Boys will be taught to respect women and girls as part of the national educational curriculum if Labour forms the next government.
The party plans to prevent laddish banter leading to misogyny and violence.
According to The Times:
Sir Keir Starmer said that carving out time at school to discuss the treatment of women and girls would help to “bring about cultural change”. Boys should hear “first-hand” from victims of male violence and abuse, he said.
The move would embolden boys to “call out” friends who acted in a misogynistic way.
He said that talking during school hours about how society treats women could make the subject become like mental health, which young people feel more comfortable discussing now than a decade ago.
Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said: “It’s also about teaching respect in relationships.”
Teaching how to respect women as part of the curriculum would be among measures the party would introduce to meet its pledge to halve incidents of violence against women and girls within a decade.
This goal will be judged on the rates of sexual assault, domestic abuse, stalking and harassment recorded by the Office for National Statistics.
Its annual crime survey from last year showed that 7 per cent of women were victims of domestic abuse, 3 per cent had been sexually assaulted and 5 per cent were victims of stalking.
A quarter of all women said they had experienced abuse before the age of 16.
Starmer and Cooper were talking at an event in south London alongside the actress Emily Atack, who has been a victim of sexual assault and repeated sexual harassment, and the reality television star Georgia Harrison, who has campaigned against revenge porn.
Atack cited Metropolitan Police officers nicknaming their colleague, the serial rapist David Carrick, “bastard Dave” as an example of how predatory behaviour could become normalised if it went unchallenged.
Atack said: “It’s what boys think they have to do to be boys . . . but we’re seeing now the repercussions of what we have been told are minor behaviours, like videoing someone and spreading it around school or catcalling someone across the street to make your mates laugh, or having all these horrible names in WhatsApp groups. All of this stuff has been completely normalised.”
She added that although teachers should be prepared to have awkward conversations with their pupils, they also needed help from other professionals on how to tackle the issues.
Starmer said: “I do think that with the right way of approaching it, we could begin a discussion which would enable boys and young men to feel much more comfortable, because [cultural change] does require them to call out and understand [misogyny].”
