In a recent BBC documentary, former England men’s football manager Gareth Southgate explored the challenges facing young men in Britain, including low school attainment, declining employment opportunities, low self-esteem and poor mental health. The positive masculinity Southgate promotes focuses on ambition to achieve, emotional openness, resilience and learning from setbacks, advocating for the role of positive male role models.
But there is a part of boys’ lives where low expectations cause the most lasting damage and where the consequences fall hardest on girls and women as well as on boys themselves. That part is intimate relationships. Too often sex education misses the deeper opportunity to examine the messages about male-female relationships young men absorb – be tough, don’t show emotion, pursue sex as conquest.
Southgate’s documentary, Gareth Southgate: Changing the Game for Young Men, didn’t cover relationships with girls or sex education explicitly. Boys told him that they feel like they’re seen as a problem. “There’s a bad stigma around young men – it’s obviously not good,” one said. And a teacher in the documentary outlined that boys shouldn’t be made to feel responsible for the harms that may have been done by the men who came before them.
The good news is that many boys don’t support versions of masculinity that can cause harm to women or others. In my ongoing research many young men aspire to support women’s rights and many describe masculinity in terms of respect and responsibility towards others.
I think what genuinely surprised me in my own research was when I found these expressions of positive masculinity among young men in prison, when researching how best to design relationship and sexuality education for incarcerated young men. Men who had obviously harmed others in the past had not lost hope for doing better and for future positive intimate relationships. Southgate also talked to young men in prison, noting that “that there is always a [positive] way back”.
But research shows that the gap between what boys may aspire to and what girls and women experience remains wide. Almost one in three women have been subjected to intimate partner violence, non-partner sexual violence, or both at least once in their life. Online intimate partner violence is a significant threat for young people. Boys want to change the narrative, but they don’t necessarily know how.
How to make change
Education, especially sex and relationships education, is vital here. It must close this gap. Commercially driven online content is widening it faster than any single school assembly or campaign can undo, so now there is an even higher challenge to do this education well.
Research shows what works. Evidence from the Jack trial, which I led with research teams across the UK on relationship and sexuality education tailored to boys alongside girls, points to several consistent principles.
These are backed up by the findings of culturally adapted versions of the trial in South Africa and Lesotho and Latin America, as well as by a wider range of research from Unesco and partners in Africa and Asia.
First, a “gender-transformative approach”. This means calling out the harms boys and men can do to girls and women, such as sexual violence, and the gender structures that can underpin harm, such as barriers to women’s equality, such as equal pay.
Young men do lift their heads and respond to scenarios that model positive masculinity – a boy supporting a partner, sharing responsibility for contraception, recognising coercive behaviour for what it is. Engaging boys positively is fundamental to progress. But it’s equally about challenging harmful masculinity, challenging double standards around rights and expectations of sexual pleasure and reproductive responsibility for young women and men.
Second, active skills building. Asking boys “what would you do?” goes further than reciting facts or lecturing boys about risk. In the Jack Trial, we used a programme called If I were Jack or Si yo fuera Juan. It immersed boys as well girls in an interactive filmed scenario of an unintended pregnancy in Jack’s life and followed up with opportunities to work through such a problem in groups. Boys, like all young people, learn through doing, through discussion, through being trusted to think.
Third, co-design. This means getting young people involved in changing the narrative. If I were Jack was only effective in increasing knowledge and skills for safe and healthy relationships because it involved young boys and girls in creating the materials, the scripts, the settings, the scenes and the digital content that speaks to their own lives. Boys who help build the message carry it differently.
Another big step though is getting these approaches out to every boy and girl. It requires trained teachers, enabled by national policy and given the curriculum time and materials to deliver. It requires health services that treat a conversation about sexual and reproductive health with a teenage boy as routine – as normal as checking a sprained wrist.
It requires investment in resources for classrooms and clinics that are genuinely engaging for boys and girls alike.
And crucially, it requires us to stop treating an engagement with boys’ needs as a threat to the progress of girls. It is not a competition. Relationship and sexuality education is key to making this dynamic work.
When boys receive high-quality relationships education alongside girls, the evidence shows improved outcomes for both. Boys who learn the value and the skills of sharing responsibility for safe and healthy relationships don’t just benefit themselves, they benefit the girls and women in their lives too.
In 20 years’ time, we want young men who won’t be scrolling back through their messages in shame, and young women who aren’t experiencing the levels of violence and abuse that remain, frankly, a national crisis.
That future is possible. But it starts in classrooms: with relationships and sexuality education that centres boys’ roles and responsibilities for positive relationships alongside girls, holds them to high standards, and trusts them to rise to meet them.
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