We no longer need to talk about Kevin. School shootings are no longer the primary focus when we think about disaffected young men. We now need to talk about Jamie.
Jamie is the protagonist of the television show Adolescence which shook audiences the length and breadth of the land. It really needed to be seen before it was talked about, as the gradual unravelling of the truth about Katie’s murder, and Jamie’s involvement, were all the more powerful without the pundits’ preloaded views dancing round the edges of our minds.
The four part series explored the frankly frightening power of social media over the lives of young boys, most especially in their attitudes to women.
We have all heard of the vile Andrew Tate, and we need to be aware that the misogyny he promulgates is not exclusive to him.
We see it every day in our classrooms and corridors. So much so that, before this show even aired, our school hired a team to come in and deliver a series of workshops to our Year 10 boys. It was a much-needed step, but I am not entirely sure how successful it was.
Many of our young men believe misogyny is something to do with not treating their girlfriends nicely. They do not understand that it goes much, much deeper than that.
They cannot see that the way they talk to women, the way they use their bodies as blockades, their threats (however mild), the way they talk about and to girls and women and the fact that they believe they deserve respect while women must earn it all add up to a pernicious and sometimes dangerous way of being.
Most of my pupils like me. They tell me so, particularly when I am challenging them over aspects of their behaviour and ask why they do not behave badly – or badly to me – when they do to other teachers.
‘Because I respect you,’ they say. ‘I like you because you talk to me as though I am a person. You are straight with me.’
They come to me for help when they have done wrong, and for praise when they have done right.
But when – before we even had the workshops – I told two of my more troublesome tutor-group boys that I did not like their misogyny, they flared up and scoffed and were furious.
Their reasoning? They liked their mums and bought their girlfriends presents.
I pointed out that the way they were – at that very moment – blocking me from the door, towering over me and refusing to do as they were asked shrieked a lack of respect for me with every bone of their bodies.
A particular target for these Year 10 (14-15-year-old) boys is a young English teacher. When skiving lessons, they circle her classroom like sharks, staring in or pointing and laughing. They lurk in corridors to film her.
They arrive at her classroom door in large groups to harangue her about ‘unfairness’ in her issuing of detentions or homework. They despise her – partly because she does not give in to them – and they make sure she knows it.
So what did this workshop (groups of 20, four weeks in a row, run by an outside company of young men with ponytails and sincere expressions) teach them?
It told them about dildos and women’s right to sexual enjoyment. It suggested some changes in language used to describe women. In trying to curb locker-room chat, it created it.
I have four daughters and four granddaughters. For years, my daughters have joked about ‘the mothers of sons’ who run around after their boys and encourage their sons’ views of themselves as demigods.
‘Boys! You can’t get them do to a thing!’ sighed a friend of mine, as my daughters cleared up supper and her three sons sat and watched.
At that point, my daughters, as one, sat down and turned to the boys. ‘Your turn,’ they said. ‘If we do it, it can’t be that hard, can it?’
And, to be fair, the boys set to it.
Misogyny is not all down to Andrew Tate and social media, you see.
