Secure Start Podcast Episode 4: Catherine Knibbs

Join me for a highly engaging and thought provoking conversation with Catherine (Cath) Knibbs, as we discuss the scope of harms children and young people may experience when online, Cath's reaction to the Netflix series, Adolescence, and Cath's question to me without notice about how we are failing boys in  contemporary western society and discourse.  I hope you like it!

About Cath:

Cath is a Researcher, Psychotherapist, Author, Speaker, and Doctoral candidate looking at the real harm children suffer in a world of technology, which is advancing quicker than many adults can keep up with.
 
Cath has a background in Engineering in the Army, IT, and Computer Tech of over 25 years, and over a decade of working with children and adults directly around issues relating to the internet, from Bullying to Porn viewing, from cybercrime to cybersecurity and more.
 
Cath writes about issues such as the impact of tech on the developing child, the impact of cyber trauma and the issues of immersive technology on eyes, brains, and bodies.
 
Cath runs a company educating professionals about child safeguarding around tech and digital spaces, and she teaches therapists how to be 'safe AND secure' when using tech to ensure they protect their clients.

For more information about Cath visit her website.

Disclaimer

Information reported by guests of this podcast is assumed to be accurate as stated. Podcast owner Colby Pearce is not responsible for any error of facts presented by podcast guests. In addition, unless otherwise specified, opinions expressed by guests of this podcast may not reflect those of the podcast owner, Colby Pearce.

Transcript

Welcome to the Secure Start podcast. And the thing that I would certainly say is the vulnerabilities offline result in far more vulnerabilities online. What we tend to do at the moment is talk about the use of technology as though it is a tool and we forget so often it is the medium.

Welcome to the Secure Start podcast. I'm Colby Pearce and joining me for this episode is a global expert in children's online behaviour and associated online harms. Before I introduce my guest, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land we're meeting on, the Kaurna people and the continuing connection the Kaurna people and other Aboriginal people feel to land, waters, culture and community. 

I'd also like to pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging. My guest this episode is Catherine Nibbs. Catherine is a researcher, psychotherapist, author, speaker and doctoral candidate looking at the real harm children suffer in a world of technology which is advancing quicker than many adults can keep up with.

Cath has a background in engineering in the army, in IT and in computer tech of over 25 years and over a decade of working with children and adults directly around issues relating to the internet, from bullying and porn viewing to cyber crime and cyber security and more. Cath writes about the impact of tech on the developing child, the impact of cyber trauma and the issues of immersive technology on eyes, brains and bodies. Cath runs a company educating professionals about child safeguarding around tech and digital spaces and she teaches therapists how to be safe and secure when using tech to ensure they protect their clients. 

Welcome, Cath. You're welcome, Colby, for inviting me on because I'm very excited to talk about this and thank you to that beautiful rendition and nod to the land you're on. We do that as a sign of respect for the traditional custodians of this land that we refer to Australia and their continuous connection and habitation of this land that spans at least the past 40,000 years. 

So, Cath, I've given a little bit of a bio or summary of your work, but I'm just wondering how you would describe the work that you do. In a nutshell, well, some of that description makes me sound younger than I actually am because it's over 30 years I've been working in and around technology, so we'll just skip that bit but I would say what I'm doing in my role is I work from the micro to the macro in terms of trauma. One of the things that isn't on that description is my background in functional health, so I've been doing that since 2018 and using functional testing such as checking for gut microbiome, DNA, what we call single nucleotide polymorphisms, I can actually see on a cellular level what trauma does and how it impacts the body and when I'm looking at technology, I'm looking at what we do individual all the way through to the macro in terms of society and how we're changing, if you like, as a species. 

So, I would certainly say what I do is working individually, collectively and metaphysically, if that's not too deep for, what time are we on? Tuesday morning. Yeah, it's the afternoon for me here in Australia but yeah, yeah, wow, that is fascinating and I wonder, is that associated with the PhD that you're completing which I referred to or? Um, no, the PhD is in how young children, so I've worked with seven to ten-year-olds, how they perceive the impact of viewing distressing inappropriate graphing imagery and this is a, it's a piece of research that really hasn't provided any new, any new findings really in terms of children are affected by this stuff on a, let's say, a nervous system level, on a psychological level, on an emotional level and it's almost like I've had to do the research to prove to people what I've been saying for the past 15, 20 years. Yes, yeah, yeah.

Well, I guess that in some ways is the role of research, isn't it? Is that, yeah, is that research is, I often describe research as being scientifically, the scientific inquiry into the things that we already believe to be true. Yeah and, and I guess what we do as clinicians is considered anecdotal until we have a piece of research that backs it up. That's right, that's right, which can be reassuring but also frustrating, I guess. 

Yes, yeah. You know, certainly you, you would be aware perhaps that I sometimes write about things like practice expertise and titled expertise and a lot of titled expertise emanates from universities and probably has more standing than, than practice expertise. So it's good to hear from someone who is both a practitioner and a formal researcher who is conducting research that's bearing out, I guess, what, what you have known from significant practice in this field. 

Yeah, so that's fantastic, Kath. Yeah. And how did you get, like, how did you get into this area of work? In a nutshell, my, if I go all the way back to my childhood, because that's where we always go when we're, we're clinicians in this space, my father was a radiographer in the prison service after leaving the army and he worked in and around what's called Category A prisons. 

So these are prisons where people are serving life, lifelong sentences for really macabre and abhorrent crimes. And when I was younger, he would talk about the crimes that some of these criminals have, have engaged in. And I must have been nine, 10. 

Obviously, there's reasons why my dad talked to me in that way. And we'll not talk about his dysfunction for doing that. But I got really fascinated in well, why would somebody do that? And because of the, if you like the dysfunction in the family, I went down the route of physics, not people. 

But I actually came back to people after the career in engineering and going into computing. Because I was raising my own children, I was working in the computing industry. Yeah. 

And what I was dealing with. So this is when the really started to take a really prominent part in people's life, particularly in business. So this was like 1996 1998 2000. 

And I had young children who were beginning to get used to computers, I introduced them to technology very early on. And what I noticed is the way in which the adults use the internet, and the way in which children use the internet. And that was really my foot in both camps. 

And then I decided to train as a therapist, because I jokingly say, computer sat my soul, it's a, it's a very quiet industry to work in, in most cases, and I'm a chatty person. So I went and trained as a psychotherapist. And whilst doing so did a little bit of work in some of the secondary schools. 

Yes. And I was finding what children were doing online was kind of in between a set of teenagers, really, what the teens were doing differed to the primary school aged children versus what the adults were doing. And we were not talking about this in 20 2010. 

If we go back, that's that's really when I started. Yeah, it was being missed. And I continuously say, and that's the generation of children that we let down.

Now, in 2025, 15 years later, we are now talking about the harms that children face. And this is thanks to online safety, trust and safety, and of course, a recent TV programme, which we'll probably get into. But also, it's the space in which now, we're looking backwards saying we should have put guardrails in place, we should have taken care of the children. 

And because of the ubiquitousness of this space, now, we are now recognising that children can be harmed. But I would certainly say, the phrase I tend to use is we look at the ACEs study for trauma. But what we didn't look at were cyber ACEs. 

And these are the ones that you can be harmed by on the internet. And that that goes all the way back to early 2000s for the last 25 years, really. So you're really talking about cumulative harms when you're talking about the ACEs study, which is for those who are not familiar with it, that's the adverse childhood experiences study that really contributed to our idea, contributed to our knowledge about the impact of cumulative harms during childhood on health and wellbeing in adulthood. 

And yeah, it's very interesting what you're, the parallel that you draw in terms of, I guess, children's exposure. And in the same way that the ACEs study referred to complex trauma experiences, because there were multiple trauma experiences, probably experienced multiple times. You're clearly drawing a line of association between that concept and what happens in the online world for children and young people.

Yeah. Yeah. And the reason for that, Colby, is because everything we do online is attachment based. 

When you actually get to the crux of the modus operandi and the why we do what we do, there is so much neurobiology involved in using technology, being on technology, doing what we're doing. And unfortunately, that's the bit that has been missed, because what we tend to do at the moment is talk about the use of technology as though it is a tool, and we forget so often it is the medium. And that's one of the phrases that I've used for a long time, it's a tool and a medium. 

And when we're talking about screen time and the metrics that are being discussed in ways that reference addiction and things like that, that's not taking into account the why we do what we do. And when you actually get down to the crux of it, it's about socialising, it's about connection, it's about engaging with your peers. And each and every part of the developmental trajectory of children is about that technology and how they interact with it, or how others interact with it in front of them. 

So everything has an impact on attachment. And the thing that I would certainly say is the vulnerabilities offline result in far more vulnerabilities online. But when we're talking about children who are in environments where technology is present, and it's overly used at the detriment of the real world connection, we are seeing a different kind of process emerging. 

And I call that attachment. Very good. Yes. 

It's fascinating listening to you talk about it, and particularly the link that you draw to attachment. My mind was going to thinking about children's online behaviour, as you were describing it as being a place where connection is achieved, a significant place where connection is achieved. And it's through those, each of those connections plays a role in what children and young people's attachment style is. 

So you may well be familiar with my work, I draw a distinction between attachment relationship and attachment style. Children and young people can have multiple attachment relationships, and they all differ based on their experiences of those relationships. Their attachment style is something of an amalgamation of all of those experiences. 

And it's very interesting. And the penny's dropping for me, even as we speak, as that you have included real world and online relationships as contributing to a child's attachment style, which is very important in the way in which children and young people and eventually adults approach life and relationships. And it's like the rudder, the rudder that steers them through life. 

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's why I went off to do my TEDx, because I found myself in that position with my own children. 

So one of the things I've looked at is early developmental needs when there's a three parent family, the mum, the dad, the device. And I was really interested when I was doing my baby ops about what sense do babies make of their world when perhaps the parent is only interested when the flashlight is on and the camera's on and they're paying attention to this thing. And this thing gets pointed at them, and then their cadence and tone changes. 

And of course, the prosody around connection is around, hi, let's take a picture. And then the parent goes back to looking in the phone. What do babies make of this new way of being in the world? And what happens when that distracted parenting becomes about what I call other children inside the device? Because babies can't recognise themselves. 

And when mum, dad or other relatives are like, oh my goodness, look at your picture here, swipe, swipe, swipe. Is that another infant in the room? Is that a sibling? Is it a baby that could be a threat? What is really going on in those first 1001 days? And the reason I went off to do the TEDx is because I was sitting in my living room. This is going back quite a few years because my children are adults now, but nearly 30 in terms of their age. 

And I was sitting there with one of the first ever iPads. And I'm tapping away thinking, look at me doing my extra hours. And I'm being a very busy mum. 

And here I am tip-tapping away. And my children were playing on their consoles and devices. And I realised nobody had spoken for an hour. 

And I had this realisation. I went, OK, everybody stop. We need to not do this or we need to not do this as often as we currently are. 

And it was about really having a conversation. Fast forward to, I don't know, probably about five, six years ago, I was on the telephone, the good old fashioned, and I'm here, the good old fashioned finger and thumb telephone. And my eldest son sent me a piece of research. 

I opened my phone and started to read it because we were having a conversation. And he went deadly silent. And he said, you're not paying attention to me, are you? Whoa. 

And that was a moment where I thought, oh my goodness, even in a telephone conversation, I'm not present because I'm reading the piece of research, which means I can't do multitasking. And as a result, I kind of dropped that into the middle of the talk about this real world connection. And what I'm beginning to see, well, not beginning. 

This has been happening for 15 years. Children who do not get their needs met, and I call it out here, go looking for their needs in there. And in there is whatever kind of technology they can find, or whatever app, device, game, et cetera, et cetera. 

Wow. I think we all have a certain level of understanding that these devices intrude into our real life and realtime interactions. I got goosebumps when you talked about what do babies make of this three-way interaction. 

That is fascinating. Probably the topic of a much longer, I think, podcast interview. But I'm really, yeah, now that you've brought it up, I'm fascinated to hear more about what you've said and what you believe to be the case about that. 

Can I just put my caveat in there, actually? It's not to blame parents. I understand, and I think I've written this in my first, parenting is the hardest job in the world. And if you've got a brand new baby and you've got, I don't know, 300 people on your Facebook page, because that's where us old fogies are apparently.

If you've got 300 people telling you how you need to be as a parent, that can be so overwhelming for these new parents. Maybe there's a reason why they're online so long. Maybe it's because should I be doing this or should I be doing that? Should I be doing sleep training? Oh, my goodness, I gave them food too early. 

I'm feeding them too often. Contradiction, contradiction, contradiction. Plus, the health visitor who comes round, maybe they've got 300 friends that have been telling them what they need to do as a professional. 

We are overwhelmed with not doing things in air quotes, the right way anymore. We have no real way of sitting with our instincts anymore when this device can be telling you continuously comparison, comparison, comparison. You're not good enough. 

You haven't done enough of this. Your baby's not doing that. They're not standing. 

They're not sitting. They're not walking. And I totally understand that must be overwhelming for brand new parents. 

But also, parenting is so difficult that in the early days when babies are sleeping, it used to be you would stick the television on. Well, you can now sit and play a game. You can talk to your friends. 

And for new mums, I guess that's a way that they can still have some form of connection, whereas the isolation of the parents before the phone, so it's pros and cons. It's interesting because while you were speaking about that, when we think about tech, and of course, our first concern is always our children and whether we have, by embracing online tech, with the alacrity that we have as a society, whether we have created, I guess the grossest generalisation is that we've created a generation of anxious children and young people, or more to the point, we've created a generation of anxious young adults. But what I'm hearing you say also is that it's more generalised, ubiquitous, I think is the word, than that, in that we've also created a generation of anxious adults who have a medium by which to constantly compare and contrast their performance in various roles, as well as the general stuff, you know, how they look, what their interests are, and all of that sort of thing. 

What Alain de Botton, my favourite modern day philosopher, refers to as status anxiety. He wrote a fantastic book about it. Yeah, his most recent one is absolutely gorgeous.

Yeah, I haven't read the most recent one, but wow. I could sit and talk to you about tech, I think, for much longer than we've both got. But if you could, I'm actually really interested to hear a summary of your, where you land with tech, and in terms of what you would say to professional people like me, and yourself, and what you would say to parents about tech, and what you might even say to governments about tech.

Well, do you know what? That segues really nicely into, I have just written a book, right, which will be out in July with Penguin, and it's called Tech Smart Parenting. Because I am pro-tech, I am pro-parenting, and I am pro-education. And those three need to go together, in terms of the world we now live in is technological. 

So I will just go back to your reflection on the anxious generation being a particularly provocative piece of literature that has not summed up the world of technology very well, mainly given the author is not steeped in technology, has arrived and done a recent, it's kind of like an overview, without understanding all of the different domains and spaces and ways in which technology is used. Hasn't included games, hasn't included immersive environments, hasn't included the internet, wants to just talk about social media without actually defining what social media is. So that's just my little rhetoric reflection on that particular book. 

Absolutely. Sorry, I was just going to jump in and say, yeah, I think my understanding is that there is a distinction to be made, or at least if we're going to talk about the impact of tech and the online world on children and young people, we need to look more broadly than social media, if we're going to talk about what we're noticing about the changes in the emotional health and wellbeing of our young people, we need to not just look at tech and the online world, we need to look at everything that is happening in society. Yeah, there is, I'll actually send you a link to it. 

There's a very good podcast that I've not long watched, which is an attachment specialist talking about actually the mental health crisis started before technology, which I'm sure yourself being in this domain, this is not a new arrival and because of tech, it's much more complicated and nuanced. I didn't suddenly get busier. I didn't suddenly get busier in 2010.

There is, yeah, there is something to be said about, I get it, clickbait books and book titles sell. And unfortunately, I'm watching this particular professional at the moment, distance diagnosing people on the internet when he knows nothing about family situation. Actually, they've just appeared on a big US platform, a very well known TV presenter has just hosted them. 

And one of the lines was, so no tech, no social media, but if they want to take a laptop into their bedroom, then I just kind of rolled my eyes and went, then you really do not understand what the dangers are and where they come from. And the reason I say that, Colby is because the reason I'm in the world of cyber trauma is because of something that happened to my children when they were about 10 or 11 on these flip phones, which are allegedly safe. I can tell you they are not because all of the spaces that children can interact and engage with all have the same kind of harms. 

And they can be accessed in many different ways. They can be accessed at a library, they can be accessed. I actually know of recently of a child managing to do something on a McDonald's device in the restaurant. 

So children are savvy enough to know how to get around if they're not allowed on social media, because there's no way to regulate this vast internet. So going back to my, my position on this, I would say we need education for parents that a does not shame and blame, because that's what I'm seeing at the moment, there is a huge drive to say, well, you gave them the damn devices, you should know better you you must you can you and what I've seen as a fallout is scared and angry parents. And when we're scared and angry, and we go into fight flight freeze, we want the thing to go away, which is why the campaigns at the moment, for no phones, no social media, no, whatever it is, smart tech, this, that and the other. 

They're coming from a place of fear of the unknown. And it's being driven by lots and lots of narratives in the mainstream media, and certainly by TV shows saying, Oh, my goodness, this particular outlier case could be your child and, and that isn't helping anybody. And the children that are growing up now are going to be Prime Ministers, they're going to be the technicians, they're going to be the surgeons, they're going to be the librarians, they're going to be trade people. 

And they are going to do that with technology, which also includes AI. And if we're going to make this this approach, get rid of smartphones, get rid of social media, what is it that we're going to miss out on by teaching children how to survive in the real world? Yeah. And it harks off going back to hunter gatherer tribes and saying, we're not going to have fire in the camp, because it could actually burn our village down. 

So we're not going to learn to live with fire, because it could potentially be dangerous. Whereas another, another hunter gatherer tribe might say, well, we're going to contain ours with stones. And we're going to use it. 

And we're always going to have somebody taking care of the fire to make sure it doesn't go beyond the bricks, so to speak. And what we're doing at the moment is we're saying we're going to be a village that has no fire, there we are, we've progressed far more than the tribe next to us, who have learned to harness and contain it. And to educate people about the dangers, but also fire can cook food, fire can keep us warm. 

And this goes to that metaphysical approach. So Heidegger talked about this, actually, and called this techne. This is the use of tools, if you like, to improve the environment and society and progress.

Hmm. Thank you. So I'm pro-progress. 

Yep. Yep. And powerfully so, if I might say.

And of course, I'm coming to you from a country that is seeking to ban young people access to social media until they're 15. And in fact, I have passed legislation that's been passed, bringing that into effect. And the mind goes to, you know, whether we've learned anything from prohibitional approaches. 

Not so far. No, no. But at least the government is on the side, the government can say they're on the side of concerned parents. 

And that's a good thing. Yeah, it is in how parents feel supported. Yeah. 

However, the gripe, the gripe across the world from the academics is this is not research based. And I will give you a good example. In terms of Pete Ketchell's has written a book called Unlock. 

So Professor Pete Ketchell's. And he talks about the way in which sometimes we implement good ideas with the vested interest only to find out later it wasn't the best approach. And that has happened repeatedly in medical settings where we've considered, for example, where somebody has a head injury and we do the little hole known as trapanning, where you actually do that. 

That has not been for the best interest of the patients, as it turns out. But it sounds like a good idea. And if we think about what what we're doing at the moment, this is that it's really an anecdotal. 

I don't know how to, in air quotes, control my child. I don't understand the technology. So I'm going to shout from the rooftops. 

It is damaging my child because that's the only thing I can say as a parent because I don't understand what's happening. And because there is a movement of parents saying I've heard it and I'm going to go into the things that really gripe me in terms of I've heard it gives them a dopamine fix or a dopamine hit when people don't even understand what dopamine is or how it actually works within the body. I believe they're addicted because they won't get off it, whereas the understanding about what children are doing and why they can't come off the game or why they can't come off the platform at this point in time is about relational processes.

But what we do is we get scared and we get angry and then we shout at the government and the government says, well, best we keep our voters on side. We will support this movement. And sadly, the bit around we're going to ban social media hasn't even defined it. 

And what I have seen is certain platforms are still available, but the Internet isn't banned and neither is gaming and VR, AR, XR, all of the different new immersive technologies. And the government is pretty much saying there we are. We've put a gate around the pond, but we haven't done it for the skate park and we haven't done it for the swings and the rides and we haven't done it for the graveled area and we haven't done it where the dangerous dogs run. 

It's almost like we've done our part because we've done the health and safety over this particular aspect in the city park and parents feel relieved. But it hasn't really sorted the issue out yet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wow. There's a lot in there. I think you mentioned the word Segway earlier and I wonder if this is a good place to Segway into the topic of the Netflix show Adolescence, which I guess very much from my observation taps into some of these issues that you're talking about, not least of which the concern that exists around the impact of social media on children and young people's behaviour. 

I just want to ask you firstly, well, I'm probably going to ask you a double barrel question. The first part being just your general impression of the show and in particular, how it portrayed social media use amongst young people and the contribution it made to the plot, I guess, of the show. So I think I used the word earlier, but I will make sure that I do use it here again. 

It is a fictional outlier story, OK? And certainly in terms of the actors in it, I enjoyed the programme. It was, if it was a book, it might be what's called a page turner for certain. The story was fast paced, which I'm going to do the idiosyncratic. 

If we're going to talk about what social media does in terms of how they influence us and how they hook us in air quotes, that's the same as the cinematic way in which this story was told. We went from an opening scene that was very energetic. It had lots of unknown questions and answers as to what was happening. 

Why was this child being arrested? Is this really how the police arrest children? Et cetera, et cetera. So it absolutely captured our attention and gave us that dopamine spike. And I'm being slightly ironic, sarcastic here, OK? So what the programme did was really good in terms of creating that attention economy in the same way that social media does. 

And given that it was a screenplay, the way in which the story started to pan out on the first and second episode were kind of indicative of if we didn't know anything about the policing service, we would expect that's how they arrest children. And that is not necessarily the case. That is a very, very rare case that somebody would be arrested in that way, particularly if they were known to be 13.

So for me, there was quite a lot of eye rolling. Well, that's not how it happens. That's not how it happens. 

But in terms of entertainment, I enjoyed watching it. In terms of the actualities in practice, is this? No, it did not. It did not go in line with what I know as a child therapist, certainly what I know in the criminal justice system, certainly in terms of being around children who are within this system in this way. 

And that's because I work with children in the criminal justice system and in this particular way. What was interesting was the tiny little nugget, and this is the bit that seems to have captured everybody's attention, was the police's son who said, Dad, it's all about the manosphere and began to talk about an environment that isn't usually talked about in that way by 13 and 14 and 15 year olds. And I have had so much fun since the programme talking to my 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 year old clients, because many of them have watched it, including the ones that are underage. 

And their response has been, we don't even talk like that. And we don't use the emoticons and the emojis like that. And that's not how we behave. 

That's the adults not getting us again. And one client reflected, and do you not think, this was my favourite, and do you not think that now you adults are talking about the emojis, that we're not going to change what we're doing? I laughed and said, but that's what all children do. Yeah. 

So what it did do, was it named, or it kind of gave a nod to the environments in which misogyny, and I particularly despise this term, toxic masculinity is being discussed. There's no such thing as toxic masculinity. It's masculinity and toxic behaviour. 

And toxic behaviour always has a root cause, which comes from, and I'm sure I do not need to say this to you at all, Colby, that children do not rock up as toxic adults. You know, there is a trajectory, there is a story. And the way in which the story has been told is, it's an absolutely outlier case.

This does not happen in general day to day practice. However, we're back to that blame, shame, scare, shock and awe, in which parents are now frightened. Maybe my child is a potential killer. 

Maybe my child, well, that is true of everybody who lives on the planet. We are all one, I think the way to phrase this is probably we're all one fight away from being a dangerous person. And that, for anybody who's interested, actually, there is a book called Ordinary Men. 

It is not a very nice, gentle read. It's about how behaviours happen in Nazi Germany, how ordinary men became these killers. And that's the thing about the human psyche. 

We are all one error away from a lifetime sentence in prison, for example. And what it has done, certainly, is bring to the surface conversations that we need to have about children, about boys. But the social media influence wasn't discussed enough for it to make sense in the programme.

I can say with absolute certainty, not all boys who watch pornography turn out to be killers, not all boys who watch pornography turn out to be sex addicts, not all boys, not all boys, not all occasions, not all situations. And the reason I say that is because I've worked with a number of them for 15 years. This is not a, I'm not throwing this out to defend the programme.

This is based in a long time of being a clinical practitioner. What the programme has effectively said is porn, social media, gaming and being out of the sight of parents is the thing that caused the problem. And what I'm not seeing being discussed is really what it was like for a young boy to not get on with his father in that way. 

There was no discussion about how he got on with his mother. There was certainly a lot of shame, a lot of parental conflict, a lot of like parental modelling in terms of the way the father behaved. That was completely missed. 

And that's the bit we haven't focused on. And yet, again, I don't need to say this to you, when you go back and look at attachment processes of children who end up in criminal justice systems, there is always that child to parent neglectful or abusive attachment process underneath it all. What we have done is we've found the common enemy to point towards. 

It's social media, it's pornography, it's gaming, there we are, job done, wash our hands of it, make it go away. And certain speakers in the so-called manosphere. So, yeah, very interesting points that you make passionately, Kath. 

I think it's just yet another example of an inherent need is not the right word for it, but an inherent focus on the behaviour of concern and a lack of consideration of the reasons those behaviours exist. And Daniel Kahneman would be, or is, probably rolling in his grave, as the phrase goes, because if ever there was a situation that absolutely played out, type one and type two errors, as he called them, in terms of the errors of misjudgment, the errors of speedily making a decision based on intuition that is not true, this is it. Yeah. 

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 

It's been my own reflections that we're missing the point, really, in our society or communities, concern about young boys. We're missing the point by creating labels, by concern about the online presence of certain people. The point that we're missing is consideration of the experience of our boys growing up.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And, for example, why they're turning to connections, connection on the internet to help them to understand who they are as a male person. 

And you said something earlier, which I think will resonate, which is that young people seek in the online world that which they're missing in the real world, so to speak. I mean, the online world is the real world, but you know what I mean. Yeah. 

So, if our boys are attracted to or consuming a certain type of content, then we really need to be looking at, well, what's actually going on with our boys, in terms of their connections in the real world, in the non-online world. Yeah. So, there's two little points that I want to dip into here. 

One is early childhood experiences of everybody's equal, and I'll come to that one in a second. But if you look at, like the internet writ large, and how these podcasts occur and take place, what I would say is we are getting a cocktail phenomena. And the screenwriter and the conversation about Andrew Tate is quite minimal. 

So, what I'll say is, you get what I have colloquially called the bro science podcasts, okay. It's a number of podcasts of adults talking to adults. And some of those podcasts are Jordan Peterson, they are Joe Rogan, you know, some of the biggest podcasts in the world.

And it's adults talking to adults about adult sexual behavior. And in that space is where Andrew Tate lives. I've mentioned him. 

And Andrew Tate's audience is not 13 and 14 year old boys, because he can't sell to them. And whilst he operates in what I call the porn industry approach, which is customer of tomorrow, his audience are people who are putting money into his wallet. And that audience are young, young males, usually around 18. 

Plus, the males that are consuming the Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan content tend to be a little bit older. And what happens is then there is a conversation that takes place between the adults who are on the podcast, and the adults consuming the content. And then we have the slightly younger adults who are regurgitating and having the conversations without necessarily having that level of understanding that maybe Jordan Peterson is his own monarchy in his own right anyway. 

But there is something about an 18 year old young male who might be saying the same things using the same language that's picked up by a younger sibling by young boys who hear it being talked about, I don't know when they're on the football or rugby field. And what I find is the 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13 year olds are using phrases that they don't even understand. And if I was to ask them, do you understand the 8020 rule, which was cited in the programme, they don't know what it means. 

And they certainly do not have an understanding about this incel movement, which I find kind of interesting, because all 13 year olds, in most cases, are not having sex, they're not in those kinds of relationships. So by default, they are not involuntary celibate, they are celibate by the very fact that they haven't developmentally progressed to where they are having sexual contact at 16, 17, 18, 19. And it's this, I would certainly say, go and have a look at William Costello's reflection on the incel movement, because the way in which this was portrayed in the programme is, as I keep saying, an outlier, this is really, really unusual, and not the norm. 

And then, of course, I think, to answer the question about why do boys do this? And I'm actually going to throw it back as a question to you in a second, is when my when my children, so that I've raised boys, okay, when they were in primary school, in the early 2000s, going into the 2010 and onwards, there was a whole approach of everybody's a winner. There was on sports days, we all do it together, and we all get a certificate. And I challenged this at the school. 

And I said, where is the element of competition, which exists naturally in evolution? Where is the competition between children racing each other in the egg and spoon race, because you have to handle disappointment. So I took my children into martial arts, that was the first thing I did. Because you learn by losing in martial arts. 

And that is how you develop an ability to understand where you sit in terms of society in terms of where you sit with your skill set. But also how you can handle disappointment, and how you can handle victory. And what what I have seen is this.

Certainly the 2020 plus the 20 to 30 year age group are that cohort of children who did not get the competition during school. I certainly remember my schooling days where your grades were read out in front of every other child. Oh my goodness, it was heartbreaking if you didn't, you know, if you didn't get your high score, or if you were a low score. 

Actually, what we tend to do is we grade the children into classes. And the top set as they're called, certainly here is the way they say, well, we're top set. So we know by default, we're much cleverer than the lower set or the common denominator. 

And that is a normative part of adolescence, that is a normative part of growing up. And that's actually what happened in the adolescence movie is there was a child who was given a statement, he was called an incel by the emoji, he was called it as an insult. And my my question would be about that TV programme is where did it address who helped that young person manage that approach of being bullied of being called names of having disappointment around his father of the non-victory status. 

So my question to you, then Colby would be, so what how do I phrase this? So what is it that we're we're not doing? And the reason I'm asking you is because you are a man and I am not. I have lived in environments, certainly within the army, where there's a lot of male masculinity and a lot of male attitudes, and I've raised two boys, but I am not a male. So I cannot talk from that perspective. 

What do you think we're not doing? We're not getting right. So usually this is the the the last part of the podcast, Kath, and where I, I acknowledge that I've asked a number of questions and it's your turn to ask me a question. And I do I actually do that routinely in my practice when I've asked people.

And as I've said on a previous podcast, all the kids ask me how old I am. That's it. That's their question, which I give them a somewhat vague answer to.

Now, what are we not doing for our boys? I think we're in it to answer your question would probably take the time of another of our podcasts. But where does one start? I think, look, I think we're failing our boys in so many ways, as a general opening statement. I think that in our society, my wife and I often talk about having three boys of our own.

We're worried about the way society is going to be for them. I think society has moved to one to a place of accountability. So men need to be accountable for some of the problematic behaviours that do exist in our society. 

Men need to understand, for example, that the dynamics of intimate partner violence and consent in sexual matters, our young men need to know all that. But our young men need, we're not proud, I don't think we're proud of our young men as a society. I think where we're failing them is that the messages are too much focused, a bit like what you've been talking about, not so much outliers, because the rates of domestic or intimate partner violence in our communities, for example, are not insignificant. 

So I wouldn't necessarily call it an outlier. It is a significant problem in our community. However, not all men, you know, the vast majority of men are not perpetrators of intimate partner violence, are not perpetrators of problematic sexual behaviour towards their partners.

I don't think our boys get that message. They get the message that we're worried about them. We're worried about their capacity to do harm. 

They don't get the message so much that we're proud of their achievements, that we're even proud of the differences between what a person, what a male gendered person can contribute in all aspects of society and celebrating the distinctions between masculinity and femininity. Sorry, Kath, you did ask the question. It could be a very long answer. 

It's a complicated question. It is. I guess it's like everything else, nuanced. 

It is very nuanced. Multi-faceted. I think, so if I really would sum it up, it was a question without notice, but that's okay, because I love questions. 

I always promise I'm being able to answer any question put to me. I would put it like this. Our boys are exposed from a relatively young age to a lot of concern about masculinity as such, perhaps.

I think masculinity has become conflated with issues like intimate partner violence and and sexual violence. So the message that they have been given is that to be a man is to be a problem. To be masculine is a problem. 

Now, the problem with that is what we know from attachment, which is if you marginalise people, if you make people feel marginalised in society, in community, then normal social rules and mores, the expectations of others, have less influence over how they go about approaching life and relationships. They withdraw psychologically as a defence against being shamed. So I think to sum up my broader views about this topic, I would say to the extent that we have marginalised males or made them feel bad and inadequate for the behaviour of a proportion of males, we have in fact contributed to an outcome where we will continue to see problematic male behaviour, problematic behaviours amongst males in our community, and we may even see growth in those behaviours of concern in circumstances where the people who are calling out the behaviour would say, well, no, that's not our intent. 

Our intent is actually to promote accountability and informed reflection by men about the harms they could potentially commit, so that they can approach life in a much more self-aware way and not commit problematic behaviours. And my concern would be that you'll never get to that point if you start from a place of it's a problem being male. I might change one word in that, because the thing that I've found, Colby, is it's you're the problem. 

So it's not being a male is a problem, it's you are the problem. And for me, to reflect something that a child said in my office, and I've said this out on social media a number of times, he was asking a question actually about approaching a woman and said, I'm not going to bother because I don't want to be called a rapist. And I went, wow, if that's the attitude and that's the fear that young males are holding, and some of it will be conscious and some of it will be unconscious, if that's what we have done as a society, is create this feeling that you are the problem, it is no wonder that there is a retaliatory response at the moment. 

Because I think, and I'm going to quote my friend here actually, who I'm going to suggest you talk to at some point as well. Lisa Edison, who's created shame containment theory. And she talks about shame containment is all about you, you contain your shame.

But what we know about shame from many, many years of the research is shame seeps out and it comes out as rage. And it comes out as aggression and it comes out and if we are continually pointing the finger that you being male are the problem, then this contained shame is going to be uncontained and uncontained shame is that really primal aggression that comes from a place of well, I might as well anyway, if that's your, and it's kind of people's opinions, isn't it, I guess. And it's the, well, it's almost like the dogs in Seligman's helplessness experiments.

If I'm damned if I do and I'm damned if I don't, then I might as well just do what I want to do, rather than do what I want to do in consideration of how society thinks about what you want to do. And so I think so that, yeah, again, not to not to be meaning to be repetitive. And by the way, I'm always interested in suggestions for interesting people to speak to. 

I do. I do think that that the very social ills that people are trying to address here are likely to be maintained or even worsened in circumstances where it is a shame to be male. I'm feeling incredibly sad deep down at the moment as we're talking about this. 

I really, really feel incredibly sad for the men who are emerging and the males yet to be men. I really worry in terms of. Absolutely, we need to address violent behavior, but also we need to understand where violent behavior comes from. 

And I think what we have done is what I call the finger pointing exercise, and it has never worked in society. And I just wanted to acknowledge on behalf of those men, I feel incredibly sad that we have done this. Yeah. 

And we society. So I think I think if we just bring together a number of threads of our conversation, it is the case that when a problem arises. Our society tends to focus too much on the behavior of concern and too little on the reasons why those behaviors exist. 

And that inordinate focus on the behavior of concern would, in my view, maintain and perhaps exacerbate the behavior or increase the. Now I'm starting to lose my words, Kath. Increase the prevalence of the behavior.

So the very response is a significant part of the problem. Kath, it's been awesome to speak to you. There's been so many things that have come out of this conversation that I hope are thought provoking for people. 

People can contact you, I guess, via your website. Yeah, probably. Probably the easiest way to find out where I am is on TikTok, Instagram. 

I am on Facebook, but I would certainly say that it's more of the social media channels. And it isn't always me who is on the social media channels because we we put out because I'm now doing I think it's called micro influencer because I'm putting out helpful videos for parents. A lot of it is prerecorded. 

Then it gets shared on particular days and times. And at the moment, I'm doing another blog around really this pornography conversation because I think I think we also get that one completely wrong. And I think that so I once heard a professional say, why is porn so horrid? And I thought, when did research become values based? Rather than looking at. 

Yeah. So people can find you on those mediums that you've mentioned. I know that I know that you also have a website because I was on it earlier. 

And you've got a book coming out, which sounds fascinating, and I can't wait to read it myself. So thank you very much for agreeing to be on this fledgling podcast and thank you. It was it was a good conversation. 

There are things where I was like, I don't think I've covered that in my I don't think I've covered that I need to do something separate there. But that always happens. So thank you very much, Colby. 

No worries.