Why Love Island and MAFS should be on schools’ safeguarding radar

The Department for Education’s updated relationships, sex and health education guidance, which came into effect at the start of September, places significant emphasis on teaching young people how to stay safe online.

This makes sense. The statutory guidance reflects growing concerns about the extent to which social media content is dictating young people’s understanding of love, intimacy and consent.

However, with so much focus on what young people might be encountering online, we can’t forget the influence of something more traditional: what they watch on television.

School leaders and PSHE leads are no longer just teaching about contraception and basic respect; we are competing with wildly popular, glossily produced, hyper-sexualised TV shows, which frequently present extreme, volatile or harmful behaviours as the “standard” for modern romance.

Shows like Love Island and Married at First Sight seem to have increasingly (and perhaps intentionally) included more controversial characters in their casting in recent years.

Misogyny in TV shows

The latest series of Married at First Sight Australia, for example, included a man who explicitly referenced his desire for his wife to be “submissive”, and made statements such as, “If a woman has a high body count, it diminishes her value” (meaning a woman is less desirable if she has had multiple sexual partners).

This echoes messaging that is routinely pushed to young people through “tradwife” content online: that girls must be submissive, not wear too much make-up, not have “too many” partners and act in a more traditional and demure way. 

What is jarring is that other TV programmes, such as HBO’s Euphoria, are promoting exactly the opposite: sexualising young women and glamourising high-risk sexual practices. The Guardian’s Louis Staples wrote in a review of the recent third season that “Euphoria’s misogyny feels like the manosphere’s wet dream”.

When young people consume these conflicting narratives without a critical lens, it can affect their expectations of what is normal, acceptable or expected of them. 

Some may argue that TV shows are clearly not real life. This is true, and I do not believe that art should be restricted or that TV has a duty to educate. We also can’t draw a causal link between media consumption and real-life behaviour.

However, there has been a huge rise in harmful sexual behaviours among young people. In a recent survey by IFAS, 43 per cent of sexually active 16- to 17-year-olds said they have been strangled during sex.

Meanwhile, Romania’s entry to this year’s Eurovision Song Contest used the phrase “choke me” 30 times, alongside lyrics such as “make my lungs explode”. The artist defended the song as a metaphor, but when dangerous practices like sexual strangulation are framed as standard practice in mainstream pop culture, young people - particularly young women - can face intense peer pressure to consent to acts they would not otherwise have considered.

Blurred boundaries

Recent allegations spotlighted by a BBC Panorama investigation into Married at First Sight UK (in which former contestants alleged that non-consensual sex acts occurred during production) expose a failure in how popular culture handles boundaries and safety.

When reality television - a genre teenagers consume in large quantities - is steeped in allegations of blurred consent, it can be incredibly confusing for young people. To the untrained adolescent eye, abuse can look a lot like romance.

So, how should schools be responding to all of this?

We need to teach young people to consume entertainment through a more critical lens. The updated RSHE guidance and updated Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) framework provide the tools to do this.

The RSHE guidance explicitly states that secondary schools must address the realities of modern media. Schools are told they must teach:

• The impact of online pornography
• The impact of misogyny
• The explicit legal boundaries of consent
• The law on non-consensual sexual strangulation

KCSIE reinforces that relationships education is vital for “preventative safeguarding”. It tasks us with identifying and addressing peer-on-peer abuse, sexual harassment and gender-based violence. 

Within this, teachers need to be alert to mainstream media that normalises non-consensual behaviour and the confusing influence it can have. Here are some practical steps teachers can take.

Take a proactive approach

Do not wait for a safeguarding incident to discuss consent. Use current media as a regular toolkit in RSHE. Deconstruct popular music lyrics or TV shows in a safe, structured way. Ask students: “Is this realistic? Is this safe? Has consent been sought?”

Teach the law

Teenagers can confuse what people do on TV with what is “normal” and, indeed, what is legal. Ensure that your curriculum clearly articulates the UK laws surrounding consent, digital image sharing (including deepfakes/intimate image abuse) and the non-fatal strangulation offences that were recently introduced into UK law.

Train staff

Ensure that your RSHE-delivering staff are fully trained and feel confident delivering lessons on these topics. If staff do not feel comfortable teaching about explicit content, they should not be expected to, at least not without careful guidance, support and training.

Engage parents

Parents are often entirely unaware of what their children are watching and absorbing. Use the RSHE guidance and share your curriculum content with parents. Explain to them why it is so important that we tackle these issues early in secondary school. Provide them with research and resources to continue these conversations at home, and encourage them to ask their children what they are learning in RSHE to open up these sometimes challenging conversations.

I was delighted recently to receive an email from a parent thanking me for teaching her Year 10 daughter about navigating consent in our RSHE curriculum. She said that it opened up conversations around the dinner table that were important but that the family may not otherwise have had.

Mainstream media should be free to embrace controversial themes and we should never resort to censorship. But it is crucial that children are not left to interpret these worlds on their own. Schools should actively teach young people how to watch with a critical eye as they learn what they want intimacy to mean to them.

Charli Faux is subject lead for PSHE and school mental health lead at Bishop’s Hatfield Girls’ School in Hertfordshire