Violence in classrooms: What boys are taught about power, and by whom

When a 21-year-old man entered a school in Andhra Pradesh’s Anantapur district and allegedly attacked a 15-year-old girl with a chainsaw, seriously injuring her and another girl who tried to intervene, the classroom became a site of unimaginable violence. Days earlier, in Panchkula, an eight-year-old boy allegedly assaulted a six-year-old girl inside a school, leaving her seriously injured.

These are different incidents, involving different circumstances and age groups. There is no evidence connecting them to one another or any particular film, influencer, or online community. The Panchkula case, especially, demands an age-appropriate understanding of childhood and institutional responsibility. 

Yet, both incidents press towards a wider cultural conversation about boys, masculinity and violence against women. They compel us to ask a question that extends beyond individual cases: how does masculinity become synonymous with power, and how are boys taught to recognise that power as a thing worth aspiring for?

Here, we need to trace the journey more carefully: from home to school, from popular culture to screens, and finally into online spaces where masculinity becomes a performance.

The first lessons begin at home 

Gender socialisation rarely begins with an explicit declaration that boys are superior to girls. More often than not, it begins with small, everyday differences. A son is allowed to return home late whereas his sister’s requests are reprimanded. A boy’s anger is dismissed as a ‘phase’ while a girl’s is often marked as disrespect. A daughter learns to contribute to household work, while a son is praised for putting his plate back in the kitchen sink occasionally. Boys are encouraged to be independent, girls are taught to be careful. 

It is also important to note that every Indian household does not operate this way, but most do. This everyday distinction, in fact, can establish an early understanding of who is entitled to freedom and who must negotiate for it. Research based on adolescents and their parents in Haryana found a strong association between parents’ gender attitudes and those of their children. It also suggested that gender attitudes are not fixed, and school-based-interventions involving classroom discussions improved adolescents’ attitudes towards gender equality. 

This means that boys imbibe ideas about authority, entitlement, care, and freedom that have already been shaped by the world around them.

The classroom: Learning masculinity among peers

At school, these lessons meet an audience. Boys learn what earns approval from other boys. Tenderness invites ridicule and a boy who refuses to participate in sexist jokes may be called boring or feminine or not masculine enough. Meanwhile, the ability to dominate a conversation, humiliate someone, or display sexual bravado can easily earn them social currency. This is not to suggest that boys are uniformly hostile towards girls. It is to recognise that peer groups can reward particular performances of masculinity.

The classroom, therefore, goes beyond spaces where children learn mathematics and language. It is also where they learn how to inhabit gender. What happens when a boy insults a girl? Is he challenged, laughed with, or ignored? When a girl says no, is her refusal respected? When a boy displays possessiveness, do adults recognise it as a boundary violation or dismiss it as harmless affection?

These questions matter because attitudes are often reinforced through what institutions choose not to question. 

Cinema gives masculinity an image 

Popular cinema makes these ideas visible, dramatic, and memorable. It has long helped shape the cultural script through which male pursuit is mistaken for romance. In Darr (1993) and Anjaam (1994), obsessive male desire is dramatised through the figure of a dangerous, wounded lover. Raanjhana (2013) takes this trope further: Kundan (Dhanush) repeatedly pursues Zoya (Sonam Kapoor), even on her refusal. His eventual ruin invites sympathy, seemingly placing blame on the woman who rejected him. 

An Oxfam India study draws attention to such narratives normalising persistent pursuit and how it hampers the women’s right to refuse. The problem is not that films single-handedly cause violence, but they can definitely make stalking look like devotion, an initial ‘no’ like an invitation to try harder, and a woman’s autonomy the cause of a man’s downfall.

More recently, Animal (2023) generated intense debate over its portrayal of aggression, possessiveness, and male entitlement. Enjoying a film does not mean endorsing its protagonist’s behaviour. But it is worth questioning why male aggression so often becomes a sign of emotional depth, why possessiveness can be made to look like love, and why a man’s inability to regulate his anger is presented as evidence of how intensely he feels.

Cinema does not create patriarchy. But it reinforces and complicates the images through which patriarchy becomes familiar. What kinds of masculinity are made spectacular, and what kinds are left invisible?

Screens turn performance into aspiration

Film scenes become edits on Instagram, dialogues become memes, and male characters become models for everyday self-presentation. In Keralam, Malayali YouTuber and gamer Mohammed Nihad, popularly known as Thoppi, has been a subject of public debate in the past three years.  A 2023 TNM report documented his popularity among young school kids and how a young crowd gathered to see him in Valanchery at a men’s fashion store inauguration despite his abusive and misogynistic language. His persona was often associated with the online idea of a “sigma male”. 

A sigma male is presented as independent, emotionally detached, and indifferent to women. Yet this supposed independence is performed for an audience, often seeking recognition from other men. 

Scholar Debbie Ging’s work on the manosphere examines online communities where masculine identity is built around antifeminism, male grievance, and the belief that men are losing social power. In India, these ideas circulate through regional-language content, gaming streams, memes, and familiar ideas about relationships. 

A boy does not need to join an explicitly misogynistic community to absorb its vocabulary. He may encounter it through humour, a creator he follows, or a group chat where contempt for women is treated as entertainment. The screen does not introduce an entirely new world. It cements familiar patriarchal ideas through a new language and social reward.

When resentment becomes an identity

The most troubling shift occurs when a woman’s autonomy is interpreted as an injury to male dignity. It starts when rejection is equated to humiliation, jealousy becomes proof of love, control is masqueraded as protection, and a woman’s refusal means umpteen opportunities to overcome it rather than a decision to respect. All these do not make violence inevitable. But they raise a serious question about a cultural condition in which misogyny can become attractive.

The solution cannot be to confiscate phones or blame influencers. Families must examine the freedom they distribute unequally and hold boys equally accountable. Schools must take gender socialisation, consent, and peer behaviour seriously. We must make spaces where vulnerability and emotional accountability are not considered failures of masculinity. 

We should be introspecting and acting.

If boys learn what it means to be powerful from the worlds we build around them, then perhaps the more difficult question is this: what are we, as a society, teaching them to admire?

Anjitha Gopi is a gender studies scholar whose research explores intersection of gender, culture, power and everyday life. She is an incoming Institute of Advanced Study Fellow at Durham University, UK. (January 2027)

Views expressed are the author’s own.