Coming for the boys

Now, after nearly a decade of propaganda carefully preparing the ground for their next move, the scene is set. They are ready to come for the boys. The feminists now say the time has come for prevention, which means targeting boys in schools.

We've already had the first announcement. At the National Men's Health Gathering in Brisbane last October, Ged Kearney, the Assistant Minister for the Prevention of Family Violence, introduced herself as a "proud feminist," and announced to the assembled group of hard-working health professionals and men's support workers that "we're going to take you on a journey away from your destructiveness and domination," before slipping in the news that classroom anti-misogyny training for boys would soon be introduced into both junior and senior schools. Kapow!

So here we go. Australia is scrambling to catch up with feminists elsewhere who've been going great guns pursuing this new agenda. In Canada, New Zealand and some American states there are moves to follow the UK and Scotland which recently announced anti-misogyny classes for boys in schools with a £20 million investment to empower teachers, families, and pupils to tackle these issues. Children as young as 11 exhibiting "misogynistic behaviours" are to receive targeted interventions. And what is misogynistic behaviour? You guessed it; whatever the feminists say it is!

Jess Phillips, who bears the ominous title "Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls", has repeatedly described misogyny as needing to be treated like "any other extremist ideology."

Sure enough, her safeguarding has already begun. In early January, Laurelhill Community College in County Antrim, Northern Ireland suspended 19 male teenage pupils after the principal raised concerns about "toxic masculinity" on display during a school assembly. The parents of the 19 boys, along with children at the school, have spoken out against the suspensions believing them to be unfair, saying they have damaged the boys' mental wellbeing after being made out to "be villains". There were claims that the girls' behaviour was just as bad, yet none were suspended, naturally.

This is obviously just the start of those targeted interventions in a population primed by the hugely successful Netflix drama Adolescence which involved a 13-year-old boy who brutally stabs and murders a female schoolmate. Prime Minister Starmer used the series to justify the intervention in schools: "Every parent should be able to trust that their daughter is safe at school…This is about protecting girls," he said.

Never mind that the Netflix drama was fiction based on numerous flawed assumptions. Rick Bradford, who writes the excellent blog, The Illustrated Empathy Gap, points out white teenage girls are in fact the least likely group to be victims of knife crime in the UK, as he shows here:

Equally dubious is the Netflix drama's beat-up of the risks to boys of exposure to dangerous influences online. The truth is far more complex with boys often victims of online abuse by girls, who are very actively using the internet to bully and abuse others.

• A 2021 UNICEF review of global studies found that boys often face equal or greater exposure to certain online harms compared to girls, including being more likely to be victims of sextortion.

• A 2024 Thorn survey of over 10,000 minors reported a sharp rise in younger boys being targeted for sexual messages or requests for explicit images.

• A Youth Endowment Fund 2025 Vulnerability Report, based on a survey of 10,000 teens aged 13-17 in England and Wales found minimal gender differences in participation in online discussions about harming specific groups, with 38% of boys and 34% of girls reporting involvement.

• A YouGov survey found there has been no increase in misogynist attitudes amongst young men, as compared to older generations.

But none of this fits the new narrative of vile boys being groomed online to become misogynist terrorists – a theme which has been embraced by our own eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant.