In the past six months alone there have been countless stories of schoolboys targeting both peers and teachers with varying degrees of tech-assisted gendered bullying, harassment, and abuse.
Gendered misconduct on the rise, female teachers scared of being "deepfaked" and parents protecting badly-behaved boys: this is high school in 2024.Devastating words from a teenager that made me shudder. I used to visit schools and give presentations about consent and respectful relationships. At one school I learned a boy had shared nude images of a girl with his friends. The young people wanted to know how to feel about the girl's culpability in this scenario.
In the past six months alone I've seen countless stories of schoolboys targeting both peers and teachers with varying degrees of tech-assisted gendered bullying, harassment, and abuse. In April,after too much gendered misconduct, culminating in 15- and 16-year-old boys harassing her and professing their adoration of Andrew Tate in class.
Katrina Marson is criminal lawyer with a decade of experience, especially in sex offences, but she has also spent a decade researching and advocating for comprehensive relationships and sexuality education. Marson understands deepfakes as the latest iteration of the same root problem as other gendered misconduct and abuse. She doesn't share my optimism about deepfakes removing victim-blaming from the equation.
So what does the law say? On August 21 this year the federal government was proud to announce that the Criminal Code Amendment Bill 2024 had passed both houses. These new laws are specifically for deepfakes of adults. People who create deepfakes now face up to seven years prison time, and up to six years for those who share them.
The non-consensual sharing of intimate images — whether real or digitally altered/created — emerges as a form of social capital. "As awful as this is to say, this type of exchange has a similar ethos to the exchange of 'trading cards'.
"Parenting is hard. I get it. It is very difficult to get a phone call from a teacher and hear that your son whom you love deeply has done something to make someone else – particularly a young woman – feel uncomfortable. But being a teenager is all about learning. It's a time in our lives where we have to learn how to interact with one another, to learn where the boundaries are, how our actions impact others, and just generally how to be a good person.
Another teacher, Gabrielle, who has been teaching for eight years and is currently teaching high school students at a private school, gave an example of a school dealing very swiftly with an instance of image-based abuse. A year 10 student "made deepfake images of a girl in his own year" and was expelled as soon as the school found out. It's impossible to know how many similar incidents don't make the news.
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