British schools are facing a surge in misogyny among boys, but the deeper problem lies beyond the classroom. According to Dr Stephen Whitehead, the issue will only continue to escalate as long as parents fail to challenge harmful attitudes at home, or even quietly endorse them

This month’s National Education Union warning about a masculinity crisis in UK schools has been read, understandably, as a story about boys. As about the 80 per cent of British 16 and 17-year-olds who have consumed Andrew Tate’s content, and about ten-year-olds refusing to speak to female teachers because, as one primary school child told a researcher, women should be treated differently. It’s been read as being about secondary school boys telling a girl they would not “even rape” her, about the rise in sexual offences committed by children, up 47 per cent in a year, and about female teachers left traumatised and humiliated in classrooms that are supposed to be places of learning.

It is all of those things. It is also something more uncomfortable, and the coverage has largely flinched from saying it. The real failure sits at home — in what is happening, and what is not happening, behind the front door.

Fifty-six per cent of British fathers under 35 hold a favourable view of Andrew Tate. These are men who are aware of what Tate says about women, who know he has described women as property, who know he is facing charges of rape and human trafficking, and who have decided, on reflection, that they broadly approve. According to the research by Internet Matters, 26 per cent of fathers know “a lot” about Tate — a higher rate of detailed knowledge than any other parental group, higher even than their teenage sons. These fathers are not ignorant bystanders to their children’s radicalisation. In a significant number of cases, they are its architects.

This is the data point that should be leading every news bulletin. Not because the boys’ behaviour in schools is not serious — it is — but because children pushing against authority, testing limits, adopting transgressive identities, is developmentally normal. It is what adolescents do. The question society asks of children is not that they always behave well but that the adults around them draw and enforce the line. When those adults are themselves fans of the ideology corrupting their sons, the line does not exist. The school is left to hold it alone.

But schools cannot hold it alone. Forty-two per cent of parents have heard their sons make misogynistic comments — sexual, violent or degrading remarks about women and girls — that they themselves attribute to online content. That is not a fringe problem; it’s nearly half of all parents with sons reporting that their child has, to their knowledge, said something abusive about women. The question is what happened next. Did those parents challenge it? Did they sit with their son and explain, clearly and without embarrassment, why it was unacceptable? Did they make it clear that this was not how he was going to speak about women — not in their house, not anywhere? Or did they let it pass with a wince, a sigh, a quiet hope that it was just a phase?

The teachers know the answer. They describe children who, when confronted on their behaviour toward female staff, cite having watched Andrew Tate as justification. They describe boys who have written essays glorifying the view that women are a man’s property. They describe incidents so routine that they have become background noise, part of the daily texture of the classroom rather than a shocking exception. And they describe what happens when they try to address it (not always, but often enough to constitute a pattern): parents who challenge the school’s account, who query whether their son really meant it, who frame the teacher’s concerns as overreaction or political bias. The teachers, already dealing with a staffing crisis, already leaving the profession in record numbers, already reporting higher rates of depression and work-related stress in schools where manosphere engagement is highest, are expected to absorb this too.

There is something almost perfectly circular about it. The manosphere tells men that women in authority are not to be respected, that female expertise is suspect, that institutions run by women are rigged against men. Schools are disproportionately staffed by women. When boys absorb that message at home — not just from algorithms, but from fathers who tacitly or explicitly endorse it — they bring it into classrooms where the majority of the people in authority over them are female. The teachers are not collateral damage but the intended target. The hostility lands exactly where the ideology predicts it will.

None of this absolves the tech companies, whose algorithms deliver toxic content to young male accounts within twenty-three minutes, on average, of first use. Nor does it absolve a government that has been agonisingly slow to translate its stated alarm about this crisis into anything resembling structural intervention. Bridget Phillipson called boys’ behaviour “a defining issue of our time”, yet regulation of social media platforms remains inadequate and resources for schools to teach media literacy and challenge misogynist content are scarce. The NEU’s call for a multi-agency response is correct and overdue.

But policy cannot reach inside a home. It cannot make a father examine what he is modelling for his son when he approves of a man who says women who are raped bear some responsibility for their assault. It cannot make a mother challenge her teenager’s casual contempt for women instead of writing it off as boys being boys. It cannot make parents understand that a curriculum teaching their child about misogyny isn’t an attack on masculinity but an attempt to give their son a future that does not end in isolation, resentment and an inability to sustain any relationship with any woman in his life.

We have spent considerable energy, rightly, asking what schools can do. We have spent far less asking what parents must do — not can, must — if they want to be part of the solution rather than its central obstacle.

A boy who learns at school that women deserve respect, and comes home to a father who laughs at that lesson, has not been educated. He has been confused, and the teacher who tried to teach him this vital lesson is left carrying a responsibility that was never solely hers to bear.

The masculinity crisis in British schools is real, but it did not begin there, and it will not end there either.

Dr Stephen Whitehead is a gender sociologist and author recognised for his work on gender, leadership and organisational culture. Formerly at Keele University, he has lived in Asia since 2009 and has written 20 books translated into 17 languages. He is based in Thailand and is co-founder of Cerafyna Technologies.

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