Gendered misconduct on the rise, female teachers scared of being "deepfaked" and parents protecting badly behaved boys: this is high school in 2024.
"But what if she sent them to him first?"
Devastating words from a teenager that made me shudder. I used to visit schools and give presentations about consent and respectful relationships. At one school I learned a boy had shared nude images of a girl with his friends. The young people wanted to know how to feel about the girl's culpability in this scenario. They were thinking out loud, working through the millennium-old problem of misogyny. Did it make a difference if they'd been in a relationship at the time? Did it make a difference if she sent him the nudes without him even asking? In other words: did it make a difference if she was a slut?
I explained, of course, that the question was about consent and respect. He knew she didn't want the images passed on, and he did it anyway. His actions were the problem to focus on here, not hers.
These young people are products of our society, and our society has taught them that when we hear about the incorrect behaviour of a boy or man, we ricochet our focus and blame away from him and onto someone or something else. A girl or woman, an outfit, alcohol and drugs, et cetera. What was she doing? What provoked him? What was she wearing?
It's not breaking news that schools and parents are still playing catch-up with the advent of the internet and smartphones being available to young people. The gendered misconduct that has always existed in real life is also built into the digital realm, and the heads-in-the-sand or abstinence-style approach isn't working.
In the past six months alone I've seen countless stories of schoolboys targeting both peers and teachers with varying degrees of tech-assisted gendered bullying, harassment, and abuse. In April, a young teacher deciding to leave the profession after too much gendered misconduct, culminating in 15- and 16-year-old boys harassing her and professing their adoration of Andrew Tate in class. In May, students at Yarra Valley Grammar were caught after compiling the highly offensive spreadsheet rating the attractiveness of their female peers including terms like "wifey" versus "unrapeable". Just weeks later, an Instagram post ranking girls from a Gold Coast school used categories such as "abduction material", "one night stand", "average" and "unrapeable". In July former and current staff at Warrnambool College reportedly faced up to 20 violent and sexist attacks a day. That same month a substitute teacher went public about the sexist behaviour she faces from students around the country, including Year 9 students projecting pornography on a whiteboard behind her while she took the roll. And in August, members of a Pembroke School football team devised a ratings scheme using sexist and racist references to female students.
For every one of these cases that actually hits the news, I see the tip of an iceberg. Gendered misconduct is grossly under-reported, when it is reported it often isn't dealt with properly, and even when it is dealt with, schools will seek to avoid negative press coverage where possible.
'A new fear unlocked'
Image-based abuse in particular is pernicious – and prevents victims from coming forward – because of the potential for slut-shaming. But the lack of victim involvement is why I've been thinking about deepfakes for a long time. The deepfakes I'm talking about are created when someone's non-sexual photos and videos are meshed with explicit photos and videos of someone else or with AI. The results can range from clunky and obvious to absolutely seamless and convincingly genuine. In January this year deepfakes of Taylor Swift went viral and were viewed more than 47 million times over a 17-hour period before the material was removed from social media.
Whereas a woman or girl complaining of image-based abuse would normally be grilled on why she took or sent nudes in the first place, now, with deepfakes, the only people we have to grill are the ones we always should have: the people who create or share this material without consent. There's nowhere for the ricochet to go. Could we find a way forward, free of victim-blaming narratives, in dealing with this latest frontier?
I spoke to a few teachers about these trends and issues. One of them, Ellen*, has been a teacher for 18 years and is currently teaching high school students. She recently watched a colleague leave the profession after "three separate sexual assault incidents across the state, Catholic, and independent sectors", and says the level and frequency of disrespect and objectification of women in school environments is definitely getting worse. While she has not personally dealt with any instances of deepfakes being created or shared at her school, she is afraid of when they will hit. "I genuinely think that it is a matter of when not if. The expression 'new fear unlocked' was the very first reaction I had when deepfakes appeared in tech." She said it "feels like ratemyteacher on steroids" and the attitudes are either being reinforced or ignored at home.'
Deepfakes are becoming a much bigger problem as the industry that facilitates their creation becomes ever more lucrative. A report by social media analytics firm Graphika found a 2,000 per cent increase in the number of links promoting websites that use AI to create non-consensual intimate images on Reddit and X since the beginning of 2023. They've moved "from niche pornography discussion forums to a scaled and monetised online business".
In July eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant addressed the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs and quoted from the description of a popular open-source AI "nudifying app": "Nudify any girl with the power of AI. Just choose a body type and get a result in a few seconds." And another: "Undress anyone instantly. Just upload a photo and the undress AI will remove the clothes within seconds. We are the best deepnude service." Ellen described to me a state of what I would call "hypervigilance", trying to keep photos and videos of herself private, lest a spiteful or just-plain-reckless student get hold of them.
Katrina Marson is a criminal lawyer with a decade of experience, especially in sex offences, but she has also spent a decade researching and advocating for comprehensive relationships and sexuality education. Marson understands deepfakes as the latest iteration of the same root problem as other gendered misconduct and abuse. She doesn't share my optimism about deepfakes removing victim-blaming from the equation. "I think the desire to blame women for sexual harm is pretty entrenched, unfortunately."
On a Churchill Fellowship in 2019 she travelled to several countries around the world to see how they were doing relationships and sexuality education better than Australia was. Marson has met a lot of young people, here and overseas, "asking a lot of questions" about intimate image sharing. "Online and offline worlds are not separate anymore. The online world is part of young people's lives in a way that it wasn't for most of the people who are making decisions about young people's access to the online world."
Marson has seen abstinence-style sex-ed fail young people again and again. Adults worry that teaching young people about gender and sexuality will make them more likely to engage in related behaviours, when in fact the opposite has been proven true. "Do we better equip young people by preventing them from accessing these things that we worry are harmful to them? Or do we better equip them by teaching them how to use and engage with [these things]? We need to prepare young people for the world as it is, not as we'd like it to be."
Marson also doesn't love Australia's tendency to legislate in response to a social issue. 'We do have a tendency to defer to the criminal justice system — the big stick — as a way of responding to thorny issues, without also investing in necessary, supporting strategies. It's politically expedient to be able to announce that "we did our thing, we changed our law," because that makes it look like we've fixed everything.'
Should teens be charged over deepfakes?
When I see how frequently women and girls are having horrific experiences — and that ricochet — I think there are some tough questions about accountability that need to be asked.
So what does the law say? On August 21 this year the federal government was proud to announce that the Criminal Code Amendment (Deepfake Sexual Material) Bill 2024 had passed both houses. These new laws are specifically for deepfakes of adults. People who create deepfakes now face up to seven years' prison time, and up to six years for those who share them.
Sexual images and videos featuring children have always been categorised as child exploitation material — whether created or captured — and they fall under various state and federal offences. There are various exceptions, however, for when young people are consensually creating and sharing imagery of themselves with other young people, to avoid unnecessary criminalisation.
Australia has a complicated and toxic attitude towards criminalising the actions of young people. Most states and territories assume that children aged 10 to 14 are "criminally incapable" unless proven otherwise, and the UN has marked 14 as the "absolute minimum" age a young person should ever be criminalised. So what about charging a 15-year-old with a criminal offence? It certainly isn't a likely or appealing option.
The devastating results of the Australian Child Maltreatment Study point to an escalating problem. "The most common perpetrators of child sexual abuse are adolescents under the age of 18 who are known to the victim." It disproportionately impacts girls and those identifying as having a diverse gender, and 98.2 per cent of it is perpetrated primarily by males. Research from The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children found "almost half of girls and one-third of boys aged 16-17 years said that they had experienced some form of unwanted sexual behaviour towards them in the past 12 months".
For both interpersonal and online abuse, Marson would like to see better options for victims who want to choose restorative justice – a process that involves accountability "whether that's through the justice system or otherwise" – but where the victim has agency and is supported through the process and the perpetrator has the chance to learn from the experience. "What we continue to grapple with in this country is the inability to come up with anything other than using the criminal justice system. We seem to have quite a degree of reluctance for any other kind of creativity around how we might respond to these sorts of issues."
Is it all just a game to boys?
There's also the thorny question of intention versus outcome when it comes to deepfakes and image abuse. Courtney Vowles is an academic at the University of Melbourne with more than five years of experience researching and writing about sexting and image-based abuse, especially amongst young people. Vowles says that a "key pattern" she's seen in the course of her work is what she and other experts in the field refer to as gamification.
The non-consensual sharing of intimate images — whether real or digitally altered/created — emerges as a form of social capital. "As awful as this is to say, this type of exchange has a similar ethos to the exchange of 'trading cards'. It's also likely to be especially emboldened in contexts of deepfakes, as perpetrators can often demonstrate a form of cognitive dissonance that enables them to detach the abusive behaviour from its embodied context and the material harm that this inflicts onto victim-survivors."
In other words, the boys and men creating and sharing these images don't think of themselves as bad guys, because it's all just a game. When they share the images amongst each other they gain clout and status. Vowles notes that there are exceptions, of course, when specific women are deliberately targeted for image-based abuse, but she says the gamification pattern "highlights the simultaneous extremity and 'banality' " of image-based abuse.
Marson recognises that pattern from her own work and uses the term "empathy bypass" to describe how someone could just not consider the human ramifications of their actions.
"I think, as with most sexual offending, there are really different drivers — and there might be overlapping drivers — for people to engage in this kind of behaviour. It's not always going to be out of a conscious desire to sexually degrade, even though that is the result. I honestly think there will be some people who do it because they think it will be funny to their mates, for example. So we just need to keep all of those different potential motivators in mind when we're thinking about how to address it as an activity."
'Not my boy', says parents
Another teacher I heard from, Rachel, has more than a decade of work experience and five years in pastoral care roles at two different schools. She is currently teaching high school students. She recently had to deal with an instance of cruel and inappropriate behaviour involving the behaviour of a group of boys towards a lone girl. It isn't possible to disclose any specific details of the incident, but Rachel says the reaction of the parents involved was more important – and disappointing – than the behaviour of the children. "I think this is an incredibly important issue that we need to be talking about," she says.
The boys insisted they'd just been playing around, that the whole thing was a "joke". But the result was the young woman in tears, "incredibly upset – crying and struggling to breathe". Rachel tried to use the incident as a firm-but-fair learning opportunity, combining an explanation and discussion with the boys plus one significant detention. "We had a long chat about how their behaviour and actions had made the young woman feel – emphasising that as a group of young men all together, they were very threatening, especially to a young woman on her own. Some of the boys seemed to understand this, but others refused to see how their behaviour had been inappropriate."
When it was time for Rachel to call the boys' parents and inform them of the incident and detentions, they were "angry" — not angry at their sons for the bad behaviour, but angry at Rachel. "One of the parents told me I had traumatised their son by making him feel guilty for what was only a game. One spent the entire conversation victim-blaming, putting all the blame on the young woman." The parents got together and backed their sons, and the school was pressured to step back its response. "Appeasing parents is very common in teaching now – especially the loud ones."
"Parenting is hard. I get it. It is very difficult to get a phone call from a teacher and hear that your son whom you love deeply has done something to make someone else – particularly a young woman – feel uncomfortable. But being a teenager is all about learning. It's a time in our lives where we have to learn how to interact with one another, to learn where the boundaries are, how our actions impact others, and just generally how to be a good person. But this means as parents we have to accept that our kids will sometimes get it wrong and that this is okay."
Rachel's experience mirrors something Ellen told me. ''Kids make terrible choices," Ellen said. "That is a fact and it's fine – it's part of growing up." But the difference now is that "they are becoming very entitled, they are protected by their parents… The parents – my god, the parents. The level of 'not my boy' is getting out of control."
According to Freedom-of-Information documents released to ABC, an average of six alleged child-on-child sexual abuse incidents are reported to police each week of term in Victorian public schools. But that doesn't include the vast numbers of unreported incidents, or those at private schools.
Toxic masculinity online
Another question I have is whether the celebrity misogynists like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson are actually to blame for these worsening attitudes amongst young men, or if they're the latest scapegoat or focus for the ricochet. Victorian education minister Ben Carroll recently announced "New School Resources To Counter Andrew Tate-Types".
Students will learn "to recognise and respond to toxic masculinity, hate speech and coercive control online" and "new resources will give students the skills to counter the influence of Andrew Tate-types, helping them safely navigate issues like consent, sextortion, pornography and gender-based bullying." But it's not mandatory for all schools.
Another teacher, Gabrielle, who has been teaching for eight years and is currently teaching high school students at a private school, gave an example of a school dealing very swiftly with an instance of image-based abuse. A year 10 student "made deepfake images of a girl in his own year" and was expelled as soon as the school found out. It's impossible to know how many similar incidents don't make the news.
The school's response in expelling the boy might seem good and strong, but it was still only reactionary – not holistic or preventative at all.
"There was a general staff announcement about the outcome and that was it. We were encouraged to shut down any chat [amongst the students], or to let them know that admin was 'taking it seriously'." At Gabrielle's school deepfakes are considered to be "covered under the general student welfare and discipline policy" and sections that relate to cyber or antisocial behaviour towards other students, but it's all after the fact.
Marson says this lack of training and support to empower teachers to educate students isn't unusual. "Teacher skill and confidence in delivering this particular kind of education is one of the biggest barriers to the delivery of this kind of education." In hearing about the Victorian government's latest announcements, Marson is wary. "We can't just stick it in the curriculum and hope for the best. We need to actually equip teachers with the skills to deliver this kind of education. And we know that they're craving those skills reported on just this month that professional development. We're dealing with generations of bad sex ed. So we can't expect that teachers will just suddenly know how to deliver this because they've got the imprimatur."
So what do we do with all this terrible information? Proliferating "nudifying" apps have a lot of money to make from young men looking for clout and revenge, but when young people come into contact with the criminal justice system it's a lose-lose scenario.
The answer is clear to me: we do something. We do anything. Anything other than shoving our heads in the sand and hoping it goes away. "I think it's also fair to say that we are kind of working this out as we go," Marson says, "because this is a new frontier for all of us, and so we're allowed to kind of be figuring out what's going to work effectively."
We need to keep in mind that improving relationships and sexuality education amongst parents is just as important as teaching the school students. We can't just lump teachers with more materials without training and empowering them in how to deliver it. We need to stop the ricochet of blaming our girls for the behaviour of our boys whilst remembering that young people make mistakes.
Everyone involved has a lot to learn – not just the teens.
* Names have been changed to protect the identity of teachers and students
Credits
Words: Bri Lee
Illustrations: Emma Machan
Editor: Leigh Tonkin
