There’s a lot to unpack here, schools are so bloody stretched as it is and it’s becoming more and more common to see headlines that basically say teachers should “tackle” all of societies ills through the curriculum – with virtually no support, resources or training. Great. I also read another article recently that said incel culture and right wing radicalisation should be “tackled” (interesting choice of word again) through teaching in schools. Even though most of it happens online there seems little discourse about somehow “tackling” the influence the online lives of young people and kids has on their real world lives. The OFSTED report in question in this article has shocking findings but as yet am waiting to hear anything about what will be done as a result.
“Nine out of 10 girls and half the boys who took part in the review said being sent unsolicited explicit pictures – so-called “dick pics” – or videos happened “a lot” or “sometimes” to them or their peers. A similar proportion of girls (92%) and three-quarters of boys complained of recurrent sexist name-calling. “The frequency of these harmful sexual behaviours means that some children and young people consider them normal,” the report said.”
All this does make me think about the stakeholders in my project though. I am having trouble getting male parents to engage in any kind of conversation around porn, mothers being slightly less hesitant, but still it’s a conversation that can only go so far when you are skirting around the content of porn so as not to get too personal about what you have been looking at I guess?!
If I had all the time and money in the world I would love to do a kind of deep dive into the corrections between 90’s and early 2000’s media and the attitudes of millennial/Gen X parents towards sex and gender equality. I think you’d find some really interesting stuff there as well as an answer to some questions about attitudes and constructs fed to us in that era and how it shows up in cultural attitudes now.