The manosphere’s influence is growing - can teachers fight back?

Four years ago, secondary school safeguarding lead Thomas Michael attended a lunchtime debate that was sure to divide opinion. The topic was “Andrew Tate: Hero or Villain” and the hall was filled with around 100 boys.

Michael and the other staff members had expected a few of the known troublemakers to be fans of the influencer, who is infamous for his misogynistic views and has faced multiple allegations in numerous countries of rape, fraud and the trafficking of minors (allegations that he denies). “But there were lads who were super intelligent, really good kids who were never in trouble, had never stepped out of line, parroting this stuff and supporting him,” says Michael.

He believes that changes to the algorithms behind social media feeds have only exacerbated the problem in the years since. “It’s quite scary to think how much more [online misogyny) would have its hooks into people now compared to then.”

The rise of the manosphere - and its potential to incite aggressive behaviour or violence - is now a huge topic of public discourse, thanks in no small part to the Netflix series Adolescence, which aired last year. As Michael’s anecdote demonstrates, however, many teachers were already aware of its influence for years before it hit the headlines. And debates continue to rage over the nature of the issue and the role that online content may be playing in teenage aggression and violence.

So what does the available psychological and sociological research tell us? And how might we use this information to protect vulnerable young people?

How students find misogynistic content

The manosphere is itself a relatively vague term. In a recent report, Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, defines it as the “online spaces dedicated to men’s issues” where misogynistic views can proliferate. The authors emphasise that it is a “fragmentary landscape”, including communities of pick-up artists, involuntary celibates (incels) and “red-” or “black-pill” groups dedicated to denouncing feminism. (The pill metaphors have been borrowed from film series The Matrix to describe the “awakening” of the mind to the supposed reality of the modern world.)

Tate is just one of many people producing such content, but he is often used as a totem to represent the broader problem, and if you look at the sheer number of people who are exposed to his content, it would appear to be a very large problem indeed.

A poll commissioned by the advocacy group Hope Not Hate in 2023, for instance, found that 79 per cent of 16- and 17-year-old boys had previously consumed content by Andrew Tate alone. By comparison, just 58 per cent had heard of Rishi Sunak, the prime minister at the time.

Teens don’t need to actively search for this content to find it; the algorithms will deliver it to them through the most tenuous of connections, as researchers at Dublin City University recently discovered.

The team set up 10 dummy accounts on YouTube Shorts and TikTok, both of which offer vertical video clips that are popular among teenagers and young adults. To examine how the users’ activity on the platforms would shape the kind of content they were offered, the researchers tested out different kinds of searches on each account. Some looked for terms that are explicitly associated with the manosphere - such as “feminist owned” or “red pill” - while others searched for more neutral terms that reflect the interests of an average adolescent boy, such as “gym tips” or “comedy”.

Either way, within just 26 minutes every single account had been recommended manosphere content, irrespective of the search terms that had been used.

Influence in the classroom

Exposure is not inherently dangerous, of course. A small report commissioned by Ofcom interviewed 38 men (and one woman) about their engagement with the manosphere. Many of the participants argued that they approached the misogynistic content with scepticism, without allowing it to influence their personal views.

Yet a sizeable minority do seem to endorse the more toxic messages. A YouGov study from 2023, for instance, found that 27 per cent of young men (aged 18 to 29) in the UK held a positive view of Andrew Tate, and 24 per cent agreed with his views about women, which include the notions that women should be subservient to men - to the point that they are “their husband’s property” - and that victims of sexual assault are responsible for their attack.

While this study was restricted to young adults rather than teens, it paints a pessimistic picture for the classroom. There are good reasons to believe that adolescents will be considerably more impressionable than adult users, after all, and it only takes a few students who have taken manosphere messages on board to harm other pupils and staff, says Harriet Over, a professor of psychology at the University of York. Given the available data, she estimates that at least a couple of boys in every class will hold some of the misogynistic views espoused by influencers like Tate. “That is enough to make life miserable for everybody else,” she says.

‘I have observed a pupil discussing how it would not be rape if nobody found out’

Little wonder that school staff are getting worried. Surveying 200 teachers about their experiences, her team found that 76 per cent of secondary school teachers, and 60 per cent of primary teachers, are “extremely concerned” by the rise of online misogyny.

Even more shocking were the descriptions of their experiences, which include disrespect, derogation and discrimination. “In the past year, I have observed a pupil discussing how it would not be rape if nobody found out,” wrote one. Others overheard boys telling female members of staff to “get back to where they belong”.

Worryingly, the influence of the manosphere is starting to touch boys at very young ages. “One teacher spoke about how, in a primary school, a little boy had told her it’s OK to hurt women because Andrew Tate does it,” says Over. “And another primary school teacher spoke about how a group of boys were inserting the images of girls from their class into a porn app and then showing it to them and saying, ‘This is what you should be like.’”

Such reports were a shock to the psychologists. “I was expecting that secondary school teachers would say that this was a really big problem, but from our initial research it’s clear that this is a pretty big problem in primary school as well,” Over says.

Over’s findings fit with a recent survey of 5,000 teachers by the NASUWT teaching union, presented at its annual conference in April this year. It found that 23.4 per cent of female teachers have been subject to misogyny in the past year - a marked rise from 17.4 per cent in 2023. They reported that the experiences were often traumatising, leaving them feeling “humiliated”, “demeaned” and “disempowered”.

“For some teachers, I think it’s a driver for them making that decision to stop being teachers at all, which is quite concerning,” says Darren Northcott, national official for education and pupil behaviour specialist at the NASUWT. “They don’t want to continue being subject to this kind of abuse.”

This comes, he adds, against a backdrop of worsening behaviour in the UK’s schools. “More broadly, we have seen teachers reporting an increase in what is sometimes - maybe misleadingly - called low-level disruption, but also more serious forms of abuse as well,” he says. Rising online misogyny is only pouring fuel on those flames.

Rising violence?

The most frightening claims concern the potential for online content to incite misogynistic violence - as portrayed in Adolescence.

Many factors will contribute to aggressive behaviour, including someone’s genes and whether they have experienced trauma themselves. Low self-control and high impulsivity can increase the chances that someone will resort to physical aggression in an argument, for instance.

Could the inflammatory rhetoric of the manosphere encourage adolescents to follow through on those tendencies?

Some commentators have pointed out that it is important not to demonise teenage boys unnecessarily.

However, Stephanie Wescott, a lecturer in the School of Education, Culture and Society at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, says that she’s seen plenty of evidence of “a very sharp rise” in violent behaviour in schools. “This problem has always [existed] but it is much worse than it has ever been,” she says. “[The behaviour] is much more aggressive and it’s much more prevalent.”

She points to the use of AI deep fakes, using photos of teachers, as a prime example of the “gendered violence” that has erupted recently. “There are some really horrific stories,” Wescott says. And the effects, she adds, may ripple through society. “We know that misogyny is a sort of red flag or a risk factor in violent crime, not only towards women but other extremist types of violent crime as well.”

Wescott’s research is based on surveys of Australian teachers, though it is not a huge leap to expect that students in England exposed to very similar content might respond similarly.

The power of prevention

For many of the researchers interviewed in this article, the responsibility for addressing the problem lies with the technology companies that allow this content to proliferate. “Platforms now have duties under the Online Safety Act to remove illegal content and to not show content that’s harmful to under-18s,” a member of Ofcom’s research team told Tes. “That includes pornography, but it also includes things like abuse and hate.”

Parents and teachers can help to empower teenagers with the necessary critical-thinking skills to handle the material that they do encounter, however. This may take the form of non-confrontational conversations that help them to question the messages - without denigrating them for what they have been viewing.

“You’ve got to take your emotional expression down 10 notches,” says Jane Gilmour, consultant clinical psychologist at Great Ormond Street Hospital and course director for postgraduate child development programmes at University College London.

The best approaches, she argues, will take into account the neurological and psychological transitions that render teenagers particularly susceptible to the manosphere’s messages.

“They’re searching for an identity, they are prone to take risks,” she says. “And they are very sensitive to perceived status.” Teenagers are also particularly prone to associative learning, she adds, in which they may come to see implicit links between two things occurring together.

‘You’re being there alongside their thought process, and that is the greatest thing we can do as adults’

In her clinical experience, Gilmour says, many young people are first drawn to the manosphere for the lifestyle that is portrayed - the wealth and the fitness advice - rather than the misogynistic worldview, which may at first seem incidental. Thanks to their associative learning, however, the different elements “are glued together, perhaps more tightly than they would have been in a different developmental period”, Gilmour says - leading them to believe that the one comes with the other.

Conversations about the manosphere could therefore begin by showing curiosity about those underlying motives to find out what kind of information or advice the young person has been looking to discover, or the identity they want to acquire. You could then talk more seriously about the misogyny, the influencers’ potential motives for spreading misinformation, and the various means of verifying the truth of what they have said. “You’re facilitating an exploration. You’re being there alongside their thought process, and that is the greatest thing we can do as adults,” says Gilmour. “Young people very often find their own answer.”

Finally, you may explore other sources of content they might like, with healthier role models. “Can we find the same thing minus the misogyny?” Gilmour says, pointing to racing driver Lewis Hamilton as an example. “He uses the language that young men like, but his website is really positive. It celebrates International Women’s Day, for example.”

Michael agrees that encouraging open conversation is the way forward. At the school debate, for instance, he found that - on deeper questioning - many of the kids struggled to support the beliefs that they espoused.

“You can see the cogs whirring. They don’t have an actual argument because they don’t really understand what they’re saying,” he explains. Teachers can use those opportunities to encourage them to look for opposing viewpoints, he suggests, emphasising the fact that you want them to make up their own minds. “You’re not telling them what to do, but you’re giving them a nudge.”

Help should soon be on its way to facilitate those conversations. Over has been working with the PSHE Association - a non-profit that supports teachers of personal, social and health education - to develop lesson guidelines for tackling online misogyny.

These guidelines are built on three “pillars”, she says, each of which has strong support from behavioural science. The first is inoculation. “That’s the idea that, in the same way you can protect the body from a virus through a vaccine, you can partially inoculate the mind against disinformation by presenting kind of watered-down versions of sexist arguments and then helping children think through counter arguments.”

The second is attempting to build empathy for the victims of misogyny, which leads on to the third, which is to “help the children be effective bystanders… What sort of small but concrete things can you say to help create a better culture in your school?”

The aim, Over emphasises, is to encourage “teenage boys to feel like they can be part of a solution” rather than demonising their behaviour, which would only backfire. The first of these lessons will be rolled out in September, with Over collecting data to measure how the students’ attitudes change over the course of the lessons - an evidence-based approach that should help her team to develop even more effective interventions in the future.

We must be realistic about what schools can achieve, of course - and avoid adding an even greater burden on to the people who may be on the receiving end of this abuse. “Teachers didn’t create this problem, but they’re absolutely at the forefront of trying to address it,” Over says, and that can place them in a vulnerable position.

Northcott, of the NASUWT, agrees. “Schools have their part to play. But I think another clear message from our members is that they can’t solve all of society’s problems on their own.”

This is a point that will become particularly salient as the government consults on whether to ban social media for under-16s - a move that teaching unions have warned could place an additional “policing burden” on to schools.

If such a ban is introduced, it will be even more vital that teachers are given sufficient resources and support to cope with the new challenges it could bring with it.

David Robson is an award-winning science writer and author. His latest book is The Laws of Connection: 13 social strategies that will transform your life