Associate Professor Samantha Schulz and Dr Sarah McDonald from Adelaide University recently led a revealing study that highlighted teachers’ alarming experiences with sexual harassment within their schools, finding institutional gaslighting and a widespread downplaying of the problem at the school leadership level was failing to address growing misogyny and gender-based violence amongst boys.
She warns that some schools are turning to external male entrepreneurs in a bid to address the manosphere’s rising influence on boys’ behaviour and attitudes in the classroom.
“I’m working with some excellent outside providers at the moment – who say that they go into schools and the teachers there say it doesn’t feel safe for us to talk about this kind of stuff; gender relations, consent and respectful relationships.
“And so it is easier in that context, or safer, for outside consultants to come in and talk about it.
“That’s not an adequate response, though. It’s a band-aid,” Schulz argues.
Short-term or one-off workshops that focus solely on behaviour change and promote positive masculinity will have negligible impact on the ground because they don’t get to the structural root of the problem, she adds.
Schulz says she is not the only academic concerned about this, either.
“There is a particular concern that surfaces when outside consultants [and companies] who are run by male entrepreneurs who are not teachers, come in and they whip up emotion and they claim to be able to ‘get through’ to boys.
“Part of what happens, even unintentionally, is that they sideline and undermine the voices of women teachers who are there doing the hard yards.
“They’re there all the time, but they’re not being supported by their systems in order to do this work well and safely.
“And the message that kind of surfaces is that women aren’t equipped to do this work.”
“Listen to women. It's not just in schools. Women are not heard," Schulz says.
Relying on external male figures to tackle the issue also gives weight to the myth that the innate charisma required to ‘get through’ to boys cannot be taught, Schulz suggests.
Schools might give the impression that they are being proactive in the face of gendered violence but ultimately outsourcing the problem in this way only risks further entrenching harmful ideologies, she warns.
‘Lola’, a regional teacher who was involved in the study, reported that her school had paid a significant amount of money for The Resilience Project – a popular mental health and wellbeing program that the researchers note is founded by a young male entrepreneur with a successful podcast.
The initiative was a waste of time and resources, the teacher suggested.
“Lola said, consultants come in, the students are given journals, they’re asked to watch videos, and told to write reflections, ‘but without somebody actually guiding them … it’s time-wasting. It’s an absolute waste of money. They’re not taking it seriously’,” the study flags.
The researchers say the ‘exceptional violence’ teachers report facing in their role is not “unfettered or random but rather, is contingent on and arises from a system that naturalises everyday forms of gendered violence”.
This includes policy frameworks that are “devoid of gender justice, which in turn manifest in inadequate institutional responses to teachers’ stories of gender-based violence”, they add.
Schulz is calling for political will to tackle the problem in schools, saying it should not be up to individual teachers or school leaders to try and rectify completely.
“Listen to women. It’s not just in schools. Women are not heard.
“It’s much more widespread, comprehensive, and in the media as well.”
