Another week, another shaming of boys in schools. Last Monday a teacher at Como Secondary College in Perth stormed into a change room and told boys celebrating a soccer win that they sounded like ‘a bunch of testosterone-fuelled misogynistic boys.” 

It was encouraging to see the extensive media coverage of this event as well as the recent shaming of boys in two Victorian schools, where boys were required to apologise for men’s violence and denounced as male oppressors.  

It is odd that so many react with surprise given that shaming of boys as toxic, violent and dangerous has been happening for years in Australia and is part of school curriculum in many states. With all the interest in the new national curriculum and concern about the growing influence of identity politics in schools, it is telling that no one is focusing on the widespread infiltration of feminist ideology into school programs with male-bashing now part of school teaching across the country.  

It is destined to get worse. As a result of the feminist’s campaign to convince the Government to spend more money on women’s safety, we are seeing even more money pouring into domestic violence propaganda campaigns, including programs in schools, which are all about demonizing men, falsely claiming all violence is due to disrespect for women and ignoring 40 years of international research showing the complex causes of this social problem – causes which include mental illness, drug and alcohol problems and exposure to family violence where mothers are just as likely to be violent as fathers.  

Research shows that in violent homes it’s not just the dad who is aggressive. Mothers are just as likely to be violent. Look at this important study from the Australian Institute of Criminology which asked young people whether they’d ever witnessed their dads bashing their mums, or the other way around. While the author, David Indermauer, trumpets the finding that almost a quarter of the kids had witnessed their fathers attack their mothers, he totally buries the most important result, that almost the same percentage had seen their mothers attacking fathers as had seen their mothers being abused by their dads. 

That’s exactly what the huge body of international research has been showing. There’s been well over 1700 research studies showing most violence is two way, involving male and female perpetrators. Here’s Canadian Psychiatry professor Tonia Nicholls explaining the results.  

Yet we have programs in schools across Australia which deny children’s own experience. Teaching kids that their mother’s violence doesn’t matter – even though children are more likely to be abused or even murdered by their mothers than their fathers. We are teaching them that we don’t care about girls who abuse other girls or women who attack men. That we only care about men’s violence.   

And that means boys who are being abused don’t dare speak out. Think about how many male victims appeared before the Royal Commission into institutional sexual abuse, talking about experiences that happened when they were boys which that they never dared reveal. We are still silencing boys who are abused, emotionally, physically or sexually, by adults, their parents or other kids. That’s a disgrace.  

For years I have had teachers and other experts approaching me about this issue.   

Mothers of Sons is a new organisation speaking out about injustice towards men and boys. They have organised a big campaign to stop the shaming of boys in schools being launched this tomorrow night, Tues May 18 at 7.00 PM AEST, on a live event on Facebook.  

The plan is to put the call out to parents, as well as teachers, ex-teachers or ex-pupils, to contact the MOS team who will help them compile evidence of shaming programs in their school that we can then present to local media. Parents are often too nervous to speak out for fear their sons will be targeted but they can remain anonymous whilst MOS deals with the media.   

We assume that given the current media interest in boy shaming there will be local and regional newspapers that will be happy to feature stories about their local schools and hopefully we’ll find some stories deserving national prominence.  

All the information for parents who wish to come forward is now on the website.    

Boys don’t deserve to be shamed for being born male.