If you’re anything like my parents, you probably wouldn’t even understand most of the content that floods my social media, no matter how hard I try to avoid it.
Here’s a recent example from Instagram: “Do y’all females ever tell ur homegirls ‘Sis chill you letting too many dudes hit?’” Essentially, that means: “Women – do you ever tell your girlfriends that they’re whores and need to stop letting so many guys fuck them?” The reel, posted by a 19-year-old man, appeared on my Instagram feed without me wanting to see it, or ever interacting with any other similar content. The comments that followed were pure misogyny. “Women see body count as a leaderboard and they try to outdo each other,” was one of them. Translation: all women are competitively promiscuous.
Consider the use of the word “female” in these posts. It is not a neutral term here, it is a term of abuse. It’s used by teenage boys to degrade us and equate us to animals. Boys are never described as “males”, but girls are always “females” – the equivalent of sows or calves, creatures that are less than human. We’re also “thots” (whores), “community pussy” and “bops”. “Bop” stands for “been over passed” and is a derogatory term used by boys to refer to a girl they’ve decided has been “passed around” or had too much sex. Sexual equality has ceased to exist online. It’s absolutely fine for boys to have sex, but when girls do, they are called worthless and referred to as objects. “When community pussy tries to insult me, I just want to beat that bitch up.” That’s a message I saw on TikTok.
I’m a 15-year-old schoolgirl and like most teenagers I spend a fair portion of my spare time on social media, often scrolling through short-form videos on apps such as Instagram or TikTok. All of my friends use those apps, and many spend multiple hours a day on them. I actively try to avoid online misogyny, but I am met with it incessantly whenever I open my mainstream social media apps. It only takes a few minutes before there’s subtle or overt misogyny, such as comment sections on a girl’s post filled with remarks about her body, videos made by men or boys captioned with a degrading joke, and even topics such as domestic violence or rape, trivialised and laughed about.
We already have some measurements in place like the CPS. One can also lose the rights of custody after certain convictions. This is all reactive, however, and in many cases CPS comes under fire for "not doing enough".
This is all speculative on top of my head, and I expect a proper governmental implementation to be much more thought through and extensive than what I write here, but the gist of it I imagine is something like the following:
Before parenthood, one would need to take mandatory courses and a governmental theory test (like the test for driving) in order to be eligible to keep your child when it is born at a hospital. This is not meant to be particularly difficult, but to root out the worst, and to educate a bit through the courses.
All human births are to be registered, and when doing so, one can easily check the parents' records for things like violent behavior, neglect, conspiracies, etc.. This is where I assume most enforcements of this law. (A result of this would be even more children in children's homes, which is another discussion as a direct result of this. (Which the government also has the power to do something about, like creating subsidiaries for foster parents.))
After the child is born, there should be a wellness checkup at something like the age of 1, 3, 5, 10, and 15, to ensure physical and mental health is good. Both the parents and the child have to answer a questionnaire separately, and if there's reason for concern, queue CPS.
CPS is also underfunded in several countries already, from what I've heard around.
This is an example of where a death should never have been necessary to take action:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=JBRHS5vErpg
Could you refer me to some specific cases? I'm curious to learn. I have a feeling it's most likely due to improper implementation, being either too narrow or too fast. This is a potentially big societal change, and needs time - years - for a proper adaptation.