to spend in the gym and things like that. There is a tremendous anxiety and destructive quality to the internet, which we as older people do not understand and they are right in the middle of. I wish we were looking for ways to save them from it.

Jack is right. This is a form of entertainment, and that is what we do. We want to entertain. We want to engage with an audience. Certainly, one of the things that I felt really passionately about was the representation of the parents and the family around the children. When I am making television, I am thinking that I really want an audience to watch, and if it makes one person question just one thing, just have one different thought that they might not have had before while watching it, then that is fantastic, and you have managed to connect to somebody. That is what we have done, but in droves and beyond our wildest imagination.

What was the one thing you ideally wanted the audience to get out of this?

For me, it was about the connection of parents with their teenagers and understanding the importance of communication.

Were there any messages that you had envisaged would come out of the show that maybe were not picked up?

Honestly, we have been picked over to an extent that none of us were expecting. So no, there is nothing that anyone has missed. I have read about seven different articles about sandwiches that really shocked me: why her giving him a sandwich was an act of something or other. I thought I just had her giving him a sandwich. I did not really think it would go this far. So no, there is nothing anyone has missed.

There is something about the time and the insecurity of the time. I am guessing now, right? There are people behind me who are specialists in this, but they would have had that impact on me when I was a kid. That line, “The world is against you, and you need to fight for normality,” is a very attractive line. That thing of saying, “All these girls that you look at and you want to talk to, and you don’t know how to talk to are poisoned against you by the world. They are poisoned against you by a culture that means that you are a secondary person to them. So therefore, you are in competition with the pack of boys around you in order to stand out,” is a very attractive line. That makes sense to a lot of people. It makes sense to a lot of feelings that you have when you are a kid about not fitting in and feeling like you are on the outside of something rather than on the inside. I certainly felt like that when I was a kid, and I certainly did things that I am ashamed of now. But this ideology explaining things would have made it even worse for me.

I would just add that from the reading and research that I have done, and anecdotally, there is a vulnerability in the people who are looking for this information. What you do not see online—it is out there—is as much positive role modelling, because it does not scream as loudly. It does not need to. People who are looking for an answer can find an answer, but that comes through the algorithms that will direct you to answers depending on what you are looking for.

I think so, and on those feelings. These are legitimate feelings that they are feeling. We are not saying that it is illegitimate to feel lonely, isolated, angry and all these different things. It has just found a way to tap into that.

Jack can definitely speak to this more. I would start by just saying that we put an awful lot of safeguarding around our younger cast members in particular, working alongside Netflix in this instance. We did not know how global it was going to become, but we thought that people were going to watch it, and the younger people have more of an online presence. We wrapped people around with a lot of advice and a lot of safeguarding, and we have not had too much of a negative response towards those people.

Yes, I have had a bit, and I am very comfortable with it. I am a bald, skinny, weird-looking man, and some people have made something of the fact that I am a bald, skinny, weird-looking man and have said these things and that somehow my masculinity is the reason why I have questioned other people’s masculinity. If you look at how Stephen Graham looks, he looks more male than anyone else on the planet. We are a combination of things, and we work together on it all. My looks have been put under the microscope a little by it all, but I am absolutely comfortable with those questions being answered. That is the thing when I talk about boys feeling like they need to look a certain way. When I was growing up, my role model was Jarvis Cocker. He made it okay to look like I do. If you are being told constantly that the only way that you can have any legitimacy is if you have muscles, that is hard for some boys. I would have found it very hard because I do not grow muscles very easily.

Exactly.

Jamie does not describe himself as an incel. Jamie is not an incel committing violent acts, he is described as an incel by others. It is a totally different thing. No, we are not suggesting that incels commit violence, and we are not suggesting people who consume the manosphere stuff commit violence. What we are suggesting is that this combination of factors affected this boy in a very negative way, which led to this harm being done.

First, apologies for coming in late. Can I say how much I enjoyed the programme? I found it incredibly thought-provoking. The Prime Minister said that as a father watching the show with his teenage son and daughter, it hit home hard. After he said that, it was made free for viewing in UK secondary schools. Emily, schools were not intended to be your primary audience, were they? With everything that you learned about teenagers in your research, everything that has happened and the political reaction, do you think that watching “Adolescence” in a school environment is the best way for children to learn from it?

You are absolutely right. Regarding having it accessible to schools, I have not really heard of many dramas at all where that has happened. It is a fantastic thing for Jack and Stephen to have achieved with it. My feeling about that is it is not a problem with the children. It is not a problem with the schools. If watching the show allows a stepping stone for adults to have these conversations with each other and with young people, and for young people to have conversations with each other, then that it is a fantastic thing to go on. To discuss the themes around it, to support that watching experience, to understand why people are watching it; that would be a really fantastic opportunity.

Do you think it possibly needs a more structured debate around it in schools?

I really cannot speak on behalf of the schools, but I imagine no one was planning on just going in and pressing play and walking out of the room again. I would imagine that there is a conversation to be had, and that would be an important part, because otherwise we are outsourcing young people growing up without facilitating that discussion.

We are a big question mark, and the answers are through discussion. We are not suggesting that we are the answer to anything, and so if there is not a conversation as part of it, then it does not work. The conversations I have had in schools since the show aired with people who have been through it have been very interesting and have led to things that I did not even consider. I was talking to a group of girls who told me that they do not speak in class because there is a group of boys in their class who scare them and intimidate them, and so they just do not say anything. Those sorts of conversations happening within a school environment so that the school can challenge that and change it could change education for them profoundly. It is not the show that has done that; it is the conversation after the show that has done that.

I would just add to that an anecdotal discussion point. I was part of a conversation with someone who was a headteacher of a large secondary school in Manchester, who did not know what my job is, and was saying it felt as though the show was shining a light just on schools, and it is really down to the parents and the families. For me, if you can engage people like that in this conversation, then hopefully that might allow those people to search for answers. As Jack said, we are not offering the answers; we are just hoping this conversation has now been started.

There has been a lot of political reaction to it. Did that surprise you? What are you hoping that that political reaction—if you are hoping—might eventually lead to?

That has been hugely surprising. I talked about it a bit earlier, but for me, legislation that protects our kids from the internet is a useful thing to do. I would not be so bold as to say what that legislation should be, but it should be larger than the stuff currently under discussion. What Australia is doing is very bold and very interesting, and if it can pull it off, I hope that other countries—particularly ours—would follow it.

I just wanted to pick up on one of the points where Christine had left off, around facilitating conversations. Emily, you said that we should not be outsourcing young people, whether it is to the internet or whether it is to television programmes. You mentioned that there are some places that are facilitating that conversation and having a good impact. Is it possible for you to follow up and email some examples of some schools that are doing it well, so that we can see what they are doing and perhaps learn from that for our Committee?

Yes, and I believe Tender is very involved in the roll-out. It is a brilliant group of people who are thinking very seriously about discussions that happen afterwards. Yes, we can absolutely do that.

Apologies for being late, but thank you both so much, and thank you for bringing this programme to us. As a mum of two boys, it has been really important for me. It has opened really important conversations for me. Also, I was a governor of a secondary school before I became an MP, and sexism was at best hidden and a little under the radar. Now, talking to parents who still have children at secondary school, it is not hidden, and the misogyny is out there. I heard one example that my sons told me quite a while ago now, about a woman teacher. A football was thrown at her during break time by a group of lads, and she could not do anything to stop it. She was even too scared to deal with this behaviour. Now, obviously she was targeted because she was a woman. If teachers are facing this, then what about our young girls? I have a question for you, Jack. Based on your research for this show, what strategies do you think Government and schools should implement to combat misogyny and better support young people? I know you have talked about some of this already, but are there any other things?

I am not a specialist, so I am not able to say what the strategy should be. I just think there should be attention upon it. The sexism really surprised me too. It surprised me in the research, and it surprised me in the reaction afterwards. Schools are very different from the schools we grew up going to, and the celebration of masculinity that this stuff is about has caused serious problems in and out of the classroom.

Just building on some things you said earlier about the internet, do you think there should be stronger laws for online platforms to prevent the constant serving up of misogynistic content to boys?

Yes, very much so. It should be the platforms’ responsibility, as they are making it in Australia. At the moment, they are making money off it, and that is a real problem. These people actually have found a way to market misogyny, and that is a problem.

I just want to add two things to that. From some reading and conversations that we had during the research, we also need to talk about critical thinking for young people in schools. Also, while we may need to focus on secondary schools, this actually starts in primary schools, and that is really important. We need to understand words like banter: what does that mean to younger people at primary school? It is not something that starts when you are 11; it is something that starts when you are much younger.

On that, at the start, you talked about altering your algorithms. How easy was that to do? You had said about learning about the level of sexism happening within schools. Did any of the content that you were seeing surprise you once you had changed your algorithms?

Very much so. The thing is, it does not say, “Click on this, and you’ll see why women are wrong.” It says, “Click on this, and we’ll talk about Minecraft,” or “Click on this, and we’ll talk about Dune,” and then you are watching someone talk about Minecraft and “Dune”, and then they slip into what their day was like, which is the stuff that is really problematic because that is the stuff that kids just consume generally. In terms of changing my algorithm, no, it did not take long. It still has an impact now. I have kept those accounts. I lurk. I am a lurker. I do not declare who I am, but I still see a lot of that stuff and I still find it very troubling. No, it does not take long. I think there is research that says it takes 23 minutes, or something like that, if you are just generally browsing for you to come across this stuff. It is very easily consumed.

Emily, did it happen with your research as well, with your changing of your algorithms, or did you not do that?

I am not on social media.

There is a collective sigh of envy.

I will have an algorithm through many other things, but specifically on social media, I would not have had different videos coming up to me because I do not look at that.

All that stuff was my responsibility.

Okay, so you cannot unsee those things. In terms of marketing misogyny, how are they making their money? Is it through advertising? Is it through influencers promoting things? You are talking about platforms making money out of this.

Yes, I am talking about everyone: everyone making money off the whole thing. Again, I am not someone who is specialist enough to be able to answer that question.

What sort of social media was primarily being used by young people?

I went all over. I was on X, TikTok, Insta. It was everywhere. You could not say it was this spot or this spot.

It is just that we have also had evidence from faith groups, as part of community cohesion, and they said that there had been a notable change. Since Elon Musk took over X, for example, a lot of the Jewish groups do not bother even trying to engage with it now to take down antisemitic material because they just do not get a response. Every group or individual we have spoken to or heard from say it has become a worse place in terms of Facebook and X. These are the mainstream ones; they are not even the ones that are necessarily the go-to place if you are going to look for things that are deeply unpleasant.

It was really interesting because when I have said this stuff about how maybe we need to think about an age of consent, maybe we need to think about these things, people have said, “Well, that would just send it all underground, they’ll just end up on Reddit,” and those sorts of things. Well, no, a small group will do that, and that small group has already been polluted. My kid is nine, and it is about protecting the kids who are just growing up and just consuming things because they are consuming things. They are not going looking for this stuff. The stuff that worries me is where it comes inadvertently at you. If you look for Andrew Tate videos, then you should watch Andrew Tate videos. My son is a huge fan of Tim Burton; he starts looking at that stuff which takes him into a whole different realm, and then suddenly he is watching stuff that makes me uncomfortable.

Yes. My kid is terrified of Tim Burton.

I just want to talk about TV more generally. We all thought the drama was incredible, and I am a fan of “Best Interests”, that was extremely moving. Given the strong engagement from Government on your drama, and things like the Post Office drama on ITV, is it important that the very beleaguered TV industry gets more support from DCMS and the Government? I am declaring that my partner is a documentary maker, and 75% to 80% of TV industry professionals are not working. That includes lots of my constituents in Whitstable. If you agree that the industry needs more support, what might that look like?

We could talk about the issues within the industry another time possibly, but we are really talking about the themes within the show. We feel quite strongly that this show is supported within the UK. Yes, it was made with a streamer. We also work with the public service broadcasters and having that mixed economy of production in the UK is really important to support and to get back to thriving. We are not a million miles away, but we will need to keep working with them. Q27 Rosie Duffield: Is it significant that it was Netflix and not, say, the BBC?

No, I do not think so. We will never know if it would have been as global if it were with somebody else. However, we had a fantastic working relationship with the platform on this particular show. You mentioned a different show that Jack has worked on and different shows that Warp has worked on, and it is important for us that this mixed economy of broadcasters stays and works well within the UK.

TV has become quite conservative. The reason why TV has become quite conservative is because we are frightened about how to get international finance. Often, if you are trying to do something a bit wilder, it becomes very hard to attract international finance, and it is very hard to make something for the BBC, Channel 4 or ITV without international finance. I worry that the next generation of writers will be told the way to get a show made is by putting a murder in it. I say that as someone who has just written a show that has a murder in it; “Adolescence” has a murder in it. But if we want to create a thriving cultural industry, then we need to allow writers to write whatever interests them, be that ice dancing or postal work. At the moment because of this squeeze on PSBs, that is becoming very hard for writers, and I worry for them. I am fine. There are a lot of people in my generation who are fine. The younger ones who have new stories to tell that will change the way we think about their generation are perhaps not being given the same scope that we were. That concerns me.

Do you think it particularly impacts newer writers coming up from different sectors? Working-class writers, for example.

Yes, absolutely. It impacts working-class writers, lower-middle-class writers, writers who do not live in London, writers who find it hard to be in London, but all writers. You want all writers who have interesting stories to tell to be given the opportunity to tell them, and they are being squashed. It is not anyone’s fault. The BBC cannot be held at fault for that, nor can Channel 4; it is the way the industry currently is. Some support for it would make a huge difference. It requires international finance to make a show. There are a lot of people trying to change that model within the industry and without, and if we can change that model, then we will start seeing more interesting shows made.

That is really important, not just because they are interesting shows but for the equality and diversity angle of some stories that we are able to see and that are hitting our screens. It is incredibly important that we have that access.

And TV changes things. TV has enormous power, and it speaks to our culture. If the wrong TV is being made, then culture is being spoken to in the wrong way. If it all becomes about murders, how are we going to hear different stories? I am part of the TV Access Project that is trying to get more disabled stories told and more disabled storytellers in television. If we can do that, we might change the way that people treat disabled people in this country. That came out of covid and a feeling that disabled people were way too easily disposed of during that time. At a time when disabled people are still under threat, we need stories told. Emily just told a beautiful story for the BBC that involved deaf people; it is called “Reunion” and it is amazing. This stuff matters.

Following on from that, in our private session before we started today, I mentioned that I had had a meeting with an Italian senator who had watched, seen, loved, and wants to learn more about your work and the show “Adolescence”. David, who did you meet from Argentina?

Jess Phillips, who is in our Home Office team does a lot of work in this area as you probably know; you have both met her. She met the Argentinian Home Secretary yesterday, who mentioned your work and was deeply admiring of your work. She said to mention that to you.

Very nice.

It has had huge cut-through, and you both said you did not expect to be reading so many articles about sandwiches and all those sorts of things. Are you planning any follow-up work in this area at all?

We are having some very positive conversations. While we feel that Jamie’s story has been told and the Miller family’s story has been told, we will be exploring what the makers and writers of “Adolescence” will be doing all together next.

Yes. I do not think there is going to be a series two, but there might be something else. Who knows?

Fantastic, we will look forward to that. Do you feel any additional responsibility in producing work of this type of social commentary to ensure accuracy and proportionality? Did it feel like a burden of responsibility to get this right?

Yes. It always does. That is what making TV is because you are representing people and putting their stories on screen. I feel it more keenly when I tell real-life stories. I felt it more keenly when I was doing “Best Interests”, where I spoke to a number of people who had lost their children. We actually changed the ending of that show because of someone’s testimony. It is hard making this stuff, and you are constantly making decisions, as you do in documentaries and all forms of television. Getting it right is very important.

You have explained in good detail the extent of the research you did and how much you wanted to get this right. How does it feel when you hear, say, the Leader of the Opposition quote what have been described as conspiracy theories around the race of Jamie being, as she said, “fundamentally changed” in the story of “Adolescence”?

That is to do with her algorithm. There are a lot of people on X and in other places who make that claim and have consumed the story that way. That just speaks to what she is consuming online.

We might all take a lead from Emily and not be on social media.

I understand it. I have two teenagers as well.

It is okay. I left X a while ago, and my life has been happier since. I wanted to ask that because we have seen the Take It Down Act in the US. As you said, Jack, this is not young people looking for Andrew Tate or looking for Tommy Robinson or whoever it is. They are looking for Minecraft, or they are looking for a game that they like. Do you think that there would be any merit in tightening up the law in terms of porn, violent games, and even perhaps dangerous disinformation that we have seen that caused quite a lot of the riots and violence over the summer? When you saw those algorithms, you said that it is not always advertised as harmful content; it is buried within.

Yes, and that is why it should be an all-over social media ban. You cannot divide this up and say, “Oh, there’s this and there’s that, and you can separate that off, and if we talk to them, this and that.” If you talk to the number of kids who take their phones to bed with them, you will be shocked at how many do. It is assumed, because the chattering classes might restrict phone access upstairs, that most kids leave their phones downstairs and go up without them. Actually, an awful lot take them up. I will not guess at the numbers because I do not think there are numbers out there. What a kid is consuming at 2 am when they wake up and feel alone is the stuff to stop, whatever that is, because it is speaking to a part of them that needs help, and it does not help them.

That is a really powerful point to end on. Does anybody have any other questions before we go to panel two?

I wondered about something you were saying about the fact it was made by Netflix, and all the international money that needs to be raised now. As you said, PSBs are being squeezed in this country. Should we be looking more to the public service broadcasters to have more of a responsibility to make dramas that are thought-provoking? Thinking back through the Post Office drama, right back to “Cathy Come Home”, the only one that was done by a public service broadcaster was “It’s a Sin” by Channel 4. Do we need to request, put pressure on, or suggest that actually doing that sort of drama is a place where the public service broadcasters have a role?

They feel that responsibility. I know I am now advertising a show—let me be clear I was not a part of “Reunion”—but a show like “Reunion” has fundamentally challenged the way that stories are told. By using sign language to the extent it does, it has changed the way that drama works. The way that BSL works is different from the syntax of the English language.

The subtitles do not work the same way.

Exactly. Everything has changed because of the way they told that show. They told it authentically, properly, and with a disabled writer. It is not that no one cares; it is that it is really hard to make a show that has an impact. I have tried for a very long time. You can have a little impact here and a little impact there, but you do not know what will catch fire. “I May Destroy You” was made by the BBC and had a huge impact. There is a whole number I could list that challenged our traditional forms of storytelling, and they came from all sorts of different places. Everyone who works at Netflix came through public service broadcasting. Everyone we worked with on this show had worked at one of those places. We all got trained in that world, and we all made this show because of our training in that world. It is not as simple as saying that they are not making this stuff. Everyone is trying to make this stuff. It is just a very difficult climate to make this stuff in because if you are trying to get the Americans to pay for half your show, sometimes you have to take it beyond the British borders. If you take it beyond the British borders, there are so few things that travel, and so you end up saying, “Well, if it’s cops, everyone knows how a murder investigation works.” It is just about the easiness of storytelling.

I would add that if we had approached this as a drama about social media age of consent, you would not have watched the same show. That is really important. Without sounding like I am telling you what it is, it is really about entertaining and engaging our audience. If the themes that we discuss for hours, and you discuss for even more hours, get picked up then that is absolutely brilliant. If it is seen as a piece of entertainment, that is fantastic too. But the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 look to create conversation with their shows.

I confess, I came up through public service broadcasting.

Thank you very much, Emily and Jack. I am really grateful for your time. Thank you for what you have created, which is not just a fantastic, thought-provoking and incredibly moving show, but a conversation that needed to be had. I am really grateful for your time today. Thank you very much. Witnesses: Matt Pinkett, Dr Daniel Guinness and Darren Northcott.

Thank you to our second panel. We have Matt Pinkett, misogyny and gender equity specialist at Engendering Change, and English teacher; Dr Daniel Guinness, co-founder and managing director of Beyond Equality; and Darren Northcott, who is now standing in for Jane, the deputy general secretary of the NASUWT. Darren is stepping in as national official for education. Thank you and welcome to you all. I am very grateful for your time, and I am going to start with David.

Darren, I am throwing you in at the deep end, but I am going to start with you, if I may. Just thinking about misogyny in schools, what kind of misogynistic behaviour are you seeing between pupils, and do you think the level of this behaviour is changing, either increasing or decreasing?

That is a really important point. Our members report to us consistently, and more than they ever have done, on misogyny in schools between pupils, but also—picking up on the question that was raised earlier—between pupils and female members of staff. Misogyny is becoming a very unfortunate, but more deeply rooted characteristic feature of too many of our schools. That is the very clear message from our members.

I totally echo what was said about the misogyny and the sexual harassment that is happening to female staff. It is rife. There is not enough being done to protect female members of staff. In “Keeping children safe in education”, there is guidance as to what constitutes child-on-child sexual harassment, but I cannot find—I might be wrong—any documentation that outlines to members of staff exactly what constitutes child-on-staff sexual harassment. In fact, I often think that as teachers, because we are adults we are expected to say, “Oh, that boy has just put something in my body, or that boy has just called me a name. Well, I’m the adult and he’s just a child, he’s just learning.” The number of female teachers I have spoken to who have been sexually harassed, physically sexually harassed; I mean it when I say women have had things put in their bodies by children, and then a day later, or even an hour later, they are expected to carry on teaching that child. The Government really need to put some guidance in place. There is advice from the unions, but actually, as far as I can see, no guidance. Of course, it is happening to male teachers, but largely it is happening to female teachers. For some female teachers it is not just every so often but lesson to lesson.

I just want to jump in on a couple of points you both made. You are both in agreement that there seems to be a rise in this type of behaviour in schools. What do you think is fuelling that rise?

We have just had a really interesting session about a TV drama, but a very important one, that has touched on many of the contributory factors that we are seeing behind this rise in misogyny in schools. One of the really important themes that was touched on in the evidence we have just heard was that social media plays an important part in that and can sometimes be an accelerant, but there are a whole range of other influences on children and young people that can lead to profoundly inappropriate behaviour. It is absolutely right that social media is a really important aspect of it, but it is directed at and has more of an impact on particular children who are vulnerable to those kinds of messages. Again, that reflects what a lot of our members tell us about why children begin to exhibit these behaviours, with all the problems that we know come with them.

Yes, many boys are confused as to how to be a man. From age 11, many boys want to be men. They cannot wait for that first pint with their dad or whatever, they are performing a masculinity. On one hand, they are hearing all these mental health campaigns saying that boys need to talk more but when they talk, either nobody listens or their friends poke fun at them. They are told, “You don’t have to be strong,” and yet, it is always the strong boys who get picked for the team. Many young boys are struggling to navigate masculinity. I have had boys come to me and say things like, “Am I allowed to hold doors open? I want to have a consensual sexual relationship with my girlfriend, but what if one day we split up and she accuses me?” They are finding it very difficult. The teenage brain does not always deal well with grey areas, and so just nailing your flag to the mast of misogyny is easier. It is an easier thing to do. It is especially easy when it takes only 23 minutes for the algorithms to push that content your way anyway. When we were at school and you got rejected or dumped, you would write some bad poetry, go home and cry for a week or two. These kids are going on the internet and are being told, “Well, if you want to be attractive to women, or if you’ve been dumped, well, you need to assert power over her. That’s what women or girls find attractive.” I just think they are going through some grey areas that they are finding hard to navigate, and misogyny provides something concrete that they can understand.

Darren, Matt mentioned he does not think there is much guidance from the Government around the increasing levels of misogyny and sexual assault, and so on and so forth, in schools for female teachers. What has been the Government’s response from your point of view? Are you aware of a Government response? What more do you think the Government need to be doing to tackle this issue?

They are interested and concerned about the issue. That needs to be recognised. It is a challenging issue, but they want to engage and help, work with stakeholders, work with us and others to try to develop some advice and guidance in this area. This sits within a number of different areas of policy. Clearly, it is about behaviour in schools. That is important. Some behaviours that we are talking about would be addressed through schools’ behaviour policies. It is also about safeguarding. We are often talking about children who, in other ways, are quite vulnerable. To what extent are there the services, systems and early intervention mechanisms in place to make sure that children and families who are vulnerable get the support they need? Perhaps one of the messages from “Adolescence” and some other accounts that are relayed about this issue is that you have children and families that are vulnerable. Those vulnerabilities and those pressures are not addressed, and in the end they manifest themselves in these really unfortunate ways. The Government are listening on behaviour and on safeguarding. But at some point—sooner rather than later—we are going to have to get to a point where we are providing good guidance to schools on how they can address issues of pupil-on-staff violence, inappropriate behaviour and abuse, and particularly that which is driven by misogynist motives.

To be very clear, that guidance does not currently exist?

Not sufficiently, no. There is no guidance you can go to. As was mentioned earlier, there is guidance on peer-on-peer misogyny, and schools find that helpful to an extent. However, there is not the extent of guidance that schools would want to see in relation to how inappropriate behaviour of pupils in respect of adults is dealt with, certainly not that is sufficient to address the nature of the problem.

Regarding the guidance, the language now is child-on-child sexual harassment in schools. Previously, there was actually a document called “Sexual violence and sexual harassment in schools” in which it very clearly outlined what behaviours constituted child-on-child sexual harassment. That document has now been withdrawn, and the information within it has been subsumed into “Keeping children safe in education”, which is a 185-page document that reads very much like a legal document, which many busy teachers do not have time to read in its entirety. Also, only part one of that documentation is actually recommended reading for teachers. The rest is primarily for school leaders. In that first part of the documentation, it says that teachers need to know what sexual harassment looks like, but actually, it is not until part five that there is some guidance as to what sexual harassment actually is. The evidence bears this out: nearly a quarter of teachers feel uncomfortable. According to UK Feminista, 27% feel uncomfortable dealing with sexual harassment. When I talk to teachers, a lot of them just do not know that what they are seeing is sexual harassment. I do a quiz with teachers in some training sessions where I give them four or five scenarios according to the guidance and ask, “Is this sexual harassment or not?” I have never met a single teacher who has got every one correct. It is not because they do not want to; it is because the guidance is not clear enough. I really recommend a short two or three-page document that exists on its own and is mandatory reading for all, and it would go a long way to solving the problem of misogyny in schools. At the moment, children, teachers, stakeholders and parents just do not really know what misogyny is, or sexual harassment is, at least. Is wolf whistling sexual harassment? Not according to the guidance. Is pulling down your friend’s trousers for a laugh sexual harassment? Yes, according to the guidance. There are some grey areas that need to be clarified.

Before Dr Guinness comes in, we are talking about schools, and you keep saying there is no guidance in schools and teachers are reporting this. Just to be clear, are we just talking about secondary schools, or are we talking about primary schools as well?

I am speaking as a secondary practitioner.

You certainly hear examples of that kind of behaviour in primary schools as well as in secondary.

That is useful for us to know.

Do you want to come in very quickly, Dr Guinness?

Very quickly. Yes, it would be my ambition, for sure. There is something really important to say here about the different forms of misogyny that are coming out, and actually how it includes things like objectification and sexualisation of young women and girls in the class but also of teachers, right the way through to things like biological essentialism and discrediting of women’s ability to do different roles. Often, there are contradictions coming up for young people—this is one of the great things that came out of the television drama “Adolescence”—where the boys will be reporting back to us that the girls are outperforming them and are far cleverer than them in the classroom and keep on getting these plaudits. At the same time, we hear that women are inherently not as smart as men. Those sorts of contradictions are quite difficult to challenge because it is not a factual piece of information that we need to provide to young people here; it is a different type of education. We can see this in other parts of tackling the misogyny issue. It is not an information shortage that young people have. Over the past 10 years, we have seen a massive increase in the level of knowledge of the young people we work with, and we work with about 7,000 different young people a year. They are aware of these issues; social media has actually helped in that regard. However, how they respond and understand the sorts of discussions we talk about are very variable, and quite often they are seeking to behave at a low level. They are seeking to behave in these misogynistic ways as a form of humour and trying to gain social capital among their peers, and that is leading to a broad normalisation of these sorts of behaviours among those cohorts. What we need to be doing here is actually seeing this as being a primary prevention issue as opposed to something where we are working only with the people who are already at extreme violence or have an extreme form of misogynistic attitude. We need to be addressing this right the way across the school, and I would say a lot of that work gets dumped on teachers without additional training and support, or with not very much as we have already heard. There is a huge role for organisations like us and other experts who specialise in this work. What is more, schoolteachers, other staff and parents have to take some responsibility in actually not reproducing some of these problems. If we run focus groups with girls or young women in schools, they will often report back some of the gender differences in behavioural management that impact upon them that can actually reinforce some of the sexism in classrooms. In the most extreme examples, they will report back about male teachers commenting on their appearance in front of the classroom. I am not saying this is happening at every school, but these are issues that might not be on the radar. We need to make sure we say it is not just the young people who have a problem that we are trying to fix, but we need to actually build up these institutions with proper resourcing and support from top to bottom.

Thank you very much. Just a final question from me. You have obviously heard the evidence from the team from “Adolescence”, and you mentioned it as well, Dr Guinness. Obviously, the Government’s desire is for this show to be shown in all secondary schools. Do you think this is a good idea? Do you think it is a supportive idea for starting to open up this conversation?

It is obviously a really powerful resource, and it has led to a lot of interesting conversations. I do not think you would want to mandate that every school should be showing this particular drama; they may have other approaches that they want to adopt. As a union, we certainly would not say, “You should do this,” but we would very strongly commend it to schools to think about. Also, the point that was raised in the previous evidence session is really important: it cannot be a question of just showing the drama and that is it. There has to be a structured conversation and dialogue around it. I was really taken with the comment that the show itself is a question mark; it is not a series of answers. If it is used, it should be a prompt for discussion. The evidence of schools that have used it in a thoughtful way is that it does prompt conversations and discussions among the pupil population that sometimes are quite difficult to commence, begin or stimulate. So, as I say, it is quite a powerful resource; schools are using it and using it well.

The themes are very important. We need to have conversations about the themes, but we should have them in ways that are well resourced, expertly guided and best practice. It is going to be very challenging for schools to do that via showing a TV programme. I agree it is up to the schools to make that decision, but it is going to be very challenging. If it is a question mark, the question mark has really hit home for the adult population. I would prefer to recommend it to teachers and parents and have a conversation with them about how you help your young people. We know that when we speak to young people in our youth advisory groups, they can recognise the stories, but they do not necessarily recognise themselves in that character of Jamie. They are at a distance from that character even though he is a crucial character for us as a society to understand, as are the other young people in that show.

Interesting, thanks.

Thank you all for coming in. We heard the first panel mention the manosphere. Matt, I am really interested in your experience. To what extent do you think social media is having an impact on misogyny among young men and boys?

It is having a huge impact. The boys I do workshops with and speak to up and down the country, the older they get they see Andrew Tate as a bit of joke now. I think Jack mentioned this in the previous panel. Interestingly, it is not the popular boys who like Andrew Tate. Andrew Tate teaches boys how to be strong and good looking and, rightly or wrongly, the popular boys are already that in many school communities. Again, as I think Jack said, there are influencers on YouTube with just 6,000 followers; there are lots of copycat Andrew Tates. I would not go so far as to say that Andrew Tate is not a problem. If we can tackle Andrew Tate and his pernicious influence, then it sends a good message to all those who are trying to grift and earn a quick buck by copying his model. For me, it is not actually the overtly misogynistic stuff. There are issues like body image and the emphasis on dating. Even the mainstream media with things like “Love Island” where people are talking and using phrases like body count, which is a military term for how many people you have killed, to refer to how many people you have had sex with is deeply problematic. Lots of parents and teachers are watching this programme with unbridled glee and talking about it, so is it any wonder that this misogyny and this toxic coercive control that you see in a lot of relationships is filtering down into the male communities that exist within a school? So, yes, social media is a problem, but I do not necessarily think the mainstream media should be let off either. It is not just what they are watching, it is what they are seeing in their daily lives that is having an impact too.

There is something here which, again, “Adolescence” captured very well. If we look at why young men are actually attracted to this thing, a lot of it needs to be understood in terms of their unmet needs. They are confused about their relationships, their own wellbeing, what it is to be an adult and be valued in our society, and so on. A big clue in tackling the online space is to actually provide those sorts of conversations and that support around all our young people through community programmes and so on. There was a recent report, I think released last Thursday, by Movember that was looking at the influence of manosphere influencers. One of my colleagues sitting in the back row was part of the research group. Some interesting things for me coming out of that report were the correlation between men who consume a lot of manosphere content actually feeling more optimistic, but at the same time having worse outcomes in terms of poorer mental health, taking riskier attitudes to their own bodies, severe self-reliance, and all those sorts of things. We can see here that people are looking for a particular answer. As we have heard, they are finding it from a lot of different people through these particular versions who are subtly pushed through them, or explicitly through algorithms. If we can actually address some of those underlying concerns, we will go a long way to stopping the appeal of these more pernicious places.

The challenge adults face in this space is that a lot of the discussion is around Andrew Tate. We know that there have been surveys done recently about the extent to which Andrew Tate’s content has penetrated that 16 to 25-year-old demographic. I thought some of the commentary around “Adolescence” was very interesting, that some of the children who are maybe in that younger phase, say 12 to 16, did not really know who Andrew Tate was. And, if they knew about Andrew Tate, he was someone they knew people who were older than them talked about. It is so fast-moving, and it is a real challenge for staff working in schools and people working with children to try to make sure that they understand what is current and what is having an impact now. Again, that is something you often hear from teachers.

That is why shows like “Adolescence” are so important because for me as a parent coming into a new world—my son is two—it is something that I am starting to think about, having a little boy in the kind of world that I am in, and the work that I do. It is about opening up that conversation and that is why shows like “Adolescence” are so powerful. I want to touch on something else that the first panel mentioned around the way that these algorithms expose young people to this content. I know, for example, that video game chatrooms are something that a lot of younger boys use. Is that another gateway into this misogynistic content?

I do not know enough about it. I know that it can be misogynistic.

There was a recent report that I was reading—which I will send to you—about how quickly people are exposed to content in chatrooms which is overtly sexual, misogynistic or racist and things like this. I also know that there is a lot of work being done by those sorts of spaces, particularly AI regulation of comments, even verbal comments. I know there is work being done in those spaces, but it does seem to be a really important place because it is often where parents will let their kids jump online and play for a few hours for various reasons, not expecting that there is something else going on through the headphones or in the chat box on the side.

We might come on to this in terms of what can actually be done to address this problem. Maybe that example of game-related chatrooms shows that part of this has to be—I think you were talking earlier about critical thinking—about how children and young people can be given the skills and the tools they need to reach their own sound judgment about what they are confronted by. That seems to me to be at least part of the solution here. How can young people perhaps test the veracity, let us say, of an assertion that they come across online or in a chatroom? That is a really important part of it. We have the Curriculum and Assessment Review currently under way in England. I know that they are interested in those topics and those areas and how those might be supported through the curriculum. That shows there are all kinds of interventions that we and the Government can make, but if we can give young people the confidence and the ability to maybe engage more appropriately with the material that they encounter, that might be a big part of getting to a better place.

Particularly because the subcultures around each of these places are very different and constantly changing, no teacher, no educator whatsoever, is going to be able to say, “This is everything you are going to encounter; this is what it means, and this is what it might be interpreted as.” That is in constant flux, so it is much better to upskill the young people to do that work for themselves. Our experience as an organisation is they actually enjoy it and really can do that work quite successfully if given the space and a couple of tools.

I guess it is especially important when we are quickly realising that access to this content and culture is quite insidious in the way that it is consumed. I want to come back and talk a little about misogynistic influences. Matt, I think you touched on this earlier, and Jack mentioned this marketing of misogyny. Why do you think this misogynistic influence is so successful? Why is it taking off?

So much of teenage life is focused on romantic or sexual success and physical attractiveness. That was the case when I was at school 10 years ago, or whatever. But now with social media, even the positive influencers, the good guys, have these six-packs and these beautiful girlfriends, wives, and beautiful homes. I am not talking about all these toxic ones and the alpha bros. This is the kind of stuff that kids are seeing all the time. When they get into the school environment, their status in the student hierarchy is determined by how attractive they are to members of the opposite sex. If you are someone who has not found their feet in the dating game at 15 years old, 16 years old, what these toxic influencers do is provide an explanation for your lack of success. Things like the 80:20 principle: as a man, you are disadvantaged anyway. Not only does it provide an explanation, but it also provides a way out. “Give me £5 a month, sign up to my blog, and I will tell you how you can obtain wealth, how you can assert yourself over women and how you can look good. I will give you a gym programme.” They are monetising it. It provides very useful explanations for their failures and a way out of it. There are many ways for boys to fail. They are in constant competition with each other to be the best at Fortnite, the best at football, the funniest, the best dressed, and you cannot possibly be all those things all at once. What they can guarantee is that every boy is going to be a failure in some area, so how about we tell him that we can sort him out? That is what they are doing.

There is something really interesting in this. I spoke to our schools co-ordinator today and he said one of the things he really wants to get across is that there is a difference in the answer the boys will give when you ask them, “What’s a good man?” and “What’s a man that you look up to?” The first one they talk about is their teacher, brother, dad or someone in their community who has these wonderful positive attributes that we all would probably also see. Then, the other one is someone who does not have to go through the hard stuff that their brother and their uncle and whoever else has to go through because he is a professional athlete, a movie star, or whatever else. Somehow, we have to get through and actually help those young boys understand that being a good man is also a pathway to really good things in their life because it is not the message they are getting.

Darren, to what extent do you think the manosphere and misogynistic online content translates into more violence against women and girls, including sexual harassment online and offline?

It does, because teachers tell us that it is a significant contributor to that. Here we are talking about material of a misogynist nature that children and young people access online, but there are other forms of insidious content that young people are accessing. If we think about misogynistic material that young people access online, we know that that reinforces flawed belief systems and it leads to inappropriate behaviour. There is a clear link; it is more complex. The evidence we heard before was really compelling in terms of how this is a complex issue and maybe sometimes it is oversimplified, but there is a clear link between what children and young people access online, how it reinforces inappropriate belief systems and then, in some circumstances, how those beliefs can then manifest in behaviours, abuse and violence that are wholly inappropriate but are related to the kinds of ideologies that young people have accessed.

I just want to talk more broadly about phones and social media. Matt, what impact do you think screen time, phones and social media are having on young people more broadly?

It is tiring them out. The pressures that it puts on them is mentally exhausting, particularly for young girls in terms of how they are meant to look and act, but also boys. Many of the boys I work with up and down the country are just tired all the time because, as has been said previously, they are taking their phones to their rooms and they are not coming off them. I am addicted to my phone, so why should a 16-year-old or a 14-year-old not be, especially at an age where you do not have that level of self-possession that you only acquire through adulthood? Likes and follows is all that matters for some kids, and that is understandable because that is the world they have grown up in. Sometimes in the discourse we often forget that social media actually provides a positive outlet for some students. There are students who have zero confidence and would never reveal anything about themselves in the classroom, on the playground or in the real world, but a simple update to their status or a photograph or sharing some artwork provides a really positive outlet for them. I am actually in favour of a social media ban, but it has to be thought about very carefully because for some kids it is positive, and before we ban anything we need to think about how we are going to plug the gaps because there must be a reason why kids are turning to social media to express themselves rather than to us. So, what are we not providing them? How are we going to find out what we are not providing them? And then, how are we going to replace it?

That is a really interesting answer, thank you. Dr Guinness, do you largely agree with that, and do you support a ban as well?

Yes, I largely agree with that. In terms of the sorts of impact it is having on young people, we are absolutely hearing similar things coming back. It is also linking into those issues about what information young people are accessing, how they are understanding it, how controlled it is, and how useful it is for them, while again highlighting some of the ways in which social media could connect a young person who might be extremely socially isolated, for example a young LGBTQI+ person in a school or community who does not have much support to find important connection and support elsewhere. These things are important, but certainly we would like to be living in a world where what was on the screens in front of our young people was very different to the content that is there at the moment, and ideally that they and us are not on our phones as much as we currently are.

Thank you. Do any of you want to say what you think could be done to combat the negative impact of spending so much time on social media and online? Darren, is that an answer that could be related to schools?

There is an interesting link there because there is a bit of a contradiction in some of the directions that policy is going. There was an inquiry conducted by, I think, the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons in the last Parliament looking at young people’s screen time, digital poverty and those kinds of issues. The debate that it was exploring was around the use of technology in schools, so moving away from paper and pencil to more on-screen forms of learning. One of the themes that emerged from that debate is that we could be rapidly moving into a world where children spend almost the entirety of their time at school in front of a screen and then, when they are out of school, they are in front of screens in their personal life. I do not think we understand the extent of dominance that screen time has on children and young people’s lives, but we have to think about how we can create spaces in children’s lives when they are not on screen, when perhaps they are using a pen and a piece of paper and perhaps engaging in physical activity. The degree to which young people are spending so much time in front of screens, and maybe spending even more time in front of screens in schools, is a really interesting question that I am not sure we have quite thought through enough yet.

Dr Guinness, you talked about the sort of content that young people are viewing online. Obviously, one of those areas is pornography, particularly violent and often misogynistic pornography. One study found that 13% of sexually active girls aged between 14 and 17 had already been choked. What do you think the role of violent and often misogynistic pornography is playing in this rise of misogynistic behaviour and attitudes?

The choking example is very important to look at because it is a clear demonstration of the ways in which what is considered normal sexual behaviour among the younger generation has shifted markedly. It might be the same study or a related one that shows that there is a very large percentage of young people who see that as a normal part of sexual activity rather than being something that could be harmful. It is as if this is actually what is accepted in an interaction, which has come through because of the sorts of pornography that exist that young people are accessing. There is something very important here about the regulation that exists for pornography, particularly online pornography, and the fact that all these things are voluntary, that we do not have the BBFC actually going through that content and applying regulation. It seems like a very worrisome and outdated loophole that exists at a place where actually most people are accessing pornography, if that is what they are doing. There is something very important that we need to be doing to make sure that whatever images young people are seeing are accompanied by information for those young people. I want to be very clear here: we are not trying to show porn to young people; that is really important. But recognising that young people are actually coming across these images, we want to be making sure that, first, we regulate what is out there and what is in the mainstream. Secondly, that we are giving the young people the ability to have some literacy around that content, and to actually understand that this is not where you get your information about what a healthy relationship is. A lot of the porn that is consumed does not show consent conversations or people actually saying, “I don’t want this.” They are not talking about desires. A lot of racialised ideas get pushed forward which normalise violence and these sorts of interactions. It is very important that young people are also given very comprehensive education around what healthy relationships are and how to form those healthy relationships with somebody. That is a really crucial part of this picture.

Matt, we have talked a lot about the online challenges, but are there other key challenges that maybe young men and boys face today? How are they different from previous generations? Do they feel that maybe those things are being ignored by the mainstream in politics?

Body image is a huge one. We really underestimate the toll that the pressure to look muscly, have low body fat and a six-pack has on young people and on young boys particularly. Academic underperformance in comparison to girls is a perennial problem, and that is because of societal expectations around what it is to be a man. There is this crisis of connection. When boys get to 14, 15 years old, they are far less likely to be comfortable in expressing intimate feelings, and I do not mean sexual intimate feelings, I mean tender feelings for friends. At 11 years old a boy might say, “Yeah, I’ve got a best friend.” I have literally had boys aged 15 saying, “Of course, I don’t have a best friend; that’s gay.” Never mind the homophobia that is embedded within that idea. What is happening is boys are growing up in a world where not only do they not have those platonic friendships, which are so crucial to our development and our happiness, but they are also existing in a world where romantic and sexual success is paramount. If they are not getting that and do not have those platonic friendships to fall back on, it is no wonder that many boys are being seduced by incel ideologies, for example, that exist within the manosphere or those darker areas of the internet. We really need to think about how we can get boys to connect with one another and how we can really tackle at an early age the homophobia that exists within the idea that, “I can’t have a best friend who’s male because that’s gay.” That is a problem.

Is there a difference, or have you detected any difference when it comes to ethnicity or class in the issues that are facing young men and boys and maybe how they react?

Do you mean in social class?

Yes, and ethnicity.

I have been to some of the top independent schools in the country, and I have also been to some of the most socially or economically deprived areas, and I get asked this question a lot. Actually, no, the pernicious influence of toxic masculinity exists within both those spheres, although it might come out a bit differently perhaps in the higher echelons of society, particularly in independent schools where there might be quite a masculine sports culture. I often see a lot of what is called ironic homosexuality. So, the boys are actually very intimate and very physical with each other, but almost in a poking fun of it way. “Look how alpha male we are; we can touch each other in ways that are really probably not appropriate, but that is who we are.”

I absolutely agree, particularly with the restrictive influence of some ideas about expression, asking for help and forming relationships; those things are prevalent everywhere. There are some really important differences in the experiences and outcomes that young men are having, and we should take an intersectional approach both in terms of how we understand the issues and how we respond to them. For example, at the moment, a young trans man will be facing a degree of transphobia and worrying about how he fits into his community which would be very heightened. We have young black men reporting to us, or through other sources, about worries of being adultified and criminalised in various spaces, being worried how they might be treated by authority figures, or there might be much higher rates of exclusion, some of which have been shown to be related to some of our perceptions of young black men. We have some class elements that are really important, and we can think about this regionally, what resources are available in different places. If we start to look at the ways in which, in some areas of the country, there has been a shift away from certain job types, that has really been impacting upon working class jobs that may have been stable over several generations. Then what is being seen is that young women have been much better at getting that training, upskilling and shifting their careers. Young men, for a variety of reasons, have some internalised identity things related to masculinity and to local pride. There are also some structural things about the ways programmes might have been set up, and some societal things about what jobs are spoken about as being men’s jobs. We do not speak much about caring or education jobs as being men’s jobs. For all those reasons, those young men in those communities have massively different outcomes whether it is around health, mental health, jobs, employment, training, wellbeing, healthy relationships and rates of imprisonment. All these things impact the communities in really different ways depending on class, ethnicity, disability and other things as well.

Is there a perception among young men, or among society generally, that mainstream politics is unaware or ignoring these? Do you think that is true?

Absolutely, among a very large cohort. It is fed via this narrative which might be explicitly said by some people that, “This feminism has gone too far. Women are trying to disenfranchise you somehow as men. You’ve been emasculated.” These sorts of explicit messages, and these things that are reinforced in various media commentaries, with even politicians talking about these points, are absolutely there. As we start to move to put a focus on addressing men’s issues, we need to be extremely careful not to do it in ways that create this false sense of us versus them—that it is men versus women, we have to wind back feminism. Actually, we should really be looking, partly not entirely, at identifying the benefits that men have had through the feminist movement and through the gains that women have had. You only have to speak to fathers who stay home with their children now to hear that story, or to men who have learned new skills to express themselves and found new pursuits to get that story coming through. I was really heartened because I know there is a lot going on, whether it is the men’s health strategy, this particular work, or the work on ending violence against women and girls. Lots of pieces are coming up that could relate to this issue, and they all need to have that common statement that clearly says, “This isn’t us versus them.” I was incredibly heartened when I heard one of the architects of the Irish men’s health strategy, which is global leading and well ahead of the trend, say that when they set out their policy, their intentions, it was going to be intersectional, feminist informed, and that it was going to talk about men as not being the cause of their problems but as people who experience those problems, and that was the first thing he said. For me, that is a nice, simple way to cut through a lot of this noise and link these different policy areas together. Q52 Christine Jardine: From what you are saying, it sounds to me as if you think those perceptions of feminism have played into the creation of this kind of manosphere attitude.

Certainly. If you think about the experience of a teenager who has grown up over the past 10 years, their online life, which is possibly one of the most important parts of their lives, has been shaped by things like #MeToo and Everyone’s Invited. They have been shaped by a lot of movements that have said, “We need to care about women’s rights.” They have also lived through moments where there have been very harmful and simplistic messages like all men are trash or this sort of thing. It is hard for a 15-year-old to comprehend the type of expression of built-up frustration that can come out in a moment like that. It is important to let it out, but it is hard for them to hear that and not think that it is a comment about them personally. That is a crucial part of the fertile ground where these misogynistic influencers plant their seeds. It is not just in boys; you can see these people in politics and in the media. There is a sense that men have been attacked by some of these movements that have been for social progress and equality.

So, “them and us” is already there?

Yes.

Sometimes it is okay as a shorthand in a space where everyone knows what they are talking about; it sums it up. There are lots of harmful things that can be related to particular versions and expressions of masculinity, and we have spoken about them: mental health, violence against women, and violence against other men. However, as an educational tool and as a tool in public narratives, I do not think it is serving a useful purpose. It is alienating a lot of people, particularly men who are struggling to differentiate between toxic masculinity as a describer of a set of expectations, or a particular expression of being a man, and men in general. We can do that work. There are two things here, but that happens in a classroom setting when you can have a discussion with people, and in a sense, the social media and media narratives have moved away from that ability to actually explain that concept.

Precisely. It breeds this resentment and defensiveness of, “I’ll show you what. If you think I am toxic, I’ll go and do that.”

It is complex, but the case for there being a link has to be compelling. When our members see misogynistic abuse directed by pupils towards staff in schools, we wonder what is driving that and what kind of misaligned thinking is leading to a belief on the part of the child that that is an appropriate way to behave. The fact that you see it outside the school as well as in school perhaps tells you something about where these beliefs are coming from and how deeply entrenched they are in some boys.

There needs to be a lot more work in schools on gender as a construct. Children in a mixed setting, for example, need to be talking about gender and the challenges that both genders face, some of which are the same and some of which are very different. Given its grip on media, politics, relationships, society in general and employment, it beggars belief that there is not a more structured gender curriculum. Of course, there are all sorts of things we could teach, but when do we find the time? Certainly, the PSHE curriculum could go a long way to dealing with gender, and, actually, sex and relationships education. I have started to wonder recently how much emphasis we put on the relationships part. Are kids learning how to be a supportive partner? Are kids being told about online dating and what that might look like one day? Are kids being told about coercive control? Are they being taught about how you should refer to somebody that you find attractive? I do not know if there is enough on that side of things. For many boys and girls, there is just this constant binary because they have never had a shared discourse about this confusing world of adolescence and adulthood which they are all trying to navigate together but are struggling at times.

I was worried you were asking me for an analysis of Tokyo culture.

I do not think I am an expert on this particular thing. What I can see is that the tech sector as a whole does not have a great record in terms of addressing misogyny and sexism.

Its effect is underestimated by tech bros, is it not?

Yes. Even the way that leadership distribution looks globally and so on, there is not a great track record there. Not having done a systemic or a cultural analysis of that space in particular, I suspect there are some fundamental issues and some would probably benefit from deep training with people in leadership to actually understand and reflect upon their own experiences, how they actually show up in their decision making, and who they bring into those decisions. That is an important thing to look at. Then, in terms of do we speak too much about online and not enough about offline, those two things are melded together and are both very important. We certainly need to be looking at some of the offline spaces. One of the things we would do with a school, for example, is get the senior leaders and teachers to reflect upon the pictures that are up on the walls, or the things that students will hear, see, experience and think as they move through the school. We find that even in schools that are very advanced on these issues, there are still things that they can pick up and say, “Oh, yeah, actually, maybe we should shift the photos around occasionally so it is not just this activity or that activity that’s in the limelight.” Stuff like that. It is important for us to think about the spaces that we create and what they show, how they are actually going to be shaping the experiences and the world views of the young people and, to be frank, all of us as we move through them.

I want to talk a bit about role models. Some boys go down the rabbit hole, do they not? I think every boy is exposed to this content, but some boys go down the rabbit hole and some boys do not. Has any research been done about whether it is a strong role model that stops them going down that rabbit hole?

I have a lot to say about role models, particularly in schools. This idea that boys need male role models does huge disservice to the majority of the profession who are women, and to single mothers, mothers who are in partnerships with men, support workers and staff working in schools. It does a huge disservice to them to say, “I’ll tell you what we need. We just need somebody who is a male.” Also, the fact is, for every boy who has gone off the rails for lacking a positive male role model, there is another boy who has gone off the rails because he has some very negative male role models in his life. What we would be better focused on is looking at what actually makes a good role model, and I suspect it is not the possession of a penis. Actually, you asked about the research. When we look at the research into what is good for boys and girls, actually kids do not really care about the gender of their teacher. As long as their teacher is authentic, consistent and has firm boundaries they are happy. That is not to say that I do not think there are advantages of having, for example, more men in teaching as a visibility issue to say to boys, “Oh, wow, it’s okay to be nurturing; it’s okay to have a job in which you’re unashamedly enthusiastic about the pursuit and accumulation of knowledge.” That is a wonderful thing. Perhaps that is where there is an advantage, but I would be reluctant to say that being male is what makes the role model. I think there is some research on absent fathers, but again, the research is not great on that. There is a suggestion that kids with absent fathers might have periods of delinquency but then again what is an absent father? I think we talked about social class earlier. Many people think that an absent father is a father who is just not around. What about your dad who is a hotshot lawyer who is away for most of your life? Again, we have to look at what an absent father actually is. That is a complex issue and any discourse around boys needing positive male role models needs to be carefully approached with people who are probably far more expert than I am on that.

It is a big debate in schools in terms of what proportion of teachers are men, and perhaps those teachers, just by virtue of the fact that they are men, are sometimes supposed to be able to act as role models. I was a primary schoolteacher. There were some prejudices that you saw manifest back then and still do now. Often you will find if you get, let us say, a one-form entry primary school, there is one male teacher. That male teacher will almost always be allocated to year 5 or year 6 because they are seen as presenting more behaviour challenges and men, in and of themselves, are innately deemed to be more effective at dealing with those behaviours. If you look at the primary sector itself, maybe around 9%, 10% of primary schoolteachers are men, but still around half of all primary headteachers are men. That is about notions of leadership and how that is understood in the context, but what message does that send to girls in those primary schools about what it takes to be a leader? We have to be really careful about the characteristics we ascribe by gender to particular roles and whether those people, just by virtue of their gender, can act as role models or are presumed to be able to act in particular ways that serve as a role model, in this case, to boys.

Daniel, what role do fathers play in showing a positive version of masculinity?

Fathers, as with other adults in young people’s lives, can play a huge role in demonstrating very positive ways of being a human and challenging very restrictive ideas and concepts of masculinity. I agree with both my fellow panellists; we actually need to focus on the quality of what is being put forward there. Just as an example, there are huge social and economic benefits that could come from different parental leave policies that open up more opportunities for men to be with their children or distribute that labour more evenly across couples. But the benefit for young people is really only going to be realised if we actually equip those new fathers with the skills that they need to do that work. It would be great if we were equipping all our new parents with that, but we know that in our society men are not generally being socialised into those roles. There is a bit of a catch-up piece where, for example, many men who we work with in workplaces, whether they have been on leave or not, actually talk about learning so much more than their wife knew—if they are in a heterosexual relationship—about raising kids or that sort of care. Also, not having access to spaces where there are other men. They will turn up to a young children’s group and it is them and eight women, and sometimes they feel or are made to feel a bit of an outsider, or they just do not know, “Is this dealing with the sorts of issues that I’m having at a personal level?” How can we actually equip the men who are already in these roles to tackle the gender norms that might be in those places, whether that is teaching or as fathers, and how can we actually help them on the personal level to form and play those new parts that they were not socialised into by their parents? This is the broader cultural change that we are trying to help with.

Matt, I just want to come back to what you were saying about not having the conversation about what a healthy relationship looks like. I would probably say we never have done that with our parents, but obviously there is a place which is seemingly an attractive space to have an idea of what a relationship is, and that is the online space, whether it is influencers, whether it is social media, all of that. But how do parents, caregivers and schools have those conversations in a way that is still more attractive and safer than online?

That is the problem. “Oh, you want to talk to your teacher about sex and relationships.” It is embarrassing, is it not? It starts early, does it not? Daniel mentioned pornography earlier. As a society, we like to think that our young people, our sons, daughters and students, are not watching pornography. All the research suggests the opposite is true. Of course they are watching pornography. What you might get is a set of teachers or a representative body saying, “Do you know what? We need to talk to children about pornography.” Then, there is uproar in the mainstream media, stories about teachers bringing in sex toys and ridiculous things like that—maybe it happened once—but to say that all teachers want to do is talk about pornography is not true. The way we often talk about boys and girls who watch pornography is that they are somehow sexually deviant for having done that as if we, prior to the age of 18, never felt an inch of sexual desire. We need to get that balance right to be comfortable with having these frank and honest discussions in which children are not stigmatised for having watched pornography. Also, let us not forget that many children watch pornography because it is sent to them; it is not necessarily that they have sought it out. So, what you have is a situation where there are all these children being made to feel, because they have watched pornography or because they have encountered it, that they are somehow dirty, filthy, deviant, and therefore that is creating a real barrier to having frank and effective discussions. Essentially, in answer to your question, although both parents and teachers have a role, I guess the job is best served by parents. They really need to be taught how to make their own children feel that they can be honest without judgment and without admonishment, if that is the word, and until we get that right it is going to be really difficult. There are kids who do it. We all probably have friends who are wonderful parents and everything is perfect; they are having these great discussions over the dinner table and stuff. One of them is not lying; it is happening somewhere. So, it can be done, but maybe our rather Victorian attitude towards sex as a society can be a bit of a barrier.

Do you think we still have that British stiff upper lip about sex?

I think so. During the recent furore, I think it was about a year ago, when they made changes to the sex and relationships education curriculum, some newspapers were suggesting that all teachers are these sex-crazed deviants who are determined to watch pornography with children. It was unbelievable. If they are going to view pornography, we want them to be able to do it critically and safely because they are allowed to watch pornography. At the moment we do not have age verification, so a kid can access pornography in six seconds. As a society, we are allowing them to do that because we are not putting the barriers in place that we should. If we are going to let them watch pornography because it is so freely available, then we also need to allow parents and teachers to be able to talk about it with them without the teachers and the parents coming under fire because they want to have these frank, constructive discussions about it.

Darren, does this kind of reporting and, I guess, prudishness, stop teachers being able to have this frank, open conversation?

They are conversations that many parents find difficult to have. Teachers, in that sense, are no different. One of the themes of the current debate around RSHE in schools is that we can talk about what is in the curriculum and what is in the guidance, and that is important but, to go back to a point that was made right at the beginning, these responsibilities basically just get thrown at teachers to try to deal with. The majority of RSHE in our schools is taught by people who are not specialists and who have received no training in RSHE. When they want to go beyond the school and look for sources of advice and support, there is none there. So, it is left to a teacher to try to address really complex, difficult, sensitive issues with no training, no support and, frankly, a curricular framework that sometimes is quite ambiguous and in a very heightened and sometimes controversial political and social context. All that falls on the shoulders of a non-specialist teacher in a secondary school or a primary school.

I just have two more questions. The first one, Dr Guinness, is around mental health. What challenges are we seeing specifically in mental health for young boys and men, and what do we need to do to improve it?

Some challenges that young people experience around mental health are common across genders. We have heard it around body image, pressure, bullying in online spaces, or just the amount of time that people are spending online. Things like this are having a big impact. In terms of men, and boys in particular, we are very aware of the lack of socialisation and building up of their skills, at developing empathy for others and themselves, at communicating their emotions, and about understanding their emotions. That leaves them at a huge deficit when it is time to actually practise self-care or when it is time to seek help. We talk to each school that we go to. We are delivering about 800 workshops a year, so we have plenty of those conversations with school leaders. We ask what percentage of their services are being accessed by boys and, typically, the answer is 25% or less of services—counselling, support or anything like this—are typically being used by the boys at that school although it varies, obviously. So, they are not using those sorts of services. Sometimes those things are seen as being not their spaces for some reason, but also there is a strong narrative being ingrained into boys from a very early age, generally speaking, about needing to deal with the problem themselves. Whether that is, “Don’t be a burden on your friends,” or whether that is with a young boy who is crying it is, “Stop crying, keep on moving,” whereas maybe with a young woman or a girl, you would ask, “What’s happened? What’s wrong?” All these little things add up, and it leaves boys not practising self-care. If we sit in a classroom and we ask, “Who here does anything?” In fact, my colleague in the back might jokingly say something like, “Who would run themselves a bath and light some candles?” The boys will laugh at that concept, but it is actually a wonderful thing to do that is really enjoyable, and yet it is seen as not fitting into that acceptable set of things, both because it is care and because it is feminised. Those things really start to impact on men and boys. Then, you have that layer of particular stresses that might come to them on the basis of whatever identities, cultural groups or social groups they fall within, and we heard a lot about that in the first panel and from our panel. So, we are left with these people who have not been given the skills, who have been put in a particular pressure cooker and do not see that there are any services, or too often do not recognise any services or support that is available to them and instead just want to solve all their problems by themselves and not talk to each other about it.

I just want to touch on the mental health issue that I have previously described as the last taboo of mental health, which is anger. We all know that it is a well-trodden statistic, especially when we are talking about gender, that men are three times more likely to die by suicide than women. What is often not spoken about is that many studies have actually shown women are two to three times more likely to attempt to take their own lives, but men are more likely to die by suicide because of the violent methods that they use. There are lots of boys walking around who are frustrated, struggling, lonely and anxious, but they are also told that they cannot talk about their feelings. So, what happens is you have a lot of anger. That is problematic when we teach girls that being angry about something means they are bossy, stressy, sassy or not ladylike, whereas lots of boys are being conditioned to overt expressions of anger. The research backs this up. Boys are far more likely to punch walls, flip desks or swear out loud. We need to think about anger. For example, punching walls: over a 14-year career, boys would come in wearing bruised knuckles like medals of their masculinity. One study showed that the No. q way in which boys actually self-harm is through punching walls. How many teachers actually know that? We do not. When a boy is angry, we are naturally frightened, intimidated and, of course, that sort of behaviour needs to be dealt with. Any behaviour which intimidates or scares somebody else or is harmful needs to be sanctioned, but we are missing a trick when we see these repeated overt displays of anger or aggression in some boys in schools. How often are we actually looking at that and thinking, “Do you know what? Yes, his anger is wrong, but does he need some sympathy? Does he need some support here in the same way a girl who is self-harming using another method would?” I do not think we are. There are lots of angry boys who are demonised and not necessarily given the mental health support that chronically angry people should probably get. I always do a thought experiment with parents and teachers. Who would you most like to be the best friend of your child: a boy who is diagnosed depressive, a boy with chronic OCD, or a boy who goes to anger management classes? They always pick the boy who goes to anger management classes as the boy they would least like to be friends with their own child because, like I say, anger is one of the last taboos in mental health when, in fact, anger is actually as natural as love, jealousy, greed and lust. That is something we need to think about in schools.

Thank you very much. This last question is to all three of you, but you can write to us if you do not want to say it out loud here. Our Committee is open and willing to be challenged at any given step; the way that we have approached all our inquiries has been that way. One of the opportunities we want to have is to be able to hear from people who monetise and market misogyny because we want to know what is at the root of that. What is the aim? If you had one or two people who you think children and young people are listening to at the moment, who should we be hearing from? As we heard from the previous panel, it is not the Andrew Tates of this world. As I said, you do not have to say it out loud now if you do not want to.

I can send you a long list.

Thank you; that would be great.

Do you think any of them would come?

Are there going to be cameras?

Yes.

Yes, they will come. I am being facetious.

They might not get a chance to speak.

They could be worse than me.

Thank you very much. This has been a really interesting couple of panels. I am really grateful for all your time, experience and expertise. As I say, if there is anything you wanted to cover that you did not get to today, please write to us. This brings this session to a close.