Professor Louise Crowley:

The influencers are tapping into that want and need young men have, and they have had that need forever, although, obviously, the pandemic shone a light on it. What we need to do, and what we do with the Bystander programme, is provide those safe spaces, start those conversations and give them the language. Even though cohorts of young men are sometimes quite silent in the classroom, we know they have conversations afterwards and engage with the learnings outside.

We have heard feedback from schools in this regard. For example, in a school where I delivered a workshop to a large cohort of senior level students, the principal came up to me a couple of weeks later and said three boys had been walking down the corridor the previous week and one of them had said something inappropriate to a female teacher. In that moment, the principal said, the boy's two friends stopped him, called him out and told him to apologise to the teacher. The school did not get involved, therefore, but let the boys handle it there and then. It is about allowing them to learn to identify it and see that unacceptable behaviour is not just aggravated sexual assault and rape but all those forms. If we can call out and stamp out those early forms of misogyny or disrespect, the hope is we will prevent an escalation. It is about empowering them and giving students agency to be the change, that is, not for us to impose it on them but to give them the skills to do it themselves.