Why Schools Should Commit to Combating Toxic Masculinity
This is the first in a three-part series about why and how Next Gen Men’s youth programs and resources engage boys-only groups in schools.
Next, read A Gender-Neutral Approach to Toxic Masculinity Won’t Work. Finish by reading How to Address Toxic Masculinity With Boys.
By Jonathon Reed
After his court hearing, 11-year-old Louis only got probation.
He’d been involved in bullying that had escalated to a physical assault that put another boy in the hospital. He was stressed and overwhelmed, not just by the legal process but by the emergence of serious violence in front of him.
“I was getting really upset after that,” he told me months later. “I couldn’t eat anything, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t do anything. I thought I deserved what he got. You know, I wanted someone to do that to me.”
Boys’ experiences with masculinity can lead to a cycle of both peer-led and self-inflicted violence.
Here’s why that matters.
Boys are struggling in unique ways.
Some people talk about there being a ‘boy crisis’ in schools. That idea originated in the late 1990s, when psychologists like William Pollack, Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson began connecting rigid cultural norms of masculinity to boys’ academic, behavioural and emotional struggles.
Pushback came from pundits like Christina Hoff Sommers, Warren Farrell and Michael Gurian, who rallied against what they saw as a misguided feminist war against boyhood that problematized ‘boys just being boys.’
“Lost in much of the ensuing public conversation were the boys themselves—the richness of their experiences, the texture of their lives. This was to be expected of those who were simply using boys as a foil with which to critique feminism. In fact, the pundits appeared relatively uninterested in boys’ welfare; they were simply the latest weapon against the feminists.”
The reality is that boys are struggling—just not in ways that are simple or politically convenient.
In 2020, suicide became the leading cause of death for children in Canada. Boys continue to account for three quarters of these youth suicides—particularly Indigenous and Inuit boys.
At the same time, one-third of boys think society expects them to be strong and ‘suck it up’ when they feel sad or scared. Four in five youth in Canada believe boys are going to be made fun of if they cry.
It’s true that many boys are falling behind in school, but racism and poverty are often at the root of their academic disparities. For example, half of the students who were expelled in the Toronto District School Board between 2012 and 2016 were Black. Almost half of all Black students in Toronto get suspended from school before they graduate.
On top of that, almost half of all high school boys in Canada have experienced some form of physical assault. One in five have been threatened with a weapon.
The way boys struggle affects the way they treat others.
You wouldn’t be wrong to look at these statistics and think more apt interventions would be ones related to mental health, anti-racism, SEL or relational learning. But you would be missing the unshakeable connections between the ways boys experience masculinity, and the ways they enact it towards others.
Boys are more likely to experience violence and more likely to translate that exposure into violence perpetration themselves.
70 percent of youth hear ‘that’s so gay’ at school every day. The boys who use homophobic language in middle school are more likely to sexually harass girls when they’re older, and boys who are targeted for ‘inadequate’ gender performance are more likely to become the perpetrators of school shootings.
Three fifths of boys hear their peers making sexual comments or jokes about girls at least once a week. One in three Canadian women experience sexual assault, and 99% of accused perpetrators of that sexual violence are male.
And so on.
The consequences of boys’ unique struggles stretch like branches throughout our society. At their roots are our cultural definitions of manhood, and therefore boyhood.
Schools can be spaces for transformation.
We know that young men with fewer constraints on their masculinity both experience and perpetrate dramatically less violence in their lives.
Challenging the cultural machinery in boys’ lives, however, will take a sustained, collective effort from parents, educators, coaches and others who work with young people.
For positive change to take place, boys need to experience responsive care themselves, and they need to build their capacity to recognize the current social system as unjust. Those things aren’t—and can’t be—separate.
“For boys to develop caring, nurturing dispositions, and perceive ways of caring other than being financial providers and protectors, they must first experience care themselves. In the classroom, this care manifests itself as trust, respect, and attentiveness. Schools must be sanctuaries for boys, where they are valued for attributes other than holding power over others, and where they learn to transact power without violence.”
Research studies have demonstrated that masculinity-focused school-based programs offer a uniquely impactful opportunity to empower boys to challenge the status quo. Programs that facilitate connection and engage with boys’ peer groups, even more so.
Boys need the space to explore non-dominant cultural values about masculinity and to practice them with their friends. Schools can offer that.
What’s the alternative? Doing nothing? Doubling down on boys-will-be-boys rhetoric? Offering specialized programming for girls, safe spaces for 2SLGBTQ+ youth and not thinking twice about the other side of the equation?
Tried it, tried it, and tried it.
If we’re going to make any significant progress on mental wellness, academic engagement or gender-based violence prevention, we need to do that within and alongside boys-only spaces.
Boys are part of the solution.
The point of all this is not that there is something wrong with boys. I’m saying there is something wrong with us as parents and educators if we don’t take every opportunity to engage, support and empower boys to be their best selves.
Given the right empathy and space, we have seen time and time again that boys are ready to challenge the status quo of rigid masculinity that they see in front of them.
That’s what 11-year-old Louis did.
I know his story because we recorded it together for Breaking the Boy Code season three. “I couldn’t eat anything, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t do anything,” he told me in the second episode. “That’s when I started talking to you.”
“What about masculinity?” I asked him.
“I think I’ve learned that you don’t have to act all tough,” he answered, “and you don’t have to hurt other people to be a man. I mean, what really has been surprising is, I never used to talk about feelings or anything like that. And I tried not to show any kind of weakness…but you can still be a guy without having to put on an act and act tough.”
This is what transformation looks like. This is the road map or the kind of future that we want to build for the next generation—to end cycles of violence, to change what bullying looks like, to change the landscape of mental health for young people.
All of that is carried in the lives of young people today, and in the parents, educators and places of learning who have positive masculinity at heart.
“I like spending time with you,” Louis added at the end of the podcast. “I like how you make me think about stuff that I’ve never thought about before.”
Let’s get to work.
Can gender stereotypes and positive masculinity be effectively addressed without specifically needing to hold a boys-only space? The next blog post in this series, A Gender-Neutral Approach to Toxic Masculinity Won’t Work delves deeper.
ICYMI This Week
Why Are More Black Kids Suicidal? A Search for Answers. (The New York Times)
Why roughhousing is good for kids, and how to keep it safe (The Washington Post)
In America, a child is shot every hour, and hundreds die. Here are 13 young lives lost in 2021. (The Washington Post)
Written by Next Gen Men Program Manager Jonathon Reed as part of Learnings & Unlearnings, a bi-weekly blog reflecting on our experiences working with boys and young men. Subscribe to Future of Masculinity to get Learnings & Unlearnings delivered to your email inbox.