Imagine a teenage boy, alone with his phone late at night. A message pings in from a pretty stranger, or even from the hacked account of a girl he already knows. Either way, it’s crudely calculated to grab his attention. There will be pictures, tantalising promises of something even more explicit, if he’ll send nudes in response. But if he does, the brutal trap springs shut.
What follows is a demand for money, if he doesn’t want the compromising pictures plastered all over the internet for everyone at school to see. Some boys (the vast majority of so-called sextortion victims are boys) try to pay up. The lucky ones panic and tell their parents. Tragically, a handful are known to have killed themselves rather than risk public humiliation.
Organised crime gangs are deploying this cold-blooded form of blackmail against children on such an industrial scale that the National Crime Agency took the unusual step of sending a nationwide alert to schools last month. It’s the stuff of parental nightmares, along with all the other horrors – pornography in the playground, Andrew Tate videos, post-#MeToo sexual etiquette, groping and grooming – that we can barely find the words to discuss with our mortified teenagers, but somehow expect teachers to cover without breaking stride.
No wonder Ofsted, investigating an epidemic of sexual harassment in schools, reported teachers are hungry for more clarity over when and how to teach topics such as sexting and toxic masculinity. Which makes it all the more frustrating that this week’s government-commissioned review of sex education in England, originally billed as helping struggling teachers, has instead descended into a screaming culture war.
Writing in the Sun, the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, vowed that “never again will young girls be led to believe they might be happier if they were a boy, or children to think there are 72 genders”. But when asked by the BBC how often inappropriate material is taught in schools, the best Keegan could offer was “I don’t know”, before insisting she wouldn’t shy away from tackling what might or might not actually be a problem. If anyone’s struggling with the facts of life here, it arguably isn’t teenagers.
On closer reading, neither the advance spin nor the resulting social-media outrage quite reflect what the new guidance actually says. Thankfully, a much hyped ban on sex education in primary schools before year five – which is when most schools introduce it anyway – will not stop teachers combating sexual abuse by teaching young children about bodies, privacy and inappropriate touching. (That’s classed under compulsory relationships education, with no age limit.) Though some will chafe against arbitrary new age limits for covering specific topics, the small print confirms headteachers will be free to introduce issues earlier if necessary, for example, if they are worried about what younger children are watching on smartphones.
And contrary to some early headlines, it’s not quite the new section 28. Teachers won’t actually be banned from covering trans identities full stop: they will be explicitly required to cover the legal process for transitioning and the protection against discrimination equality law gives to people undergoing gender reassignment. But crucially, they will be banned from teaching the broader concept of “gender ideology” – the idea that people have a gender identity that might differ from their biological sex, which underpins trans identities – unless directly asked by pupils, and even then they will have to explain that it’s contested (in other words, that some people don’t believe in it). They’ll be obliged to teach “facts about biological sex” and banned from using materials suggesting that gender lies on a spectrum or is determined by stereotypical interests such as wearing pink or playing with dolls – to the extent, of course, that any school ever did.
Though all this arguably brings schools into line with an outside world where an adult’s right to express gender-critical beliefs in the workplace has been upheld by the courts, it leaves teachers walking a gossamer-thin tightrope.
Should pupils be allowed to insist that boys can’t really become girls? What if there’s a vulnerable trans girl in the class, or trans teacher in the school? At best this will be a task for highly skilled specialists, benefiting from the kind of extra training and support that ministers conspicuously aren’t offering here. Not for the first time, schools are being asked, somehow magically, to resolve an issue that has defeated wider society, or, at the very least, sweep the pieces tidily under the carpet, without the tools to do so. And that doesn’t just apply to trans rights.
Though early teenage romance has always been an anxious, fumbling thing, now it comes loaded with the added fear of viral humiliation for getting it wrong that accompanies living very online lives. And while girls are the most obvious victims of this porn-soaked and increasingly misogynistic culture, what is becoming increasingly clear is how much boys are harmed and worried by it too.
When the BBC journalist Catherine Carr put a microphone in front of teenage boys and just let them talk for her Radio 4 series, About the Boys, she heard of boys so anxious about being accused of rape if they didn’t explicitly seek consent to each specific act that they filmed themselves asking for it on their phones in case they later needed proof. Some boys were avoiding relationships with girls altogether because they were so frightened of getting it wrong, and being branded creeps or rapists on sites such as Everyone’s Invited, which allows girls to post anonymous accusations naming only the perpetrator’s school.
Like most women, I am innately suspicious of men claiming that they just don’t know where the boundaries are post-#MeToo. But 15-year-olds? It’s impossible to hear stories like the ones Carr recorded without feeling simultaneously frightened for the girls and sad for the boys, blundering through situations for which we have failed to give them the language and the skills.
Boys have already realised, Carr concluded, that they’re not going to learn anything very useful from porn and are desperate for frank, practical advice about “how not to be terrible at it” from someone they trust, but all too rarely get it.
This review was a lost chance not only to overhaul sex education for the world our children actually live in, rather than the one Tory backbenchers feverishly imagine they do, but to bring back a sense of joy and confidence to teenagers for whom the first flush of romance has become a fearful, anxious thing. We owe teenagers an open and honest conversation about sex. But for that to happen, it’s the adults who will have to grow up.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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