果冻传媒

From TikTok to school corridors, misogynistic content spread across online platforms are shaping how many young people understand and interact with the world around them, creating . The acclaimed British television series , sparking national debate about the pressures facing young people and revealing that hyper-traditional and harmful gender norms are far from a thing of the past.

On 2 July 2026, the 果冻传媒鈥檚 , and University College London鈥檚 (UCL) delivered 鈥�From Screen to Classroom: Understanding Misogyny in Young People鈥�, a one-day public engagement event co-hosted by the 果冻传媒 Policy Hub. Bringing together practitioners from the youth, education, local government, charity and policy sectors, including the and , the event explored the drivers of rising misogyny among young people, its impact across society, and sustainable approaches to prevention.

A Timely Intervention

Deeply concerning is the rise of the 鈥榤anosphere鈥� subculture: a network of online communities and influencers that promote the belief that men and boys are disadvantaged by advances in gender equality and feminism. Through social media and online platforms, so-called manfluencers promote misogynistic narratives, such as contempt for and subordination of women, and harmful models of masculinity and self-improvement. It diverges from 鈥榚veryday鈥� forms of sexism by using interconnected networks to deliberately spread harmful views about women and girls, and anti-feminist ideas.

Against this backdrop, the Department for Education (DfE) have across English secondary schools by 2029, including greater focus on recognising and preventing misogyny as part of a wider strategy to tackle violence against women and girls (VAWG). Yet, there has been little translation from policy to practice. Limited and unequal provision across schools, gaps in teacher confidence and training, , and the continued perception of PSHE as an optional subject all contribute to the uneven adoption of the DfE鈥檚 curricular reforms. Within this context, Williams and Osman co-delivered the session as a research-informed response to this ongoing crisis and government strategy.

Reel to Real: How online ideas become offline actions

Opening the session, Liz Laming, Senior Subject Specialist at the PSHE Association, mapped the economic forces driving the online spread of misogynistic content. She explained how political actors and interest groups pay social media platforms to amplify content, while AI-driven algorithms prioritise material that generates engagement and profit 鈥� widening the reach of content and, over time, desensitising viewers. Exemplifying her argument, Laming highlights research from and that finds 59% of boys aged 11 to 14 had been exposed to misogynistic and violent content by algorithms, even when their initial searches were unrelated, demonstrating significant concerns around online safety.

Amid the ongoing crisis of belonging 鈥� often 鈥� the manosphere presents itself as a space for self-improvement, engaging topics from fitness to finance, and gaming to relationships, as gateways to overtly misogynistic and violent content. Laming identified trends such as which misappropriate scientific research to promote unrealistic beauty standards to men and boys. Alongside normalised anabolic steroid use (鈥榮oftmaxxing鈥�), more extreme methods, such as to alter facial features (鈥榟ardmaxxing鈥�), are growing concerns. Harmful gendered content also targets women and girls, with growing promoting ultra-traditional gender roles centred on male breadwinners and female domesticity. Taken together, these trends illustrate how social media is a powerful vehicle for transporting misogynistic ideas across diverse audiences, with consequences for health, safety and wellbeing. Increased incidence of mental and physical ill health among young people, such as , demonstrate that online and 鈥渙ffline鈥� spaces are interconnected. The manosphere is not on the fringes of society: it has real-world implications, and anyone can be exposed to it.

What are we to do? Debates at Hand

A support worker from captured the mood in the room by asking, 鈥淲hat has society come to that we now have strangers raising our kids on the internet?鈥� The question sparked debate about stronger protections for young people, including the following its . Participants argued that such measures risk treating the symptom rather than the cause, enabling social media platforms to evade responsibility of regulating content and failing to equip young people with the skills and resilience needed to navigate digital spaces safely.

Responding to the government strategy, Laming outlined the on facilitating discussions with pupils around gender norms and misogyny in the context of healthy relationships, emotional wellbeing, belonging and online safety. Emphasising standardised and widely applicable approaches, she advocated embedding prevention within PSHE through sustained, age-appropriate education, rather than one-off interventions. Central to this is scenario-based learning which invites boys to be part of the solution. By engaging all pupils in discussions about respectful relationships and social responsibility, educators can boys as potential perpetrators, promote positive norms, and reiterate that most young people do not endorse misogynistic views. As the deep-rooted network of the manosphere extends beyond a few prominent figures, Laming dissuades mentioning specific influencers as this can inadvertently amplify manosphere visibility. Instead, educational efforts should focus on the wider attitudes that sustain misogyny and encourage critical thinking and digital literacy among young people.

This discussion prompted participants to consider the extent to which schools should be considered primary socialising agents alongside families and households. While schools are increasingly expected to respond to complex social challenges, many attendees raised concerns about the capacity of an already overstretched and under-resourced teaching workforce to take on further responsibilities without adequate support. Participants stressed that preventing and addressing the harmful attitudes that underpin VAWG extends beyond the classroom, with long-term, cross-institutional responsibility shared across education, families, governments, and communities. This leads feminist coalitions, like , to question the sufficiency of the 拢3 million investment in the teacher training pilot. It also raises broader questions around accountability: would failure to deliver the create further implications for state-funded schools?

These discussions set the tone for to advocate relational approaches to preventing misogyny and sexual violence. Positioning schools as key sites for youth mentoring and social justice work, Harris argued that effective and sustainable preventative education lies in reciprocal identification. He asks, how much do students see themselves in teachers and youth workers, and how much do teachers and youth workers see themselves in young people? Bridging this gap through mutual identification and relationship-building was central to the programme that Harris co-designed and delivered to teenage boys in West Midlands schools. Rather than relying solely on best practice guidelines, the programme used personal storytelling and discussions drawn from lived experiences to connect young people with the real-world consequences of harmful attitudes and behaviours. These approaches fostered trust, reflection and empathy, shifting the focus from simply asking what works in prevention programmes to considering who is best placed to deliver them.

Practitioners, including and , echoed the significance of this approach. They described relationship-building and capacity-building as crucial for raising young peoples鈥� confidence, sense of belonging, and willingness to engage with sensitive or complex conversations, with mentoring enabling these conversations to occur through mutually negotiated trust, rather than authority. Together, standardised and scalable PSHE education and small-scale mentoring projects can offer a strong foundation for sustainable prevention that helps young people feel seen.

Looking Forwards

As debates emerged around capacity, credibility and best practice, the session at 果冻传媒 pointed to a broader conclusion: misogyny, VAWG and related harms are structural challenges requiring structural solutions. Siloed approaches that place responsibility on some people, while absolving others, do little to address the conditions that enable harms to persist.

Panellists advocated for a collective reframing of social harms: they should not be understood as inevitable, but as products of cultures, institutions, curricula and policies that shape who is granted agency and who is reduced to risk. In doing so, they challenged narratives, including the government strategy, for framing VAWG in terms of individual responsibility and reinforcing gendered binaries of protector and protected, and victim and perpetrator. Instead, the panel argued that harmful behaviours and the more extreme manifestations of misogyny now visible in schools are rooted in longstanding patterns of gender inequality embedded across society 鈥� transcending class, religious and ethnic boundaries.

Drawing on Shakespeare鈥檚 words, (Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2), Osman reminded participants of their collective responsibilities. This message echoed a familiar proverb, 鈥淚t takes a village to raise a child鈥�, compelling us to work together 鈥� now.