Who would have thought that school, which was meant to be a place to educate elementary, high school and college students, would also double as a place where violence is surrounding them constantly? Students, whether it be boys or girls, face the issue of gender-based violence.

The CBC team at Marketplace investigated schools on the issue of students harming other students. As a result, schools were not cooperating unless they gave them fees, worried about students’ privacy and the school’s image, what’s even worse is that they just didn’t want to deal with it. Instead, the CBC did a survey approach to the students, “The results are stark: 41 percent of boys say they were physically assaulted at high school; 26 percent of girls say they experienced unwanted sexual contact at school; one in four students first experienced sexual harassment or assault before Grade 7.” To elaborate on my points, I will look into what could be the reason there is violence towards boys, how it affects others and why schools act that way.

First of all, boys get into fights mainly because they were taught to respond violently to anything that harms their notion of masculinity. Boys are taught to take up a stereotypical concept of manhood. For instance, they should always be ready to fight and get aggressive. We have normalized it for men to solve a problem by physically and verbally assaulting the other but not when they show or talk about their feelings. They can’t reach out to anyone, because it indicates that they can’t deal with it on their own. It would lead to insults thrown at them because the qualities of being emotional and asking for help are not seen as manly but seen as a feminine characteristic.  In Kimmel’s “Masculinity,” what it means to be a man is to be unlike a woman (2). In other words, a man is completely the opposite of women, who must show that they can fight when needed and deal with it like a man. The gender binaries are defined as mutually exclusive of each other and in terms of lack, negation and opposition.

Furthermore, boys tend to get bullied or bully others, likely because of how much pressure there is to be considered a man. For instance, the pressure boys face playing sports, how coaches use languages such as “you play like a girl” or “don’t be a pussy” to make them perform better. How boys compete on who is more of a man and their performance is the sole measure of how much of a man they are. Kimmel remarks in “Homophobia”, “…making sure that nothing even remotely feminine might show through” (148). Toxic masculinity, thus, relies on antifemininity as one of its main pillars.

Moreover, in violence against girls, we see how the forced idea of manhood works negatively towards both boys and those around them. A common reason why there are sexual assaults is that a girl’s “no” is not taken for an answer by those who have been taught to be unfailingly dominant and to never back down. Therefore, a lot of sexual violence comes from a man wanting to have and maintain the power and superiority that traditional definitions of masculinity grant them over girls and women.

Lastly, the reason why violence in schools doesn’t seem to decrease is that the institutions remain still and do nothing. They want to protect their image. However, their reputation is based on how the students are doing. The school affects the behaviour of the students, but they don’t do anything to change because institutions and society, in general, have excused such behaviour with the casual “boys will be boys.” Kimmel states in “Masculinity” that gender is not some “thing” one has but a specific set of behaviours that are produced in specific social situations (2). This proves that an institution such as school has a major role in fortifying prescriptive attitudes and behaviours.

To conclude, violence in schools shows that stereotypical manhood harms boys and others. Schools should work on becoming safe faces to accommodate students of all kinds and be flexible with their teachings and attitudes in order to be at pace with the understanding that the world is coming to- how gender, as a social construct, should relax its boundaries and allow greater space for personal expression.

Work Cited

Kilmartin, Christopher, and Andrew P. Smiler. “Defining Men’s Studies.” The Masculine Self, Cornwall On Hudson, NY, Sloan Publishing, 2019, pp. 1–7.

Kimmel, Michael.“Masculinity.” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Ed. William A. Darity, Jr. 2nd ed. Vol. 5. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008. 1-5. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 9 June 2014. 1-5. Print.

Kimmel, Michael. Masculinity as Homophobia. 1994.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/school-violence-editors-note-1.5331402

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/school-violence-marketplace-1.5224865