Listen here on your chosen podcast platform.
The nine teenage boys aged 13 to 15 sat joking and laughing in their south London classroom, their joshing belying a nervousness, trying to gauge how honest they should be.
The question from the workshop moderator came up: how young were you when you first accessed pornography? The room went quiet. “I saw it in primary school, I saw people having sex, I didn’t really know what was going on,” said one boy. “I was six,” braved a second, his voice yet to break. “My friends tricked me into it,” said a third. The revelations kept coming. “I was 10.” “I was nine.” “I was 12.”
Their vulnerability was poignant, but when asked how porn might affect how they relate to girls, they fidgeted, shrugged and fell silent again. The discussion moved onto what appeared to be more comfortable territory — rating girls in their school. “Most of us do it,” said one boy. There was a clamour of agreement. Rating categories included “peng, leng or meedy”, slang for “attractive, sexy or ugly”. Also popular was “kiss marry kill” and “kiss marry smash” where “smash” (to have sex) was the highest rank and “kill” the lowest.
Did they feel peer pressure to rate girls? “Yeah,” several said. “People see it as entertainment,” added another. “You’re in a group, they start talking about girls and their bodies, it’s fun.” How might the girls feel about it? “Not happy, especially if they rate below five,” said one boy.
Another volunteered: “There were eight of us in a group chat, we were rating girls in our class, one was a definite ‘kill’. Was it wrong? Yeah, you feel bad. But not so bad you wouldn’t do it again.” Some in the group were uncomfortable. “It can be sexist,” one boy said. The chat turned to receiving naked images of girls. Seven of the nine admitted to seeing revealing pictures of girls from their school being passed around on someone’s phone. One boy said: “A girl at our school sold a nude pic of herself to a boy for £50. Everyone was like ‘come look, come look’.” How did they feel joining in? “You don’t think about it, you just do it,” one boy said.
I had come to this high school in Croydon to find out: what do boys talk about when they talk about girls? The boys in the room were not gang members or problem pupils but rather Year 9 and 10 boys who had aspirations to be doctors, lawyers, teachers and civil servants — future pillars of society. We wanted to gauge how regular teenage boys relate to girls in 2024.
I would hold a similar workshop with 13 and 14-year-olds at The Norwood School in Lambeth. This school was brave enough to go on the record as a place seeking to expose sexist behaviour and to adopt new ways of thinking to challenge it. The Croydon school, too, was seeking to address the rise of toxic masculinity.
The workshop at The Norwood School was led by Jenni Steele, founder of Project Yana (You Are Not Alone), who regularly runs sessions in schools to address healthy relationships and inappropriate behaviour. “Boys need correcting in so many ways,” she said. “They think it’s okay to smack a girl’s bum, or say things like, ‘your breasts look big in that top’. Girls don’t know whether to call it out or laugh it off. If they say ‘it’s not funny’ it can be uncomfortable for them, so they need to be equipped.”
She added: “The stakes are high. I am working with two under-age girls, not at this school, who were exploited for sex by older males over 20 who plied them with gifts, alcohol and drugs. The key to prevention of abuse is education.”
Andrew Tate, she asked the boys, had they heard of him? “Of course!” the room erupted. “Some say he’s the Top G”, said one boy, using Tate’s description of himself as a “feared and respected top gangster”. Others were more circumspect. “He says stuff from the olden days, like women are your possessions, women are just there to have your children — it’s disrespectful,” argued a second.
Once you laugh, because you feel awkward, you’re part of the problem. The girl doesn’t see you as on her side
Campaigners say the emergence in 2022 of misogynist influencer Tate — who believes women are subservient to men and has advocated “hitting and choking” them — has had a massive impact on impressionable teenage boys, some of whom have adopted his toxic masculinity, causing huge concern in schools and homes across the capital.
According to a King’s College poll, a fifth of men aged 16-29 in Britain look favourably on Tate, and many schools, including Norwood, have run special assemblies to counter his misogyny.
It comes with data showing femicide on the rise. In the four years to 2022, the number of women killed, injured or threatened with a knife has more than doubled from 6,000 to 13,700, according to police files, with counties like Essex reporting a precipitous surge of 400 per cent. According to the Office for National Statistics, only 41 per cent of actual incidents of domestic abuse are recorded by the police.
Research by the Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza has found that many children have seen – and are searching out – pornography or sexual material before they reach secondary school, with many thinking that it is reflective of real life or healthy relationships.
Anne Longfield, former children’s commissioner for England and a passionate campaigner for children’s rights, said: “What is terrifying is the speed with which Tate and others like him have got hold of the mindset of boys. He plays on their insecurity in a very aggressive way. For boys who get their ideas of a relationship from the internet, or don’t have a role model at home, combined with their exposure to porn, they could grow up thinking strangulation of girls is normal. Rating girls is not new but it’s pretty vile. Schools can’t just say ‘it’s only banter’ because then it becomes normalised. It’s a huge worry.”
At The Norwood School, Steele asked the boys: have girls become too powerful? “Definitely,” they agreed. Who’s looking more like the boss, she asked. “Women,” they said. “They try to control you,” said one. “Girls earning more than boys? I am not up for that,” said another. “In my family, my father is boss,” said a third. The first boy added: “I got dragged up by a girl today for no reason. We were playing and she started throwing me around. Girls are getting more aggressive, more rude.”
At both focus groups, the boys admitted that girls had to deal with constant commentary on their bodies. Did they ever call it out? “I have a friend who often shouts out stuff to girls like ‘gyatt’, which is slang for sexy bum,” one boy said. “His friends find it funny. I find it weird but also quite funny, so I laugh too.”
In numbers
1 in 2 males aged 16-24 say feminism has gone too far
1 in 5 males aged 16-29 say they support Andrew Tate
125%: rise in number of females killed, injured or threatened by knife in four years
15: prime age for carrying a knife in London
7% of perpetrators of domestic abuse are charged
A second boy said: “Once you laugh, because you feel awkward, you’re part of the problem. The girl doesn’t see you as on her side.” A third added: “But if you call it out, it makes you look weird to other boys. And if a group of boys shout at a girl down an alley and you call them out, it can be dangerous — they might stab you.”
At Norwood School, Steele asked about girls breaking up with them and how they responded. “I didn’t care,” said one. “I cried,” admitted another. “After that I blanked her, I hated her.” Did they try to convince the girl to come back? “No, it makes you look like a beg,” said one. “After the break-up, she’s a dead ting,” said another. The chat returned to the subject of receiving sexualised images of girls. One boy said: “I was kind of gassed when it happened to me. If you get to a stage where a girl feels comfortable to send you that picture, you get happy, trust me.”
Steele asked if the boys were aware of the law regarding forwarding inappropriate images. “There are serious legal implications,” she said. “If you do receive revealing pictures from someone, do NOT send them on. You can get into serious trouble if you do.”
Of the 19 boys who attended the one-hour sessions, a sizeable minority expressed respectful attitudes towards girls. But the majority seemed to have normalised sexist ways of thinking and behaving that girls later told me they found extremely oppressive.
As the Croydon session ended, one boy spoke out with powerful emotion: “It’s been hiding deep inside me. I have felt such guilt. It’s such a relief to talk about the porn and the pictures and to hear what others have been through and that I am not alone.”
At both schools, as they filed out, almost all the boys asked: “When can we do this again?”
Number fact sources: Police crime statistics; King’s College London; Domestic Abuse Commissioner; Youth Endowment Fund
