A lecturer notices two male students sniggering over a phone during group work. She's seen this before — a clip, shared under the desk, that would have circulated as a dirty joke a decade ago now carries a name attached to it, a face, a philosophy. She has about four seconds to decide: confiscate it and risk shutting the conversation down entirely, ignore it and let it fester, or do something else nobody trained her for.
This is the scene playing out, in one form or another, in lecture halls and college common rooms across the US, UK, Canada, Australia and beyond. At a recent Bodyswaps webinar on tackling misogyny in higher education, nearly 150 educators and education leaders from across those countries logged on to talk about exactly this moment — and what almost nobody on the call had was a clear answer for what to do next.
What the panel agreed on, across a former counterterrorism officer, a college assistant principal, and a professor who described feeling her “heart racing” in her own classroom, was this: punishment alone isn't working, because misogyny isn't a discipline problem. It's a skills gap. Specifically, an emotional intelligence gap — the ability to sit with discomfort, read a room, de-escalate a peer, and choose empathy over performance. That's a skill set, and skill sets can be practised.
Educators aren't imagining an escalation. Reports of misogyny directed at staff by pupils in the UK have climbed every year for four years running: from 17.4% of female teachers in 2023, to 19.5% in 2024, 22.2% in 2025, and 23.4% in the most recent NASUWT survey of over 5,000 teachers (NASUWT, 2026). Nearly 14.3% of female teachers now report suffering verbal abuse daily, compared with 9.8% of male teachers.
Share of female teachers in the UK reporting misogyny from a pupil in the past year, 2023–2026.
It isn't only a UK phenomenon, and it isn't only a school-age problem. Researchers at the University of York surveyed 200 teachers across UK primary and secondary schools in 2025 and found 76% of secondary school teachers and 60% of primary school teachers were concerned about the influence of online misogyny in their schools. 44% of secondary teachers said they'd personally observed female pupils subjected to misogynistic comments or discriminatory behaviour (University of York, 2025).
The pipeline into higher and further education is already primed. HOPE not hate's landmark 2023 poll found 79% of UK boys aged 16–17 had watched, listened to, or read content from Andrew Tate — a figure higher than the share who could name the Prime Minister at the time. A 2024 study from King's College London and Ipsos found 21% of men aged 16–29 who had heard of Tate held a favourable view of him, three times the rate among women the same age and men aged 30–59 (King's College London/Ipsos, 2024).
Government has noticed the scale of the problem, if not yet the shape of the fix. In December 2025, the UK Home Office declared violence against women and girls a national emergency and pledged to halve it within a decade, backed by a £20 million package for schools focused on “healthy relationships” curriculum and staff training (GOV.UK, 2025).
Panellists at the Bodyswaps webinar were quick to point out the scale mismatch: £20 million works out to a few pounds per pupil nationally — a fraction of what a single influencer's subscription platform earns in a matter of months.
“Misogyny is inherent in all our systems throughout education. It's not reported as misogyny, so it isn't managed as misogyny either.”
— Panellist, Bodyswaps webinar on tackling misogyny in HE
None of this is new territory for the classroom generally. Ofsted's landmark review of sexual harassment in schools and colleges — still the largest UK dataset of its kind — found 92% of girls and 74% of boys reported sexist name-calling happens “a lot or sometimes” to them or their peers, and 90% of girls said unwanted explicit images were part of daily life (Ofsted, 2021). What has changed since is the speed and scale of the pipeline feeding it — and the number of institutions now reporting the same pattern moving upward into 16+ colleges and universities.
Educators on the panel converged on a diagnosis that goes beyond “boys behaving badly.” Three forces are compounding at once.
First, categorisation failure. Incidents that are clearly misogynistic get logged as generic “classroom management” or “conduct” issues, which means institutions have no real data on scale — and no case for resourcing a response. One college leader described digging into two incidents reported as “classroom misconduct” only to find serious misogynistic behaviour underneath, filed under the wrong heading entirely.
Second, a confidence gap among staff. Many educators say they don't feel equipped to confront misogynistic comments or content in real time — not because they don't care, but because nobody has ever taught them how, and getting it wrong risks amplifying the very content they're trying to shut down.
Third, and most relevant to what actually works: young men are being taught confidence and conviction by algorithmically-amplified influencers, and taught almost nothing about emotional intelligence anywhere else. It was never a strong offering in the classroom, it's fading at home — panellists pointed out that the extended family members who once modelled this, uncles, older cousins, family friends, are largely absent from most students' daily lives now — and it's actively mocked online as being “for soft boys.”
Meanwhile, employers are asking for exactly the skills nobody is teaching — NACE's Job Outlook 2025 survey found a roughly 25-percentage-point gap between how proficient graduating students believe they are in critical thinking and how employers actually rate them on arrival, with “power skills” like emotional intelligence and adaptability now ranked among employers' top hiring priorities (NACE, 2025).
There is also a structural pressure working against confrontation entirely. Several educators on the panel described institutions shifting toward a “customer service” model in response to enrolment pressure — softening deadlines and language, and discouraging the kind of productive friction that once made room for a teacher to challenge a student's behaviour directly.
That's a reasonable response to retention targets. It's a difficult one for tackling misogyny, which by its nature requires someone to be willing to create a moment of discomfort.
The most encouraging thread from the webinar wasn't a new curriculum — it was a reframe. Every panellist independently arrived at the same conclusion: you don't out-argue the manosphere, you out-practise it. Belonging, real-world connection, and safe rehearsal of difficult conversations do more to shift behaviour than a lecture on what's “healthy” or “unhealthy,” because those are precisely the things algorithmic content is currently supplying instead of the classroom.
That's playing out concretely in Wales. Five further education colleges there are part of a Taith-funded international Community of Practice, partnered with five colleges and universities in Canada, specifically formed in response to concerns from the Welsh schools inspectorate, Estyn, about peer-on-peer sexual harassment in FE settings (FE News, 2026).
One outcome of that collaboration was a 400-strong event at Cardiff City Stadium where young men worked through discussions on misogyny and respectful relationships led by international speaker Matt Brown. Siân Holleran, ColegauCymru's International Project Manager, put it plainly: the funding “created space for honest conversations, practical solutions and lasting change for both staff and learners.”
Coleg y Cymoedd, one of the colleges active in that Wales–Canada network, took the practical step further by building a module called “Addressing Inappropriate Language” directly into its White Ribbon UK Accreditation work, using Bodyswaps' AI-powered VR roleplay so students can rehearse calling out and correcting misogynistic language from a peer — in a psychologically safe, repeatable simulation, on a headset or a laptop (Bodyswaps case study, 2026).
As Richard Fullylove, the college's Strategic Information Learning Technology Manager, put it: “Bodyswaps has been fantastically impactful across the college — really enthusing and engaging staff and students who perhaps wouldn't have actively engaged and participated as fully as they have.”
A VR or desktop roleplay lets a student rehearse the specific, awkward, high-friction moment of correcting a peer's language, get feedback on tone and word choice, and try again — as many times as it takes to feel natural — without the risk of getting it wrong in front of the whole room the first time.
Share of pupils who say each behaviour happens "a lot or sometimes" to them or their peers.
For institutions ready to move from problem statements to practice, five actions came out of the webinar as genuinely achievable regardless of budget:
Crucially, this doesn't have to mean a headset budget line most institutions don't have. The same roleplay works on a desktop browser, which matters for the FE colleges and community colleges on the webinar who don't have VR fleets to hand out. What makes it effective isn't the hardware — it's the repetition, the private feedback, and the fact that a student can fail the conversation ten times with an AI character before they ever have to get it right in front of a real classmate.
Nobody on the Bodyswaps webinar panel claimed to have solved misogyny in education. What they agreed on was more useful than a solution: punishment and policy are necessary but not sufficient, and the institutions making genuine progress are the ones investing in practice, not just prohibition.
Emotional intelligence — reading a room, managing your own reaction, choosing empathy over performance — is learnable. It starts early, at home and in primary school, but it doesn't stop needing reinforcement once students reach 16, 18, or 21. Bodyswaps exists to give higher and further education institutions a scalable, repeatable way to give that reinforcement: safe, private rehearsal of the exact conversations educators are currently having to improvise in real time, with no training and no second chances.
→ Bodyswaps for higher education institutions
→ Bodyswaps for further education institutions
→ How Coleg y Cymoedd integrated immersive learning for student and staff soft skills
→ Workplace skills for students
https://www.nasuwt.org.uk/article-listing/misogyny-in-schools-hits-new-high.html
3. HOPE not hate (2023). Poll of UK 16–24 year-olds on exposure to Andrew Tate content, cited in parliamentary written evidence and UK news coverage.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/vawg-strategy-to-better-protect-children-from-misogyny-and-abuse
Misogyny is rising partly because of algorithm-driven “manosphere” content reaching boys at a young age, combined with a lack of emotional intelligence teaching at home or school. Reports from UK teachers show pupil misogyny toward female staff has risen every year since 2023.
Emotional intelligence training teaches skills like reading a room, managing your own reactions, and responding to conflict with empathy instead of aggression. These skills reduce misogynistic behaviour because they replace it with a practised, better alternative — not just a rule against it.
Yes. VR and desktop roleplay lets a student practise a difficult conversation, like correcting a peer's language, as many times as needed in a private, low-stakes setting. Colleges like Coleg y Cymoedd in Wales use this approach as part of their anti-misogyny and White Ribbon accreditation work.
In December 2025, the UK government declared violence against women and girls a national emergency and announced a £20 million package for schools, focused on healthy relationships education and staff training, as part of a 10-year plan to halve VAWG.