Associate Professor Samantha Schulz from Adelaide University has led a revealing study that unpacks teachers’ alarming experiences with manosphere encounters within their schools.
The researchers are now warning that ’infrastructures of gender injustice’ within the school system at large are creating fertile ground for institutional gaslighting to occur.
Women teachers are up against two main problems here, Schulz points out.
“On one hand, there’s [the] things that are happening to teachers at the hands of boys and young men, and that’s a rise in vulgar, sexualised, aggressive language, heightened homophobia…
“[But] I think what stood out – and has been standing out to us more and more – is the insufficient support by leadership and bystanders.”
The account of one male secondary teacher named ‘Brian’ speaks volumes on this front, Schulz suggests.
Brian noted there had been a significant shift in student behaviour at his public school, and that the name of notorious ’manfluencer’ Andrew Tate’s was surfacing regularly.
When three of his female colleagues resigned on the same day due to repeated sexist harassment from male students, Brian said he was asked to step in.
“I had to take over a class of one of the teachers who quit because she was having sexually suggestive things said to her by her students, and it was not really dealt with appropriately.
“She got to the point where she felt sick even thinking about coming to work,” he told researchers.
Yet once in the classroom, the teacher said he ‘didn’t really have to deal with anything’ because the young men ‘accepted [him] as an authority figure … a man with a beard’.
When asked how the situation was dealt with by leadership, Brian said staff were ‘told not to talk about it’.
“…So I got on with my job like nothing had happened … I don’t feel good about it, obviously.
“But in terms of talking with the boys, I would be concerned about opening the floodgates on some pretty negative feelings. I’m not sure how to politely raise that subject [of misogyny].”
This testimonial clearly illustrates systemic problems in how gender-based violence targeting women teachers is dealt with, Shultz argues.
“It’s such a good illustration because it brings into the frame inadequate responses of leadership. And partly the impulse of schools is to protect reputation, so reputational damage.
“And we do exist in an education market, so that’s not necessarily the fault of schools and leaders alone – but when it comes to this gender-based violence that is being directed toward women, women become the casualties.”
The researcher flags that she doesn’t want to place blame squarely at the feet of school leaders, however.
“They’re under their own kind of explicit pressure at the moment, but it does point toward systems that do not have the language, resources, just the kind of disposition to hear what women teachers are saying (and) believe them.”
In Brian’s case, the leadership essentially gave the teacher licence to ignore the sexist harassment that had taken place – and this is not okay, Schulz suggests.
“And then when we asked, ‘well, what could you do? What would happen if you did do something?’ That’s when he explained, ‘well, I wouldn’t really know what to do’. And he went on to say ‘it’s beyond the remit of our work’.
“But it should be part of every teacher’s work. This is everyone’s job.”
Associate Professor Samantha Schulz argues that rather than have school leaders invest in band-aid solutions, such as paying external consultants to come in and target misogynistic attitudes and behaviours with one-off workshops, what’s needed is broader political will.
Women teachers are now jumping from school to school in order to escape ‘baseline’ sexist cultures, Schulz says. It’s a concerning trend.
“One of our other participants who rang up from a completely different setting … she also talked about three women resigning in the same week.
“So, we’re starting to see a pattern of women shifting schools ... in search of safety.”
‘Bonnie’, a young maths teacher in a regional school, told researchers she had quit her previous teaching position in 2023 due to a lack of support from leadership when she was repeatedly harassed by a group of Year 8 and 9 boys.
The students in question would make ‘moaning’ noises whenever Bonnie walked by and started playing ‘sexualised moaning’ sounds from YouTube clips on repeat inside her classroom.
“Leadership did nothing. There was no support. And a couple of other young female teachers left, too. One had been told multiple times by kids as young as Year 7 that she looked like a porn star.
“It was disgusting, they would hang around outside her house, but the female principal said, ‘just because you say it’s harassment, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is’,” Bonnie shared in the study.
Schulz warns that harmful behaviours and language rooted in the manosphere appear to have become normalised within some schools, with one teacher in particular describing her own harrowing experience in “completely emotionless terms, as though this is just kind of a normal element of her day-to-day work”.
“And there is a kind of a patterned impulse to reframe this in more palatable terms as it’s just a behaviour management issue,” Schulz adds.
“That is concerning because, at worst, this is a form of institutional gaslighting that we see played out in society more broadly ad nauseam.”
Rather than have school leaders invest in band-aid solutions, such as paying external consultants to come in and target misogynistic attitudes and behaviours with one-off workshops, what’s needed is broader political will, Schulz says.
“And this means brave political leadership, policy support, where we can start to join the dots and say, ‘if schools don’t play a much stronger role in reversing and transforming gender-based violence from the youngest ages, [well actually] schools are perpetuating and contributing towards gender-based violence escalating even further in this country’.
“And we’ve already got epidemic levels of violence against, women, girls, the queer community. So policy support is really important.”
Last year another study found that some Australian school leaders were engaging in institutional gaslighting, effectively silencing and victim-blaming women teachers who reported instances of sexual harassment by students.
In a paper canvassing the ‘widespread’ and ‘systemic’ issue, Stephanie Wescott and Steven Roberts from Monash University drew on two compelling case studies to outline the ‘denial, minimisation and intentional mixed messaging’ that women teachers endure at the hands of school executive.
Wescott said that teachers consistently reported that there was no standardised response or clear policy at their school to deal with reported cases of sexual harassment and misogyny on campus.
“It was very ad-hoc … and certainly not proportionate to the kind of distress that women were reporting,” she told EducationHQ at the time.
“We found in particular that there was denial and minimisation happening. So, it wasn’t just that, ‘oh there’s actually no policy here’, it’s that, ‘we don’t really believe you’ or, ‘we don’t accept what you’re saying’ or, ‘it can’t really be that bad, are you sure?’”
Schulz says we urgently need a shared language for calling out the problem and reporting it.
“Let’s have a look at data invisibility. When we frame what’s happening as a behavior management issue, we’re not really gaining an idea of the scope and the breadth of the issue.”
