Want to educate young boys about misogyny? Run a lesson on Pakistani rape gangs - Carole Malone

This is now a country where men from certain religions have multiple wives, where Sharia Courts – all 85 of them – operate freely, and all too often women are cruelly discriminated against over matters of divorce, child custody and inheritance.

Under the Government’s new strategy, teachers in all secondary schools in England will be required to teach students about healthy and respectful relationships.

This comes in the wake of research showing that four in ten young men hold a positive view of sexist commentators like Andrew Tate, who holds extreme misogynistic views and has come out with stuff like “ women should be in the home”, are “the property of men”, and he reckons that women should "bear some responsibility" for sexual assault.

So yes, young men need to be taught that toe rags like Tate are misogynist, sexist scum who should be driven out of all decent societies.

But I fear the Government’s plans to tackle misogyny and violence against women, which it claims are “ambitious and bold”, will just be tickling around the edges of the problem.

If the Government and particularly Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, want to tackle misogyny head-on on they have to make young men aware of why and how it's escalating. They have to teach kids the root causes of it.

So, will these lessons in schools feature the grooming gangs? Will students be taught that Pakistani Muslim men raped and abused thousands of vulnerable white girls because they believed them to be trash? In the words of one victim: “I was told white girls are all trash. They are all whores and should be raped as punishment for not obeying Allah”

Will teachers discuss that, I wonder?

Will they explain that sexual violence is rocketing on our streets at the hands of men from countries like Afghanistan and Sudan because in their cultures, raping women and young girls isn’t seen as wrong?

Will they be told that men born in these countries are more like to commit sex crimes than men born in others?

Or will this country’s obsession with not “inflaming community tensions” take precedence over protecting young girls from the misogyny of alien cultures?

Mahmood says the Government’s Violence Against Women and Girls strategy will be the largest crackdown in British history.

And so, it should be borne in mind that more than 200 rapes are recorded every day and even more go unreported.

And I might be more willing to believe Mahmood if it hadn’t been for the fact that only 2.6 per cent of rape reports in the year Mar 23-24 led to the defendant being charged.

I might believe be willing to believe her if the statistics didn’t show that more than 37,000 sexual offences took more than three years to be completed. Some poor victims have to wait nine years for justice.

Does that sound like a society that gives a toss about misogyny or women’s safety?

My problem is that while Mahmood’s intentions might be good, what she’s proposing won’t happen because this Government and the teachers who are expected to enforce this new strategy are too terrified to take on those cultures where women are treated as subhuman and where abuse is the norm.

It was just two years ago that the Government’s rape tsar, Emily Hunt, a rape survivor herself, resigned and said she had so little faith in the police’s commitment to investigating rape that she wouldn’t bother reporting one herself.

She said there was a distinct lack of will to change how the police approach rape.

Add to that Baroness Casey’s report into the Met Police, which said that in rape and domestic abuse cases, survivors were “made to feel like an inconvenience and gaslighted”.

In that report, one officer said: “If you look at our performance around rape and serious sexual offences, the detection rate is so low you may as well say it's legal in London.”

What a bloody indictment!

So, forgive me if I don’t believe what the Government or Mahmood want to do will make the slightest difference to the plight of women in this country. Don’t get me wrong. I want it to. More importantly, millions of women desperately need it to.

We all want to see these specialist investigation teams Mahmood has proposed rounding up rapists and sexual predators and chucking them in jail.

But first, there has to be an attitude shift. It has to be accepted that the failure of multiculturalism is in part to blame.

Also, police have to WANT to stop the rape and abuse of women because until now it hasn’t been a priority. And they have to take seriously those women who find the courage to come forward and report rapes and abuse because that hasn’t been happening either.

As I said, I want to believe this Government is taking rape and misogyny seriously.

And this is its chance to finally do something about it. But God help them if this turns out to be yet another broken promise!!!