Breaking News: The U.K. To Spend £15 Million on Anti-Male Campaign

U.K. Government launches first ever misogyny prevention fund

Lauren Hurley, Official Cabinet Portrait of Bridget Phillipson, July 5, 2024

The United Kingdom is set to spend £15 million (nearly $20 million U.S.) on an anti-misogyny campaign over the next three years. The Minister for Women and Equality, Bridget Phillipson, points to this effort as a “critical step…to confine misogyny to the history books.”

The program will involve a misogyny prevention task force that will “work with corporate partners and philanthropists to unlock additional match funding and ultimately multiply its reach.”

Office for Equality and Opportunity, The Rt Hon Bridget Phillipson MP, and The Rt Hon John Healey MP

“The fund will operate a bidding process through which organisations will receive grants to deliver programmes that meet the government’s ambition of preventing misogyny in all its forms, and reducing its impacts.

Examples of similar work already ongoing in the sector include:

• Expect Respect from Women’s Aid – a free programme for schools that educates children on what is and is not normal in relationships and stepping in when it’s safe

• investment in mentoring and interventions from positive role models for girls and boys respectively, alongside active bystander training, funded by the Mayor of London

• workplace training and resources from Equimundo, aimed at men and designed to foster gender equality in the workplace”

If this sounds familiar, it is. Back in March of 2025, I wrote about the steady effort to misrepresent boys and male behavior in a fictional Netflix series Adolescence and the consequences of its fallout. Nine months after the Netflix series, the United Kingdom’s Department for Education (DfE) introduced a pilot curriculum in schools that aims to root out misogynistic ideas, a seemingly harmless endeavor until one understands that the premise begins with the notion that boys are inherently defective and violent.

It is important to keep in mind that this was the result of a fictional series and the ability of media, academia, and government to collectively curate a response, despite the fact that boys are behind in higher education¹ and that males are far more likely to be victims of homicide.²

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While it’s fair to argue that women are primary victims of other forms of violence, such as rape, it is important to note that the U.K. government largely ignored the immigrant grooming gangs across the U.K. because it wanted to be culturally sensitive and avoid being associated with racism.³

Other claims about females experiencing higher rates of domestic violence tend to ignore the fact that domestic violence is often reciprocal among partners—a pattern Erin Pizzey observed back in the 1970s when she opened the first women’s refuge in the world, Chiswick Women’s Aid.

“Of the first 100 women coming into the refuge, 62 were as violent or more violent than the partners they had left. Not only did they admit their violence in the mutual abuse that took place in their homes, but the women were abusive to their children.”⁴

At the heart of this movement is an advance toward greater isolation of male well-being in the U.K. under the auspice of protecting women against an onslaught of imaginary male misogyny. It’s not that people do not want to protect women or have them thrive, but they also want to protect men and have them thrive. When multiple government programs and agencies become invested in particular narratives and beliefs, the messaging can easily turn toward championing the causes of some while isolating and avoiding the rights and needs of others.

These programs are likely to become struggle sessions in schools, the workplace, and other institutions across the U.K. with little pushback from a nation that willingly recognizes a Minister for Women and Equality but fails to appoint a Minister for Men and Equality.

1. Chart 3 – HE Students by Sex 2014/15 to 2024/25
This is the primary, direct source for the sex breakdown over the full period.
Footnote: Higher Education Statistics Agency, “Chart 3 – HE Students by Sex 2014/15 to 2024/25,” HESA, accessed October 28, 2026, https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/chart-3.

Higher Education Student Statistics: UK, 2024/25 (SB273)
The official statistical bulletin that underpins the latest figures and methodology.
Footnote: Higher Education Statistics Agency, Higher Education Student Statistics: UK, 2024/25, Statistical Bulletin SB273, January 27, 2026, https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/27-01-2026/sb273-higher-education-student-statistics.

2. Office for National Statistics. “Homicide in England and Wales: Year Ending March 2024.” Office for National Statistics. Accessed October 28, 2026. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/homicideinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2024.

3. Alexis Jay, Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham (1997–2013) (Rotherham: Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, August 2014), https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Independent_Inquiry_into_Child_Sexual_Exploitation_in_Rotherham.pdf.

“Real or Imagined: Racism ‘Fear’ over Rotherham Child Abuse,” BBC News, August 27, 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-28951612.

4. Erin Pizzey, “The Situation for Women’s Refuges Is Desperate – but We Need to Start Admitting Men, Too,” The Telegraph, August 6, 2014, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/11014388/The-situation-for-womens-refuges-is-desperate-but-we-need-to-start-admitting-men-too.html.

“Experts Question Ideas about Domestic Violence,” The Interim, October 13, 1998, https://theinterim.com/issues/society-culture/experts-question-ideas-about-domestic-violence/.

Note: Lauren Hurley, Official Cabinet Portrait of Bridget Phillipson, July 5, 2024, photograph, No 10 Downing Street, https://www.flickr.com/photos/number10gov/53837397190 (or https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bridget_Phillipson_Official_Cabinet_Portrait,_July_2024_(cropped).jpg).