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.
