Gendered violence in schools: Urgent need for prevention and intervention amid rising hostilities

Gendered violence in schools has remained an unaddressed issue for decades. A recent increase in hostilities towards women and girls, and in reporting of gendered violence and abuse across multiple regions, reflects a shifting landscape of gender relations in education settings requiring urgent attention.

Schools are uniquely placed within the field of gender-based violence. They are sites where both gendered violence occurs, and where leading prevention and early intervention work could take place.

However, there remains significant barriers to progress in both of these areas.

Our work has identified a troubling and discernible shift in gender dynamics in schools, which we have categorised as resurgent male supremacy. Spurred by the ubiquity of the manosphere – a web of thematically similar online groups and identities united by their blatant disdain for women and feminist progress – we’ve suggested a new wave of misogyny and sexism is thriving in education settings.

The manosphere’s reach into the lives of young men is being increasingly captured in education, sociological and digital media research. We know that algorithms feed misogynistic and anti-feminist content to accounts identified as belonging to boys, and that exposure to manosphere content increases the likelihood of young people subscribing to unhealthy ideas about relationships.

Even more disturbingly, the political reach of the manosphere and its proximity to political power was realised in the recent US election, where manosphere figures such as Joe Rogan encouraged followers to vote for Donald Trump in the recent US election, and the manosphere celebrated the news of his victory.

Trump’s election win revealed some troubling insights into voting behaviours among young men in both the US and other regions. We have written elsewhere about the likely effects in schools of the election of a misogynist (again) to public office in the states, particularly given the existing social climate in many schools in Australia.

Given these intersecting problems and the additional pressure of a hostile social climate, there are two issues requiring attention.

The first is the absence of serious attention to gender-based violence in schools, and the second is a lack of meaningful investment in schools as sites of primary prevention.

Violence is rooted in systems of education

One of the significant factors enabling gendered violence in schools is that there remains an institutional element of violence in schools. In our paper exploring the practice of institutional gaslighting perpetrated against women teachers who report violence and abuse, we note that sexist abuse that occurs within schools is:

“... shaped by systems and ideologies that make gendered violence a daily part of women’s experience; the very structures of power that create and then ignore patterns of gendered violence against women.”

Schools are known to reproduce existing hierarchies of power, including gendered power dynamics that situated men as more authoritative and respected. This is reinforced when women report experiencing sexism and gendered abuse in their classrooms, and the responsibility for that behaviour is placed back on their own abilities to control the classroom, rather than the existing framework of male supremacy in operation.

In an Australian context, schools have been home to various forms of violence since European colonisation shaped the contemporary education system. Colonialism and its effects are both ongoing in education institutions in Australia.

For example, discrepancies in Indigenous students’ literacies, attendance and higher rates of exclusion attest that the prevailing inadequacies and harms of contemporary education systems.

Violence in schools is driven by both gendered and postcolonial dimensions; in the ways that schools maintain and replicate social biases, limitations and failures of powerful institutions.

This means that addressing gender-based violence in and through schools requires fully-resourced, whole-of-school and transformational approaches that look critically at schools as legacy sites of perpetuation of violence, and as hopeful places that work towards its elimination.

For this to occur, we first must acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that schools perpetuate and enable violence through institutional norms and practices. At the same time, they’re places where transformational practice can occur.

What can be done?

Schools are important, and often overlooked, spaces to undertake gender transformative and gender justice work. This includes gender-based violence prevention and early intervention work with young people demonstrating attitudes and behaviours that we know exist on the spectrum of gendered violence.

Australia has various curriculum-based initiatives that explicitly aim to do this work. In Victoria, government schools are mandated to follow the Respectful Relationships curriculum, which is explicitly designed to interrupt the development of ideas and attitudes that can lead to violence.

In the Australian curriculum, the Respect Matters curriculum connections provides opportunities for schools through the Health and Physical Education (HPE) curriculum area to explore topics regarding consent, respectful relationships, power imbalances in relationships, and managing relationships online and offline.

There’s also a range of external providers that schools often choose to engage students on specific issues related to gender and sexuality. However, evaluations of these programs do not support that once-off programs grounded in mental health approaches are necessarily effective. Such approaches need specific attention to gender and power, need more program hours over a number of weeks or months, and need more diversity among their facilitators.

Despite these opportunities, there remains many barriers to schools fully implementing approaches to gender-based violence prevention.

Controversy associated with gender and sexuality-oriented initiatives in schools have historically stymied schools’ abilities to make progress on gender and sexuality matters, and teacher lack of confidence or fears about potential backlash remain impediments to the successful implementation of gender and sexuality curricula and initiatives.

The broader political climate further influences the take-up of gender and sexuality-oriented initiatives in schools.

Political will is central to the implementation and expansion of programs, and the climate in which schools make decisions about program and curriculum implementation, as well as support gestured through government commitment and resourcing, are also key measures to successful implementation.

There’s incredible potential for schools to undertake powerful and transformative gender-based violence prevention work. Our collective hopes for young people’s education often involve imagining who they might become, and how they might contribute meaningfully to tackling persistent social issues.

Eradicating gender-based violence should underpin the work that drives our engagement with young people in schools, so that they might see justice in their lifetime.