The next generation of girls will be better protected from violence and young boys steered away from harmful misogynistic influences - Government announcement

[IwantToRetire]

The plans unveiled today will focus on prevention and tackling the root causes of abuse, and come as the latest stats show that nearly 40% of teenagers in relationships are a victim of relationship abuse and over 40% of young men hold a positive view of Andrew Tate.

Under the £20 million package, teachers and families will be empowered to address these harmful attitudes and behaviours head on, with young people taught to identify positive role models and challenge unhealthy myths about women and relationships.

This is just one part of the government’s strategy to tackle violence against women and girls, deploying the full power of the state in the largest crackdown on violence against women and girls in British history.

Teachers will get specialist training on how to talk to pupils about issues like consent and the dangers of sharing intimate images, with experts brought in to pilot new approaches. This will be backed by pioneering research identifying the most effective way of teaching young people these crucial lessons.

Full statement https://www.gov.uk/government/news/vawg-strategy-to-better-protect-children-from-misogyny-and-abuse

There are 5 different "stratergies" available to download at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/freedom-from-violence-and-abuse-a-cross-government-strategy

End Male Violence Against Women

?

Could just ban porn?

Men and boys are the majority of the victims of male violence and I agree that it would be great if they stopped hitting, raping, and killing each other as well as stopping hitting, raping, and killing women and girls.

However, MVAWG manifests differently from MVAMB. Men and boys commit 95% or more of sexual offending, and an adult male sex offender is six times more likely to select an adult female victim than an adult male victim. The majority of domestic violence is male-on-female. Women are smaller and weaker than men, so in a fight, we are disadvantaged. And women and girls can't make their victims pregnant, only men and boys can do that.

It's hence legitimate to address MVAWG as a distinct form of male violence, particularly when supporting victims and provisioning single-sex spaces, the Freedom Programme, etc to reduce the risk to women and girls. But I agree that getting men and boys to be less violent generally is necessary.

They could start by putting every damned rapist away for a lot of years and those who attack children on an automatic life sentence as per murderers. All of them. Not those who get caught attacking more than one victim once while those who spend years abusing one child get off scott free. I remember Project Sapphire claiming that it would be 'disproportionate' to go after one of those. LIke hell.

Teachers should have been doing this sort of thing already. Schools are not supposed to tolerate bigoted behaviour of any type, and this is exactly the sort of thing that PSHE lessons are there to deal with.

For whatever reason, it seems teachers haven't been doing a particularly good job of this (which would tally with my own school appearance) and I hope this gives them the resources/motivation to turn that around.

It is totally putting the cart before the horse.

Accepting that there are generalised differences between males and females is a fact that needs to be faced. Until then we are in denial.

Violence against women and girls existed before porn.

I think schools have been doing this sort of thing in PSHE.

But, the reality is pupils have had access to the Internet via phones for a relatively short period of time and how the internet works has changed. So what worked before the tik tok algorithm era might not work so well now

That doesnt mean there hasn't always been violence against women and girls. But what it does mean is boys can get drawn into extremist views easier so schools have to work harder. If a young man has watched literally hours of toxic content a day, is his nice female teachers going to be able to counter that easily in a pshe lesson?

We surveyed our pupils. Some are spending 8 hours a day on thier phones and parents say they know what thier children see but they dont.

Also the nature of violence does change. So many more girls are getting injuries from anal sex now.

There is a fatal flaw with your proposal.

If a molester gets life whether he murders his victim or not, he might as well murder her because dead victims tell no tales.

I think its probably easier to prove murder than rape as the person is clearly dead.

Although there is the 'i accidently strangled her to death and she consebted to it' defence going round to be fair.

You'd have to very good at hiding bodies and evidence to murder everyone person you molested. So few rape convictions go anywhere as it boils down to his word against hers. And I think jurors would be even more reluctant to convict if it was life.

Why do you think that is and what could be done to improve things?

Could be worth a try - after all schools have managed to convince large cohorts of kids that they can change sex. But I'm sceptical tbh. Frankly, if they can find a way to do this wrong - they will. Incompetence seems to be built in with this government

Bridget Phillipson, Minister for Women (amongst other responsibilities) has made a great contribution to this campaign today: challenging the Supreme Court ruling on how sex is defined. She thinks the EHRC guidance is trans exclusive. Nice one, Bridget!

This is true. However the increased easy access to porn now means most men who watch porn are now jerking off to women being raped and abused. That increase is a new thing, and would be helped either by banning porn, or decent men refusing to watch it.

For what it's worth, there has been quite a lot of commentators making this point in the past few days if you look at reactions on LinkedIn etc. This is changing for the better, with some organisations like Boys Impact starting to do really good work in this area

This is a big thing - at the moment there's very little being done to make boys feel good about themselves or that they're valued for their skills, brains, emotions etc. This makes them feel unwelcome in schools, so they feel resentful, and makes them very easy fodder for people like Andrew Tate.

Honestly I'm a bit sceptial about this whole announcement, there's a very god commentator who's pointed out that this new strategy doesn't actually contain anything new, but just rehashes stuff that was already other strategys and documents etc. It's also an easy grab for headlines that sounds good, but doesn't actually cost any money or involve any actual action.

We shouldn't be looking at banning porn which fixes the whole issue of VAWG. That is a silver bullet that politicians like, and is a typical response by politicians to look like they're doing something by just banning something but not addressing the underlying problems.

Personally I think people are living in an ideological fantasy if they think porn can now be banned. Violent porn and the use of choking etc needs to end, the producers snuck this stuff in there, they can look at stop producing it and then weening people off of it as the supply dries up.

Violent pornography and sissy hypno are very much supply creating the demand. I think we're better off trying to get people to produce better alternatives.

There are already quite a lot of countries where all pornography is illegal but many of those citizens have been convicted of sex crimes in the UK.

The problems with trying to ban porn are:

1. Sexual health information gets caught up in the net.
2. Porn users subscribe to VPNs or use Tor.
3. The "porn" on the Tor "dark web" includes footage of actual murders and torture and it's much easier to find or stumble upon once you have Tor installed.

I think it's a sorry state of affairs when people are calling for single-sex schools. I know it's been said in the past that girls do best in single-sex schools, and boys do best in co-eds, but really? Is it really necessary? Is it a price we need to pay?

The price I paid for my mixed-sex primary education was routine beatings from age four and sexual assault at the age of eight. I remain unclear what the benefit of that mixed-sex environment was for me.

When I walked through the door of my single-sex secondary school, it was the first time I'd walked into a school building without fear since I'd been at nursery.

One girl in four will be a sexual assault survivor by age 16. A schoolboy rapes a schoolgirl at school every day in England and Wales.

Autistic women and girls are massively underdiagnosed and also have a 90% lifetime sexual assault victimisation rate. A single-sex environment safeguards these girls, and every other girl who is, for whatever reason, vulnerable, without needing a diagnosis to put them on the SENCO's radar.

A sufficient proportion of schoolboys are sexual terrorists for it to be reasonable and proportionate to simply remove all the girls to a different school.

Of course I get the arguments. Are we seeing an increase in demand for girls-only schools? I would imagine the DfE wouldn't be keen.

Despite parents turning away from fee-paid schools because of VAT, Queen Mary's in Ripon has seen more applicants. The girls at Notre Dame in Glasgow campaigned to keep their State school single-sex.

The overwhelming majority of male violence is violence by men against other men.

An "End Male Violence" campaign would likely be regarded by the public as misogynistic for focusing on violence between men rather than focusing on violence by men against women.

From a prime minister who discovered violence against women and girls from a TV drama.

It feels not even ‘better than nothing’.

It’s born of a conviction that VAWG happens becuase other people are such bad people and if only we told them to be good people like us, it would all be fine.

Instead of working out what harmful policies the govt has and changing them.

Societies have been trying to reduce male violence since forever, surely, although albeit without much success. Beyond VAWG (as if that wasn't bad enough, tbc), of course there's violent crime, burglary, muggings, car theft, and so on. Which impact on us all. And costs the State billions.

Sorry to hear you had that experience. It's really scary to think about for girls.