When Everyday Misogyny Becomes Extremism

The following blog post and statistics is based on research by Sara Meger & Kate Reynolds, University of Melbourne, published in The Conversation, March 2026

 

International Women’s Day is an occasion for celebration: of progress made, battles won, and the long arc of history bending, however haltingly, toward equality. But a major new Australian study published this month in The Conversation demands we pause the celebration and reckon with something deeply uncomfortable: progress, it turns out, provokes backlash. And that backlash is finding a home in the minds of teenage boys.

Researchers Sara Meger and Kate Reynolds from the University of Melbourne surveyed more than 2,300 adults and 1,100 young people aged 13 to 17 across Australia. What they found is quite alarming.

 

“Roughly 40% of boys aged 13 to 17 agreed that women lie about domestic and sexual violence.”

Source: Meger & Reynolds, The Conversation, March 2026

 

Read that again. Two in five teenage boys, children who will grow into voters, partners, employers, and fathers, have already absorbed the belief that women fabricate the violence done to them. This is not a fringe view. It is, statistically, approaching a majority position among a generation of young men.

What makes this research particularly important is not just the headline statistic, but the analytical framework the researchers bring to it. Meger and Reynolds are not simply cataloguing bad attitudes. They are tracing a pathway, from everyday misogyny to violent extremism, and their findings suggest the two are far more connected than we typically acknowledge.

Public debate about extremism tends to focus on race, religion, or nationalism. But this research positions gender politics as equally central to the radicalisation process. Across vastly different extremist movements, from far-right ethno-nationalists to religious fundamentalists to online “incel” communities, there is a common ideological thread: an insistence on women’s “rightful place” in society. The language differs; the underlying logic does not.

Key Finding: Support for violence to resist feminism was the second most endorsed form of extremist attitude among Australian adults surveyed, with 17% agreeing such violence is legitimate. Among adolescent boys, that figure rose to 28%. Among adolescent girls, it reached 21%.

These are not abstract attitudinal preferences. They represent the ideological raw material from which violence against women is built. And they are being formed in children still at school.

 

 

A Generation Being Radicalised Online

How does this happen? The researchers point squarely at the internet and at the commercial ecosystem that has grown up around male grievance. The so-called “manosphere,” a sprawling network of influencers, forums, and YouTube channels, frames gender equality as a direct threat to men. It offers alienated young men a ready-made explanation for their unhappiness: women, feminism, and a world that has supposedly abandoned them.

The appeal is not hard to understand. Social research consistently shows that boys and men increasingly feel uncertain about their place in the world; alienated, humiliated, lacking a sense of belonging. Into that psychological gap steps a well-funded content machine that provides community, identity, and an enemy. The enemy, of course, is women.

“Online communities validate men and boys’ grievances and offer an ‘outgroup’ to scapegoat and blame — women. At the same time, a new ‘ingroup’ is being crafted, coalescing around misogyny.”

Source: Meger & Reynolds, The Conversation, March 2026

This is radicalisation. It follows the same structural logic as other forms of extremist recruitment: identify a vulnerable group, offer them belonging, give them an enemy, and gradually escalate the ideology. The fact that the target audience is often 13-year-old boys makes it no less serious. Arguably, more so.

 

 

The Two Faces of Misogyny

One of the most nuanced aspects of the research is its identification of two distinct clusters of misogynistic attitudes. The first cluster centres on the private sphere – the belief that a man has the right to control a woman in the home through violence if she disobeys. The second cluster is more diffuse and public: support for restricting women’s reproductive rights, or agreement with the idea that “sometimes a woman just pushes a man too far.”

Crucially, different types of extremism appeared to map onto different clusters. This tells us something important: misogyny is not monolithic. It manifests differently depending on context, ideology, and the social networks in which it is embedded. Understanding these distinctions matters enormously for prevention – because the intervention that works for one type of misogynist attitude may not work for another.

What both clusters share, however, is the tendency to place responsibility for violence on women – either for disobeying, provoking, or lying. This is the common thread running through domestic violence apologetics, victim-blaming in sexual assault cases, and the broader cultural dismissal of women’s testimony. When 40% of teenage boys have absorbed that belief, we are not dealing with a cultural quirk. We are dealing with a public safety crisis.

 

 

Why This Should Matter to New Zealand, Too

This research was conducted in Australia, but New Zealanders would be foolish to treat it as someone else’s problem. The manosphere does not stop at the Tasman Sea. The algorithms that feed young men a diet of extremist content operate identically on both sides of the ditch. The cultural dynamics driving male alienation – economic uncertainty, shifting gender norms, the erosion of traditional masculine identity pathways – are present here too.

New Zealand has its own troubling record on gender-based violence. Our rates of intimate partner violence are among the highest in the developed world. If misogynistic attitudes among teenage boys are indeed a precursor to that violence (and this research suggests they are), then we have every reason to take these findings seriously and ask hard questions about what is happening in our own schools, communities, and homes.

 

 

Interruption Requires Action

The researchers are careful not to present a counsel of despair. The pathway from misogyny to extremism, they argue, is not inevitable. It is shaped by social norms, institutional responses, and collective action. And there is genuine evidence that early intervention works.

The University of Melbourne’s Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships program, a curriculum-based approach that builds social and emotional skills alongside positive gender norms, has already demonstrated measurable success in Australian schools. Research consistently shows that curriculum promoting healthy gender norms leads to better mental health outcomes, less bullying, and reduced perpetration of gender-based violence.

But the researchers are honest about the challenge: how does a school program “compete” with the relentless, algorithmically-optimised content pipeline of the manosphere? A respectful relationships class once a week is no match for dozens of hours a week of recommendation rabbit holes. Any serious prevention effort needs to grapple with that asymmetry – through media literacy education, platform accountability, and the broader cultural work of giving young men positive identities and genuine community that does not require the denigration of women.

 

 

Taking Women’s Testimony Seriously

There is one more dimension of this research worth dwelling on, and it is the most intimate. The finding that 40% of teenage boys believe women lie about domestic and sexual violence is not just an attitudinal data point. It has real consequences for real women and girls.

When a young woman discloses abuse to a friend, a teacher, or the police, the question of whether she will be believed is not academic. Studies consistently show that false reports of sexual violence are rare – a small single-digit percentage, consistent with false reporting rates for other crimes. The belief that women routinely fabricate such claims is not a statistical inference; it is a cultural myth, systematically reproduced and amplified, that directly obstructs justice, silences victims, and enables abusers.

If two in five teenage boys already carry that myth, the girls around them are already living with its consequences. Every class, every sports team, every social group that contains those boys contains girls who know, on some level, that should something happen to them, they may not be believed by nearly half the boys they know.

 

That is the real-world cost of what this research has uncovered. And it is reason enough to act urgently, seriously, and at scale.

 

Source: The original research article by Sara Meger and Kate Reynolds of the University of Melbourne is published in The Conversation: “40% of teenage boys believe women lie about domestic and sexual violence: new research” (March 2026). Available at: theconversation.com

 

 

Published on Thursday, March 19th, 2026, under Family violence, What Ken thinks

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