Sarah Harte: Male violence and the opt out from sex education

A bird’s eye view of last week’s news stories in Irish newspapers throws up the following.In the Dublin criminal court, Fine Gael TD Jennifer Carroll MacNeill spoke of her “cold sense of dread” and concern for her personal safety at receiving messages from Gerard Culhane including nude pictures and videos of a male masturbating.At a meeting of the Irish Women’s Parliamentary Caucus, which is a cross-party forum for Irish women parliamentarians to discuss and campaign on issues predominantly affecting women, Senator Fiona O’Loughlin, the Fianna Fáil chair of the caucus, spoke of parking her car near a bright light when attending political meetings at night. She also spoke of the fear of intimidation and harassment including sexualised threats that female politicians are subject to. The Labour leader Ivana Bacik, another member of the women’s caucus, said that she believes that female politicians are subjected to more abuse than their male counterparts and that there is “a particularly nasty gendered aspect to” it. She said: “It’s not just about women in politics but about women getting harassed online in a more general setting, in workplace or school settings as well.” Elsewhere, it was reported that a senior official at Garda Headquarters who helped to expose the misclassification of homicides has threatened legal action against the force over its alleged failure to address her complaints about sexual harassment and discrimination. Lois West, deputy head of the Garda Siochána Analysis Service, has been on sick leave for six months after complaining about the force’s refusal to deal with her complaints. In 2018 West and a colleague Laura Galligan told the Oireachtas justice committee that they were “belittled and treated poorly” after exposing failures in the way gardaí were recording homicides.The BBC journalist, Aileen Moynagh, was interviewed about her ordeal of being subjected to what a judge called “horrific” sustained online harassment and threats from a young man who was just 16 when the abuse began.

Cyberflashing

Emily Clarkson, an English female social media influencer, daughter of the personality and columnist Jeremy Clarkson was reported as calling for the toughening of online flashing laws. She spoke of being “cyberflashed relentlessly on Insta. I get dick pictures all the time”. She also gets “regular rape threats, death threats”. On the surface, what ties these six different women is that they each have a public profile and/or a degree of professional power. Michelle Butler, a criminologist at Queen’s University says that “male sexually aggressive behaviour running the gamut from lewd remarks to sexual assault may be interpreted as stemming from a need for power and control”.

In January, the senseless, brutal killing of Ashling Murphy triggered both a public outpouring of anger and a national debate about male violence against women and how to tackle it. In the last five years since the establishment of the #metoo movement, toxic masculinity has been consistently on the slate.A recently introduced Labour Party private members Bill proposes the abolition of state-funded single-sex schools within 15 years.  Labor TD Aodhán Ó Ríordáin says that the bill addresses “the legacy of single-gender schools” tackling gender inequality and “toxic masculinity”. In the past, He has previously spoken of the link between increased levels of domestic violence in Ireland and the “warped sense of power” that he believes is fostered in some single-sex male schools.Last week, Fine Gael senator, Regina O’Doherty, speaking at the Oireachtas Committee on Gender Equality, which is examining the recommendations of the Citizens’ Assembly on norms and stereotypes in education said that if she had a magic wand, “every school would have to have both sexes and it would be a gender empowering environment”.However, she also said that her daughters in their co-educational school wouldn’t be continuing with the subject of metal and woodwork for Leaving Cert, because the “culture and the environment in the class” was “male toxic”. Education Minister Norma Foley told a committee that she would not support the Labour bill abolishing single-sex state schools, saying that while it was positive that two-thirds of our schools are currently mixed-gender schools, “it benefits society when we have every possible benefit of choice available in terms of parents’ choices in choosing the educational path for students”.People Before Profit TD, Bríd Smith, accused the minister of not answering a question about religious ethos influencing the teaching of sex education in certain schools. In response to a question from FG spokesperson for equality Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (mentioned above) on whether “every child will receive an identical [sex] education with no opt-out for parents or schools” in accordance with the curriculum, Minister Foley answered that “the curriculum will be followed as laid down in our schools”. Minister for Further and Higher Education Simon Harris was adamant before the committee that he would defend “to the death the right of a parent to decide the ethos” of the school they choose to send their child to. He was less clear on how he might achieve what he identified as the urgent need to deliver “impartial sex education from primary school upwards” while being undecided about whether legislation was needed to oblige all schools to provide this sex education. And frankly, therein lies the nub of the matter.

Education Act 

Currently, under the Education Act (1998), schools may determine what they consider to be appropriate sex education in line with the “characteristic spirit of the school”. It is known that many religious schools opt out of teaching “sensitive topics” on grounds of their ethos. So, while “age-appropriate, impartial, fact-based information on sex and consent” may be on Mr Harris’ wish list, as he almost certainly knows, it’s not going to happen in schools who exercise their right to derogate unless they are legally forced to comply.The National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) is currently reviewing the curriculum and is due to produce a draft sex education curriculum for the Junior Cycle age group which will address issues like male violence, consent and gender-based violence which is to be welcomed. However, once more a derogation from this curriculum will be permissible based on school ethos.

Orla O’Connor, director of the National Women’s Council of Ireland has spoken of the need for “a core curriculum to tackle misogyny and gender-based violence.” Presumably, she means one that can’t be opted out of.At the very basic level, there is a question in Irish schools about how we tackle gender-based violence. In May 2021, the ombudsman for children Niall Muldoon told a joint Oireachtas Committee that the Department of Education “has persistently chosen not to ask about sexual bullying. In 2022, the State will have to account for itself again to the UNCRC (United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child) and confirm that no progress has been made on the collation of sexual violence data in schools.” In 2021, the problem of “rape culture” and sexual abuse was found to be rife across both state and private English schools being designated by Scotland Yard as a “national issue.”This prompted one feminist writer and human rights activist Natasha Walter to write on Twitter that although she was ashamed of her reaction, having read of some of the accounts of abuse in co-ed schools, she was relieved that she and her daughters had gone to single-sex secondary schools.

Outdated models

In Ireland, the views of educators on the merits of single-sex schools are a mixed bag with many calling for the abolition of what they view as a harmful outmoded form of education, others extolling the merits of educating particularly girls separately, and some saying the key issue is not whether a school is single-sex or co-educational but rather whether a school is good with teachers doing their job and with happy pupils. In America, research on different learning styles between the two genders is apparently resulting in more public schools contemplating single-sex schools. The belief is that by educating them separately, gender gaps that leave girls behind in maths and boys behind in literacy can be narrowed thereby undoing seemingly entrenched gender disparities. This volte-face is also founded on the hope that the pervasive problem of boys generally falling behind in comparison to their female counterparts could be addressed.Schools are a crucial piece of a bigger more complicated societal picture. Taking one random example, anybody who has raised teenage boys will know of the eye-wateringly misogynistic and often violent lyrics of rap songs where women are reduced to harmful archetypes and their value is essentially the sum of their sexuality. I’m not suggesting some Tipper Gore style censorship ‘Irish mothers against rap’ campaign but I do think that deconstructing these songs for impressionable boys would be useful. Ditto grasping the nettle of porn, and grappling with its warping effect on young peoples’ notion of sexuality, bodies, and relationships. This should be done in a core subject on respecting girls and women, one that couldn’t be opted out of by any school.Drawing a direct line between single-sex schools, misogyny, and toxic masculinity seems overly simplistic. Many European countries with predominantly co-ed schools have not been exempted from the out-flowerings of toxic masculinity in their schools; France is a case in point. How our children are educated about consent, sex, and sexual violence regardless of whether the school is single-sex or co-educational goes to the heart of the matter.Dismantling misogyny so deeply embedded in our culture will take a group effort.Government, educators, parents, and campaigners need to work together to fight the ingrained and endemic misogyny, abuse and harassment that exists both online and in the real world.The media reports above culled from one week’s reportage put this beyond doubt.