STATEMENTS BY SENATORS
Senator ANANDA-RAJAH (Victoria) (13:12): Teachers are reporting that six-year-old boys are calling girls dumb and sluts. Two in five boys aged 13 to 17 identify with right-wing extremism. Nearly one in three follow white supremacists and harbour anti-women views like 'equal opportunity has gone too far'.
When this is the reality, it is no surprise we are seeing a surge in toxic masculinity in our schools. Increasing reports by female teachers of being subjected to misogynistic taunts, gestures and language are contributing to teacher attrition. These regressive attitudes are not confined to boys.
One in 10 young women believe that men are the head of the household. These are some of the findings of a study by the University of Melbourne funded by the Office of National Intelligence. It found that hostility towards women is the single strongest predictor of violent extremism in young Australians.
It is a stronger predictor of violent extremism than political ideology, religion, ethnicity or how much time someone spends online. In other words, misogyny is not just a social issue but a national security one. Just this week we have seen three private school boys aged 13 and 14 charged with aggravated sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl and five footy players facing allegations of sexual assault.
Australia-wide, reported sexual assaults have increased by 10 per cent in the last year, and, on average, a woman dies every 11 days in Australia as a result of violence. What has led to this structural problem of misogyny in our country? How are these attitudes taking root and polluting the minds of young Australians but especially our boys?
Unsurprisingly, this study found that these attitudes are being shaped by online content, particularly engagement with manfluencers, porn, which is basically exaggerated and a distorted view of sexuality, and online dating. Teach Us Consent researcher Chanel Contos, who is in the building today, reports that, when they mimicked a 16- to 18-year-old boy on social media, it took only 23 minutes for the algorithm to feed them misogynistic content.
If a young boy or a man actively searches for content in this sort of domain, the algorithm will feed them up content in two minutes. Our feeds and algorithms have become a gateway to misogynistic and violent extremism. It's infinite.
It's heroin online—confirmed by Meta employees, who disclosed in the Guardian today that Instagram is a 'drug' and they are 'pushers'. Our online environment for boys is tiger country, fraught with exposure to misogyny and cyberbullying. It's egging them on to violence by amplifying a perceived sense of personal grievance and personal injustice, tapping into vulnerabilities and shifting blame onto girls and women.
And it's making us all less safe. This is why the Albanese Labor government has introduced a world-leading social media delay for Australians under the age of 16—for our kids. Now, 20 or more countries have fallen into line, like dominoes, behind us.
Social media companies are fighting this tooth and nail, with Meta using a proxy army of global influencers, from yummy mummies to actors, to blokes who wine and dine with Meta and then talk up their piss-weak social media controls for teenagers. Arturo Bejar, a Meta whistleblower, said: You can still search for suicide and self-harm content even though they promise you can't.
Meanwhile, the eSafety Commissioner last week disclosed that these companies are going around the world trash-talking Australia's social media delay, holding us up as a failure. The Healthy Masculinities Trial and Evaluation, backed with $3½ million from our government, is supporting student led programs in high schools and sporting clubs. Brighton Grammar—a school that I visited not long ago with our Special Envoy for Men's Health, Dan Repacholi—is doing an amazing job in this space, giving boys the space to question what they are seeing and why they are seeing it.
Led by boys, for boys, it is the counter-messaging we need more of, and it probably needs to start earlier. Our impending digital duty of care bill will take this up a notch, placing the onus on social media companies to proactively keep our kids safe and save our boys.