I hear that a lot, and with rapid frequency as my boys got older and the eldest son puttered towards teenagery.
“You worry more about the girls,” I’m told again and again, by parents of girls, as they mutter about discos, short skirts, and cropped tops.
Well, maybe it’s time we start worrying about the boys. Putting the onus, the spotlight, on them, because something is going on and it feels like it’s happening under our noses and we don’t seem to know what to do about it.
Natasha O’Brien’s mother shouldn’t have had to worry about her girl getting punched unconscious to the ground for daring to ask a young man to stop shouting homophobic slurs on a public street.
No woman in Ireland should have to bear witness to our legal system placing more importance on the male guilty party’s career prospects than on the female victim’s right to justice, but it happens over and over again.
We heard the evidence that soldier Cathal Crotty boasted about the vicious attack on Snapchat. I mean what kind of group is he in that that’s ok to post? Who was he trying to impress? Was it all men in the group? What did they think?
Natasha O’Brien, who was attacked by Cathal Crotty in a random assault in Limerick City in 2022. Picture: Brendan Gleeson
If you have a son who has a phone, no matter what age they are, could you pick it up and scroll through his social feeds without him leaping for it in outrage? I’m not talking about his personal messages, as parents we don’t need to know everything, but we need to know something. What might you see on there? When is the last time you checked?
Have you talked to your sons recently about consent, about gender violence, about how we treat each other? Age appropriate, of course, but if your son has access to the internet, they need to be able to talk about these things.
Put your peepers on everything they’re looking at. Ask them what kind of stuff comes up when they’re watching YouTube, TikTok, or Snapchat.
They don’t have to be actively following accounts for their feed to be full of swill. There are complex algorithms at work to hold their gaze. Do you know what they’re listening to, who they’re watching, what their malleable brains are being influenced by?
I swore I wouldn’t give my sons mobile phones until they were over 16 — minimum. Then covid and lockdown happened, and suddenly they were an important connection to friends they couldn’t see in real life and my stance waivered.
We moved the goal posts to first year in secondary school.
Remember when the Andrew Tate/Greta Thunberg blow up happened in 2022? I was talking about the Twitter spat on a work call, and a lot of us had never heard of Tate. My son, 14, had just got his own smartphone. He was with friends when I got off the call.
“Do ye know who Andrew Tate is?” I asked.
“Everyone knows who Andrew Tate is,” they said.
“WHAT?!” How did ye know him?” “He’s big on TikTok,” they shrugged.
When was the last time you checked your son’s phone? Picture: iStock
I had a look. Their social media accounts were feeding them constant clips of him. This malign, misogynist toxic tool of a man was being presented directly to my beautiful child and all his friends every single day — and I didn’t have a clue.
My generation talk about social influencers blithely and maybe with a teeny bit of scorn — sure they’re only making eegitty videos online, arf.
But the clue is in the title, and what if the wrong ones, the dangerous ones, are literally influencing our boys, who will become men who will go out in the world with real women in it?
We imagine they’ll behave according to the values we’ve tried to instil, but if, in their formative years, we allow insecure idiots to bleat hyper-masochism or violent content directly to them, then we have to have a proper think about what that could mean.
Women’s Aid reported their highest-ever number of domestic abuse disclosures in their 2023 report. They say it’s an “alarming increase” in physical violence and economic abuse, the highest since the charity started in 1974.
Things are getting worse. Headline after headline, report after report, court case after case. It takes a village they say, and it’s not just parents that have a role to play. We need help from our schools, our Government, our lawmakers, and policy-deciders to put manners on the companies making the profits from our children’s attention too.
Of course, the gender violence epidemic is multifaceted and obviously not just about what content our kids are consuming, but we can’t dismiss its clout. Pick up your child’s phone. Find out about parental controls. Talk to them about this stuff.
“Two to put her down, two to put her out,” Cathal Crotty wrote after punching Natasha to the ground. She’s not staying down though. Natasha is standing up, she’s demanding our society to be better, and we must stand with her.
