From reports of child-on-child abuse in schools to the Cornell 7 case, every day we see more examples of society’s inability to educate boys properly. Rebecca Spargo writes about what she’s learned while researching for her new novel and how the issue isn’t just teaching kids right and wrong – but also not to stay silent
Tuesday 06 October 2026 01:00 EDT
The drama ‘Adolescence’ displayed to many the dark places that teenagers go without proper guidance (Netflix)
Like most women, I was pretty horrified at the stories that emerged from the “Everyone’s Invited” campaign in 2021. The campaign invited young women to publish anonymous testimonies of peer-on-peer sexual misconduct and violence they had experienced at school. At the time, you could search all of the schools that had been mentioned and every single school I could think of, both primary and secondary schools, appeared when I searched. It was really shocking.
I would love to say that this is now a thing of the past, but it’s not.
A recent report in The Guardian revealed that thousands of cases of child-on-child sexual abuse in schools, including multiple rapes, are reported to police every year. More than a third of the rape victims were children under 13. Of those where the sex of the victim is documented, two-thirds were girls.
Like most women, I was pretty horrified at the stories that emerged from the “Everyone’s Invited” campaign in 2021. The campaign invited young women to publish anonymous testimonies of peer-on-peer sexual misconduct and violence they had experienced at school. At the time, you could search all of the schools that had been mentioned and every single school I could think of, both primary and secondary schools, appeared when I searched. It was really shocking.
I would love to say that this is now a thing of the past, but it’s not.
A recent report in The Guardian revealed that thousands of cases of child-on-child sexual abuse in schools, including multiple rapes, are reported to police every year. More than a third of the rape victims were children under 13. Of those where the sex of the victim is documented, two-thirds were girls.
A report found thousands of cases of child-on-child sexual abuse in UK schools (Getty)
Every single woman I know is appalled by this. I have two daughters, but quite a few of my friends have sons. We all consider ourselves feminists, and we talked a lot at the time of the “Everyone’s Invited” campaign about how devastating it would be to have to consider whether your son was capable of behaving that way. That was the spark for my novel, entitled Such a Nice Boy: what if you are confronted with the truth of what your son has done and are forced to consider what he might be capable of?
When I was growing up, a parent’s greatest fear was that their teen might fall in with a bad crowd. Now, that “bad crowd” is their phone, and the wrong people are being actively pushed to them by algorithms, strangers, or their friends, often in the form of extreme and violent porn and misogyny.
Many parents aren’t fully aware of how common it is for boys and girls to see this sort of material and what it’s actually doing to them. There’s a very common belief that if you’ve brought your child up to be good and decent, you have somehow inoculated them against this kind of influence; that it would never be “my child” who would do something like this. But many parents just don’t really understand what their children are looking at.
Every single woman I know is appalled by this. I have two daughters, but quite a few of my friends have sons. We all consider ourselves feminists, and we talked a lot at the time of the “Everyone’s Invited” campaign about how devastating it would be to have to consider whether your son was capable of behaving that way. That was the spark for my novel, entitled Such a Nice Boy: what if you are confronted with the truth of what your son has done and are forced to consider what he might be capable of?
When I was growing up, a parent’s greatest fear was that their teen might fall in with a bad crowd. Now, that “bad crowd” is their phone, and the wrong people are being actively pushed to them by algorithms, strangers, or their friends, often in the form of extreme and violent porn and misogyny.
Many parents aren’t fully aware of how common it is for boys and girls to see this sort of material and what it’s actually doing to them. There’s a very common belief that if you’ve brought your child up to be good and decent, you have somehow inoculated them against this kind of influence; that it would never be “my child” who would do something like this. But many parents just don’t really understand what their children are looking at.
Unfortunately, almost every day brings a new story that shines a light on what fuels men to commit acts of sexual violence. Currently, it is the horrific story of male students from Cornell University allegedly drugging a female student and subjecting her to a seven-hour gang rape. The so-called “Cornell 7” have not been charged with any criminal offence and they deny wrongdoing. But we do know that messages such as “Free p---- upstairs” were being posted in these young men’s friendship group chats on the night of the alleged rape.
Cornell’s president has called the allegations “deeply disturbing”.
Cornell’s president has called the allegations “deeply disturbing”.
The group chat messages at Cornell University demonstrate how misogyny can take hold and follow some through their younger years (AP)
In response, there is a lot of advice on social media for women to “Educate your sons”. And of course parents do have an important role to play. In the absence of tech companies doing anything really serious to stop the kind of things that kids are seeing, then parents have got to have some difficult conversations with their children. They need to talk to their children about porn, which is often highly misogynistic and violent, and which is having a massive and negative influence on girls too, but particularly boys. They have to make sure their children know that they can talk to them without fear of being judged or blamed.
But there is more to the picture than that.
As we’ve seen with the Cornell case, it’s the silence of men – in this case, the peers of the alleged rapists who stood by and did nothing, but also the university administration, which thought that setting an essay as “punishment” for alleged gang rape was adequate – that allows men who do bad things to think that they can just get away with doing whatever they like.
Having spent the last few years researching this book, my children know that they will not be getting a smartphone for a couple of years at least
And, unfortunately, the tendency is often to blame the victim for the perpetrator’s behaviour, and the future of the alleged perpetrator is often given more consideration than the future of the victim whose life has been destroyed. This is something that we see time and time again: Why is that? We have to think about what messages that is sending, not just to men and women, but to young men and women and to boys and girls, of what it means to be both a perpetrator and a victim in our society – and how you will be treated.
In response, there is a lot of advice on social media for women to “Educate your sons”. And of course parents do have an important role to play. In the absence of tech companies doing anything really serious to stop the kind of things that kids are seeing, then parents have got to have some difficult conversations with their children. They need to talk to their children about porn, which is often highly misogynistic and violent, and which is having a massive and negative influence on girls too, but particularly boys. They have to make sure their children know that they can talk to them without fear of being judged or blamed.
But there is more to the picture than that.
As we’ve seen with the Cornell case, it’s the silence of men – in this case, the peers of the alleged rapists who stood by and did nothing, but also the university administration, which thought that setting an essay as “punishment” for alleged gang rape was adequate – that allows men who do bad things to think that they can just get away with doing whatever they like.
Having spent the last few years researching this book, my children know that they will not be getting a smartphone for a couple of years at least
And, unfortunately, the tendency is often to blame the victim for the perpetrator’s behaviour, and the future of the alleged perpetrator is often given more consideration than the future of the victim whose life has been destroyed. This is something that we see time and time again: Why is that? We have to think about what messages that is sending, not just to men and women, but to young men and women and to boys and girls, of what it means to be both a perpetrator and a victim in our society – and how you will be treated.
Promoted stories
Having spent the last few years researching this book and seeing truly horrible things as a result, my children know that they will not be getting a smartphone for a couple of years at least. But we have discussed porn and the fact that the sex depicted is not how a healthy relationship should be.
Research by a charity called Dignify shows that 32 per cent of surveyed children have been exposed to pornography, often starting as early as primary school age and, of those, 86 per cent of children who see porn once will seek it out again. So this is how many kids are learning; they’re learning about what sex should be like from porn. There’s also research that shows that a lot of the kids, because they know everyone else is looking at it, feel they need to look at it as well.
(Canelo Books)
The Children’s Commissioner’s various reports into this issue in the UK are damning too. One found that 79 per cent of young people had encountered violent pornography before the age of 18 and that frequent users of pornography are more likely to engage in physically aggressive sex acts.
It feels like every week there’s another horrible story about sexual violence. Writing about such issues feels timely, but in truth, this is now a constant in today's world.
One of the things I wanted to do when I was writing it was to show people the impact of the kind of inappropriate content your children are seeing. And to be shocked by it – please.
As told to Victoria Young
‘Such a Nice Boy’ by Rebecca Spargo is out on 8 October
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