Anti-Misogyny Lessons in Schools: What the Data Says About Boys and Girls

The Government has unveiled a new package of measures aimed at tackling what it calls a “national emergency” in violence against women and girls (VAWG), with schools placed squarely on the front line. Ministers say the goal is straightforward: intervene earlier, challenge harmful attitudes before they harden, and ensure “the next generation of girls will be better protected from violence and young boys steered away from harmful misogynistic influences.”

The announcement is politically potent, too. “Every parent should be able to trust that their daughter is safe at school… This is about protecting girls,” the Prime Minister said, framing the policy as a decisive move against “toxic ideas” taking root among pupils.

Yet the moment the detail landed, so did the backlash — not only from campaigners who argue it does not go far enough, but also from critics who say the Government is building a gendered strategy on a more complicated reality than the press releases suggest.

What is being proposed

The measures, announced as part of the wider VAWG strategy, include an online helpline and a new set of school-linked interventions designed to spot early warning signs and divert children away from harmful behaviour. Reporting around the strategy describes teacher training on issues such as consent and the risks of sharing intimate images, alongside the possibility of referring “high-risk” pupils to behavioural programmes that aim to challenge misogynistic beliefs and improve relationship literacy.

The Government’s case rests heavily on two claims: first, that online “manosphere” content and a small number of high-profile influencers are shaping children’s attitudes; and second, that early intervention in schools can prevent future abuse. The Home Office news release points to research suggesting that more than 40% of young men have a positive view of Andrew Tate, and warns that children are being exposed to misogyny and abuse at increasingly young ages.

There is also pressure from the other direction. Dame Nicole Jacobs, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner for England and Wales, was among those reported as saying the proposals did not go far enough — a familiar critique whenever prevention is announced without an equally clear expansion of specialist services for victims.

The “online harm” story is not one-way

The fiercest criticism, however, is about framing — specifically the sense that the policy story has been narrowed to “girls at risk, boys as risk.”

That sits uneasily with the data ministers themselves frequently cite about online harm. In 2022, Ofcom’s own research found that men were slightly more likely than women to have experienced potentially harmful online behaviour or content in the previous four weeks (64% versus 60%). Yet the Ofcom news release that publicised the findings was titled: “Ofcom urges tech firms to keep women safer online.”

Ofcom did not ignore women’s experience — far from it. The same publication stressed that women were less confident about their safety online and more likely to feel bothered or offended by hateful or discriminatory content, with some harms (including misogynistic content) reported more often by women.
But the headline choice became a symbol for critics who believe public policy has become comfortable speaking in absolutes — and reluctant to acknowledge that abuse online is widespread, messy, and not confined to one sex.

Ofcom’s Online Nation 2024 report underlines that breadth. In June 2024, it found that 68% of users aged 13+ had encountered at least one of 47 “potential harms” in the previous four weeks. Among teenagers, girls (73%) were more likely than boys (66%) to report encountering at least one such harm — a reversal of the adult pattern — but the overall picture remains one of very high exposure for both.

Nor is this a new finding. Pew Research in the United States reported as far back as 2014 that men were somewhat more likely than women to experience at least one element of online harassment (44% vs 37%). 

The argument made by sceptics is not that misogyny is imaginary, or that women do not face distinct risks. It is that the public conversation often compresses “online harm” into a single storyline — and then uses that storyline to justify interventions that are sharply gendered in one direction.

A study of “gendered hate speech” that complicates the narrative

The same dispute has spilled into academic research. A paper in Scientific Reports analysed four Reddit communities that explicitly defined themselves as misogynistic or misandric, examining how gendered hate speech appears and escalates in each setting. The author’s conclusion was blunt: the analysis did not reveal systematic differences between the misogynistic and misandric communities.

That finding is already being used as ammunition in a broader culture war — which is not what science is for. But it does reinforce a more sober point: online hostility can be gender-targeted in more than one direction, and “who is harmed” is not always as politically tidy as official messaging implies.

Domestic abuse: huge numbers — and different patterns

Domestic abuse is even more sensitive territory, because it raises an uncomfortable truth: you can acknowledge that women are disproportionately affected by severe and repeated abuse while also recognising that male victimisation is not marginal.

The Office for National Statistics estimates that in the year ending March 2025, 2.2 million women and 1.5 million men aged 16+ experienced domestic abuse.

Women are still more likely to be victims — and police-recorded domestic abuse statistics show women making up the majority of victims in recorded crimes.

But “1.5 million men” is not a footnote. It is a national-scale phenomenon that complicates any attempt to treat abuse as a single-gender emergency.

The risk for government is credibility: when official language implies one sex is the primary victim class and the other is the primary perpetrator class, it collides with many people’s lived experience — including boys and men who have been harmed, and girls and women who have been harmed in ways that do not fit a neat script.

What the Youth Endowment Fund found about teenage relationships

The sharpest challenge to the “boys as the problem” frame comes from the Youth Endowment Fund (YEF), whose annual surveys are among the largest datasets on teenagers’ experiences of violence in England and Wales.

In the YEF’s Children, violence and vulnerability 2024 report, the charity found that violent or controlling behaviours inside teenage relationships are worryingly common — and that boys in relationships were more likely than girls to report experiencing violent or controlling behaviours (57% vs 41%). The report also notes that younger teens in relationships reported higher rates than older teens.

That does not prove girls are “the abusers” and boys “the victims” in some sweeping, universal sense. It is self-reported survey data, capturing experiences that range from controlling messaging to sexual coercion and physical violence. It also tells us little, on its own, about context, severity, frequency, or fear.

But it does puncture the assumption that relationship abuse among teenagers is simply a pipeline from “misogynistic boys” to “harmed girls.” The picture is more complicated — and if policy is serious about prevention, it has to cope with that complexity rather than wishing it away.

The YEF’s 2025 work adds another layer. Its latest report on the scale of violence found that online exposure to violent discussion is now close to universal: 70% of 13–17-year-olds said they had seen real-world violence shared on social media in the past year, and more than four in five had seen conversations about hurting specific groups, with over a third saying they had taken part (either to support or to challenge such opinions). 

The policy risk: prevention that looks like “punishment”

The most incendiary critique of the Government’s plan is the claim that “behavioural courses” for boys amount to compulsory “re-education.” That language is polemical — but it points to a genuine political and practical risk.

If interventions are sold as protecting girls from boys, rather than protecting children from abuse and exploitation in all directions, they may breed resentment, disengagement, and performative compliance. In the worst case, they push harmful attitudes underground — where they are harder to challenge and easier to radicalise.

Conversely, if the Government tries to de-gender the strategy entirely, it risks losing the political clarity that makes “protecting girls” such a powerful message — and it risks blurring genuine, well-documented harms that disproportionately affect women and girls, including sexual violence and misogynistic harassment.

This is the hard bit of policymaking: holding two truths at once.

What an evidence-led approach would actually look like

A serious prevention strategy would start from three principles.

First, it would treat online harm as a high-exposure environment for almost everyone, with different risks and different impacts — not as a simple gender morality tale. Ofcom’s data supports that nuance, showing both breadth of harm and gender differences in the type and felt impact of harms.

Second, it would treat teenage relationship abuse as a safeguarding issue affecting both sexes — not as a messaging opportunity. The YEF’s findings alone are enough to justify universal, high-quality relationship education that addresses coercion, control, digital abuse, sexual pressure and physical violence without assuming only one direction of harm.

Third, it would keep victims’ services in view. Prevention without support is not a strategy; it is a headline. And the criticism from victims’ advocates is that the country has heard too many promises about “tackling” abuse while refuges, counselling, specialist policing capacity and court support remain stretched.

The Government says it is stepping in sooner to stop harm before it starts. The question is whether it can do that without turning a complex reality into a single story — and whether it can protect girls better without denying boys the dignity of being seen as potential victims too.

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