Category Archives: education

Prejudice

In September 2014 I wrote an article about the organised intention to promote the image of schoolboys as sexual predators (on that occasion in the context of compulsory Sex and Relationship Education). It ended thus,

Only boys are acknowledged as potential abusers. One shudders at the totalitarian mentality behind the phrase “adequate interventions” – not for boys who have done anything, but for those who are deemed “at risk” of doing something – as judged, one presumes, by people with suitably approved ideological purity. It is presented to us as a fact that more abuse will be reported. It will. The very process will ensure it, and is intended to do so. God help our boys. They will be forced to play the role of the bourgeoisie in our very own Cultural Revolution.”

It is now in full swing.

Though hard data is not available and probably never will be, news reports are beginning to appear which are exposing what is happening in schools. The dominant narrative will, of course, continue to be that girls are at constant, severe and ever-escalating risk from sexually rapacious boys. That the boys may be aged 13 (or even younger) makes no difference. They have the indelible mark of Cain, a penis, and their original sin cannot ever be expunged.

I’m indebted to Mike/J4MB for drawing my attention to the following newspaper article in July 2022: My son’s innocent teenage fumblings saw him branded a rapist, his anonymous mother reveals. I urge you to read it in full. The key points are as follows.

The story is recounted by a mother who withheld her name out of fear for her son. She had other sons too, and observed that, “throughout their young lives they have routinely been told by their young female friends that they ‘hate men’ and that ‘all men are rapists’. So fevered has the atmosphere among young women become that today something as innocent as a male tapping you on the shoulder can be construed as assault.” Do not doubt it. A teacher recently committed suicide over something that trivial because it led to a court case.

One of this mother’s sons was 13 when he was sent a topless photo by a schoolgirl. With another girl he had been involved in “saucy texting and some mutual touching”. There was zero question of full-blown sex taking place and all the behaviour was mutual and consensual, as far as the boy was aware. But one of the girls’ mothers found the material on her daughter’s phone and complained to the school. The boy’s mother then discovered the truth about our society. She wrote,

“…the stark difference between the treatment of girls and boys became evident, to my son’s lifelong cost. The girls, who were equally culpable, as sending nude photographs is both an offence and against the school rules, were dealt with discreetly. A quiet word was had with them and their parents and that was an end to it. Conversely, my son, who’d never been in trouble before, was suspended for two days, the final step before expulsion. The school’s rationale was that the other pupils would see this as ‘justice’.”

Moral authority, do note, was delegated to children.

A merciless campaign of intimidation and bullying by other school pupils followed. The boy was called a ‘rapist’, a ‘nonce’ and told he should be castrated. He was urged to kill himself on a daily basis. He was attacked by a mob in the playground and was threatened with stabbing. Lurid rumours started that he had locked multiple girls in cupboards and raped them. Later, one of the girls decided to call the police and accuse the boy of sexual assault. The boy was told by an acquaintance that it was because she was ‘feeling bored’. A month later, a girl who had been friends with the boy for years accused him of sexual assault after he touched her on the back to get her attention. Once again, writes his mother, “his teachers reacted aggressively by hauling him out of his lesson, thereby cementing his reputation as a predator and destroying any scant chance he had to resume a normal life at school”. The boy’s emotional well-being inevitably crumbled under this assault. His friends deserted him; nothing he said or did made any difference, he was a ‘rapist’ in the eyes of his entire school.

During the investigation that followed, the police told the boy’s parents that they were being inundated with similar calls from teenage girls “whipped into a frenzy by the MeToo movement”. Lawyers the parents consulted confirmed an exponential rise in allegations against young schoolboys in the past few years.

The anonymous mother subsequently discovered that two of her girlfriends’ sons had had similar experiences: “One had been ostracised by all his friends and had to move away from the area after an ex accused him of rape after he started a new relationship. Another had his picture plastered on a website with the smear of “rapist” next to it, for much the same reason.”

Data to quantify the prevalence of such cases are not available, as far as I am aware. But it is becoming clear, just from newspaper reports, that this appalling targeting of boys is not rare. In March 2021, Sarah Rodrigues had a piece in the Telegraph titled, “As a mother of sons, this is scaring me”. She wrote that, as lockdowns ended, many of the country’s adolescent boys were not so much excited about returning to school as frightened. The reason was the thousands of allegations being made on Everyone’s Invited. The prevailing atmosphere was of fear.

Rodrigues recounts several examples. One was of a teenage boy arriving at his sixth form college to a chorus of screams from girls, others hissing or spitting. This was due to some story about him circulating on social media platforms. He never went back. His friends immediately deserted him, having been threatened with ‘cancellation’ otherwise. Teenage boys are now concluding that it’s safer to stay at home. Rodrigues rightly raises the issue of allegations which only follow the end of a relationship – which seems common. Last week’s fully engaged bit of fun is today’s retrospective sexual assault.

The Rodrigues article was followed in the newspaper by a piece by Pravina Rudra reminding us (I paraphrase) not to forget that it is the boys who are the little shits, and the girls who are the real victims. Just in case you were in danger of confusion. Articles like Rodrigues’ are always immediately neutralised.

Just last week, 5 February 2023, The Times had an article by Sian Griffiths, “Why MeToo fallout is wrecking the lives of schoolboys”, which begins to shed some light on the issue of prevalence. It reports the testimony of highly experienced psychotherapist, Julie Lynn-Evans. Her clients used to be teenage girls with eating disorders or self-harming issues. But for the last six months they have been exclusively boys – boys who have been ostracised, punished or even expelled for behaviour that she describes as little more than clumsy teenage fumbling. Many have done nothing wrong. Her testimony involves words like “serious”, “dangerous” and “not justice”. Some of the boys are suicidal. Clearly all of them are extremely severely impacted or they would not be seeing a psychotherapist.

The article quotes a criminal defence lawyer who has worked with dozens of boys subject to these allegations, which generally first appear on Everyone’s Invited or the Whisper app. None have resulted in convictions. Some involve such things as “brushing up against someone in the lunch queue”. Give me strength. On that basis I was sexually assaulted multiple times daily for six years…and that’s not counting primary school.

The process is the punishment, and that punishment follows automatically upon allegation. The facts are irrelevant. It is not even very relevant if a prosecution finds “not guilty”. By that time the boy’s education has been seriously disrupted for a protracted period, usually over a year, he has been ostracised and vilified, he is seriously depressed, even suicidal, and the family generally has to move away because the boy’s life will go on being intolerable despite any “not guilty” verdict. The trauma these boys undergo is underestimated by society. They are often left fearing to restart education, put off university, and too fearful ever to go within ten yards of a girl ever again – and possibly boys too.

Who is the one hurt here? Was it the girl who was merely touched (or voluntarily provided a topless photo of herself) and was subsequently the recipient of everybody’s concern and protection, perhaps enjoying the attention and envy of her school friends. Or was it the boy who was universally vilified, urged to kill himself, lost all his friends, was subject to mob aggression and further groundless accusations, ultimately obliging his family to move away?

In future life, will it be the girl or the boy who will be frightened of risking intimacy with the opposite sex? Who has truly been damaged, by intense harm in the short term, and perhaps chronic harm throughout life?

What are the causes of this behaviour by young teenage girls?

Girls of that age are testing their newly acquired power over boys. It was ever thus. Girls used to be content to break hearts; now, it seems, they want to destroy a boy’s entire existence. There appears to be no remorse when the consequences of their accusations become clear. Quite the opposite.

Girls of that age are also keen for attention, especially if the attention involves sympathy or admiration. Both of those objectives can be fulfilled by making fashionable allegations against a boy. And this perennial inclination is now exacerbated by our victimhood culture, which provides a bonus in terms of status to the alleged victim. Girls presenting as sexual assault victims will be met only with sympathy, concern, and positive encouragement by all authority figures.

Then there’s the mobbing. Another girl, envious of the attention a “victim” is getting (or perhaps just bored) decides to join in. What better than to accuse the same boy? Everyone will believe it immediately, he’s a known rapist after all.

Then there are the mobs of boys. Schoolboys were always ready, Lord Of The Flies fashion, to be merciless towards the excluded. They too are fearful; fearful of being the next for the treatment. And so they learn the quisling response of allyship, the cowards. I hope there are exceptions.

But we must also acknowledge that some girls (not all) are genuinely fearful of boys – which is not to say that such fear is well founded. How could they not be when they have been raised to believe they live in a rape culture. That preposterous narrative continues to go from strength to strength. It is incredibly damaging, to both sexes, driving a wedge between them. Every boy, they have been taught to believe, is just waiting for an opportunity to pounce on them. That boys might be motivated by feelings of tenderness towards girls is not something they have ever heard. Females have always been rather ignorant of the inner life of males, and ignorance has now given way to wild falsity.

The role of our therapeutic educational system contributes strongly to girls’ fear. They have been taught to prioritise their feelings over factual evidence, and this plays to a natural tendency. Regrettably, there is truth in the oft-made claim that we have raised a generation of snowflakes. Unfortunately, it applies to the boys too.

There is, perhaps, a deeper psychological reason too. Girls and young women have a need to feel protected. Yet their distancing from males of their own age, encouraged by the mantras of the “strong independent woman” – and perhaps fatherlessness too – have removed the source of protection. But the innate feeling of need of protection remains. To rationalise this feeling, a cause has to be attributed to it. The dangerous predatory male fits the bill. In short, boys become the victims of irrational, innate female psychology.

But let us not forget the simpler and more direct explanation: that some girls are just wicked. The “mean girl” phenomenon is real, and boys have zero chance against mean girls. As Erin Pizzey has said in the context of mixed sex DV refuges, “no way, the women would eat the men alive”. Quite.

“Everyone’s Invited” facilitates these behaviours – and is intended to do so. It not only provides an easy vehicle for allegations, analogous to #MeToo, but also is a (further) conduit for the narrative on rape culture. The strapline of the organisation is “Everyone’s Invited is the leading activist and educational organisation tackling rape culture in the UK”. They particularly target schools and universities.

One can see a pattern of future behaviour emerging from this. Unjust treatment of young men accused of sexual assault has been increasingly a feature of university life for many years. Men are not even safe at the gym now. The false allegations of sexual assault that are made in adult life are the natural extension and outcome of behaviours reinforced by society via the schools at an earlier age. Five years ago I did a brief review of such false allegations in the UK and identified the reasons as being (with numbers of cases in brackets): regret sex (19), rejection (14), revenge/anger (14), to hide infidelity (10), attention seeking (10), extortion / blackmail / fraud / for the compensation (9), political (4), delusional (4), for sympathy (4), jealousy (3), to excuse poor exam grading, I kid you not (2), and, in one case, simply to get a lift home in a police car.

And, no, I don’t believe the above remarks will apply to all girls. I fully expect there are many who understand very well what is really going on. But like the neutral boys, sticking one’s neck out in a school environment would be courting the mob to turn on you. And so both sexes learn to bite their tongues about disgraceful behaviour out of fear and self-interest. It will serve them well in later life in our culture now.

But I have addressed only the causes of the girls’ keenness to make allegations. There is another dimension to this phenomenon, namely the active encouragement of these behaviours from every direction in society. The #MeToo phenomenon has been highlighted as one cause. One of the things that drives me to distraction is that, even in the articles quoted above, it remains obligatory to display concern for the girls. For example, the psychotherapist Lynn-Evans stated, “I like #MeToo and would like to give the woman who started it an award”. Similarly, the anonymous mother in the first piece included the following in her account,

Of course, any girl should feel able to complain about physical contact that makes her feel uncomfortable.”

Let me be clear: I abhor the fact that violence against women is still such a problem in our society. It breaks my heart every time I read about the latest young woman who has been attacked, raped and even murdered on our streets. I’ve always taught my sons to respect women and make sure their female friends get home safe. I fervently believe girls have the right to call out bad behaviour and be listened to.”

I had never brooked sexism in my house, yet found myself questioning my own mothering skills. Had I not hammered home the importance of treating girls respectfully?

This is how hard it is to escape gynocentrism even for a mother defending her – let’s be frank about this – her abused son. She should have been demanding that mothers raise their daughters to understand the importance of treating boys with respect. What chance is there of anyone ever imposing such an obligation on girls? Nil.

Instead we have the empathy gap on steroids, with callous behaviour by girls being rewarded instead of punished. This is the nub of the problem: total failure of genuine moral authority. There are no adults in the room anymore.

The #MeToo phenomenon has been highlighted as a driver of this accusatory culture, but this has merely given further impetus to the feminist mantras which go back at least 50 years (and actually far longer). If ordinary schoolgirls are now saying they hate all men and all men are rapists, then it is hardly irrelevant to note that feminists have been writing exactly that in their tracts for over half a century. It is hardly irrelevant that the feminist perspective is obligatory in the whole education system.

This is not to say that all teachers are complicit feminist zealots (though some are). Many teachers are the victims of this ideologically based intolerance. Teachers too have allegations made against them – sometimes women teachers too. But that is to be expected in an ideologically-driven process, essentially totalist in nature. No one is safe. The ideology holds everyone in its sway, even those who seem to be its chief progenitors.

For example, teachers may have limited freedom of action following allegations from pupils, such as those recounted above. Government statutory advice on required action following allegations was updated in September 2022. This stemmed from the earlier ‘rapid review of sexual abuse in schools and colleges’ carried out by Ofsted in 2021, and this in turn was a response to the launch of Everyone’s Invited. The advice describes anyone accused of any sexual misdemeanour as a ‘perpetrator’ and recommends that schools remove them from any classes or spaces they share with the ‘victim’. The advice also states, “staff should be aware it is more likely that girls will be the victims of sexual violence and sexual harassment and more likely it will be perpetrated by boys”.

The Government guidance is all about safeguarding, yet it is clear that the actions of schools failed catastrophically to safeguard the accused boys in the above cases. The reason is the endemic prejudice that is blind to girls’ situational aggression. We are culturally unable to recognise who is the victim and who the perpetrator.

What this example of Government guidance demonstrates is that, (i) these draconian, and prejudiced, policies are promulgated top-down by Government, but also that, (ii) their origin can lie in a private initiative by a single individual or small group of individuals. This can only occur if the spark created by a small group falls into the dry tinder of a pre-existing prejudicial environment which extends through official bodies and into Government.

But the killer observation is this: if there is such widespread concern that girls are subject to rampant sexual abuse at school, where are the calls for girls to be educated separately? I hear none.

If the authorities – and parents and girls themselves – really believed the narrative which they all so gleefully promulgate, why are they not calling for girls to be educated separately from boys?

This mirrors what has been happening in universities for many years. On the one hand the narrative claims that universities are the epicentre of a rape culture. On the other hand, neither young women themselves, nor their parents, show any reluctance to their continuing to attend universities in ever increasing numbers.

In contrast, I hear plenty of calls for boys to be educated separately, including from myself. Which sex, then, is truly at risk?

There will never be calls for single sex education from the feminists because that would defeat their purpose because their purpose is not the protection of females. Their purpose is the control of males, which is why feminism has focussed relentlessly on the eradication of all-male spaces. The feminists want males to be firmly under their thumb at all times so they can vent their lust for endlessly vilifying all things male. If women and girls are collateral damage in that campaign of prejudice, well that’s too bad. And so schoolgirls are now collaborating with a process which will lead to their own undoing in later life: a culture in which young men increasingly have no interest in intimate relations with them.