What would you think if you were told that a six-year-old boy had tried to cut off his penis because he could no longer join Girlguiding? Would you blame the new admissions policy – which no longer allows boys to join, even if they identify as girls – or would you think this was a child in serious distress?

This is not a hypothetical question. It was, in effect, the framing of a recent Observer article, which presented this deeply troubling account as evidence of the harms caused by the girls-only admissions policy. It also used the phrase ‘her penis’ and she / her pronouns throughout to describe a six-year-old boy.

I was already aware of this case through my Sunday Telegraph reporting on the troubles within Girlguiding, and made a conscious decision not to include it, because it involved a very young child and raised serious ethical questions about how such situations should be reported. Four days ago, I raised concerns about the piece – both publicly and with the Observer directly – but it remains online, unchanged.

Of course, this isn’t an isolated case. Inaccurate reporting on sex and gender is a persistent problem in journalism, with fresh examples appearing weekly. In recent weeks, the Manchester Evening News reported a violent murder committed by a male as having been carried out by a woman. STV reported a 23-year-old man found guilty of possessing indecent images as a woman. Shortly after the Observer article, Metro published a feature about a ‘devastated’ 10-year-old boy who can no longer be in Girlguiding – built almost entirely around this single emotive account.

Part of the problem, I think, is that the line between reporting and opinion has become blurred. Journalists can – and should – write opinion. I’m doing it here. But when reporting on a contested issue, the basic rules still apply.

This isn’t just about individual journalists or articles, however. It raises serious questions about what is being taught on journalism courses – and what standards are being upheld in newsrooms.

I trained in journalism in the early 2000s at the London College of Printing (now the London College of Communication). My tutors – both experienced hacks – didn’t pull any punches, and they didn’t worry about hurting your feelings either. If your copy wasn’t good enough, or something was missing, you were told to fix it.

I wrote mainly for the Guardian for many years, and my regular editor was uncompromising. While it drove me mad at times, it made me a much better journalist. If I had filed a piece like the Observer or Metro articles, I would have been told to go back and find at least one more person to interview – to establish whether this was part of a wider pattern – and to include at least one counterview to ensure the piece was fair and balanced.

When I later became an editor, those were the same standards I expected of others. Because good journalism is not about reinforcing a narrative. It is about testing it – with accuracy, balance and a willingness to ask difficult questions.

Balance doesn’t mean giving both sides equal space. But it does mean acknowledging that another side exists. Otherwise, readers aren’t being informed – they’re being led.

And that’s activism, not journalism. Nowhere is this clearer than in the language increasingly used in reporting on sex and gender. As Brendan O’Neill put it in a 2024 spiked article, the phrase ‘her penis’ is ‘the most Orwellian phrase of our age’. It asks both journalists and readers to accept something that is plainly untrue – not for the sake of clarity, but in the service of a particular ideology.

And once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere. Recent Metro headlines are a case in point: ‘I’m a trans non-binary Pakistani Muslim woman – all my identities co-exist’ and ‘I want to see more hairy, brown, gender non-conforming bodies like mine’. These may be opinion pieces, but the language – and the assumptions that underpin it – are increasingly treated as ‘neutral’ across journalism more broadly, when they clearly are not.

I don’t place all the blame on individual reporters. They should be able to rely on their university lecturers to teach them journalism, not activism – God knows they’re paying enough – and on more experienced journalists to model what good practice looks like.

If I sound invested in what education can do, that’s because I am. Education was my beat for many years, and I’ve also taught journalism at a number of UK universities. I loved it – and I’d love to do so again. With 25 years’ experience and a formal teaching qualification, I should be in demand. But I’m not naive enough to think I’d be hired now. As a woman with openly gender-critical views, why would a university take that risk – knowing students might find my views ‘problematic’, or even try to bully me out?

This is not hyperbole. I used to teach at Goldsmiths, which has a notoriously political student body and ran a #ThisGirlCan campaign in 2024 celebrating women’s sport – featuring a man who identified as a woman. One look at my X feed and I suspect I’d have a target on my back for the ‘Kathleen Stock’ treatment.

For the uninitiated, Stock was forced to quit her role at Sussex University in 2021 after sustained pressure from students over her gender-critical views. That alone should give us pause. Because if people with certain views are effectively excluded from journalism education, it raises a very obvious question: what exactly are students being taught – and what are they not being encouraged to question? Particularly in universities, which have traditionally championed free speech.

Journalism does not just reflect reality – it helps shape how we understand it. If basic facts are blurred, or language is used in a way that obscures rather than clarifies, the consequences go far beyond a single article. They affect how we understand issues such as crime, safeguarding and public policy – and whether people trust what they are being told.

None of this is complicated. Journalists are not required to take a particular view on contested issues. But they are required to report them clearly, accurately and with enough balance, so that audiences can make up their own minds.

If journalism is to retain public trust, it needs to get back to basics: accuracy, clarity and a willingness to test claims rather than reinforce them.

Janet Murray is a journalist writing on women, culture and public policy. Follow her on X: @jan_murray.

The debate on slavery reparations is showing no signs of dying down. Last week, the United Nations General Assembly voted in favour of a resolution urging members to apologise for the slave trade and to pay reparations to African countries.

The UK was one of 52 countries to abstain from the vote, which was proposed by Ghana and supported by 123 members. But should we not have voted against it, alongside the United States, Israel and Argentina?

The truth is that demands for reparations are opening a can of worms. Identifying which countries should pay up for slavery is more complicated than some might think. While it is true that European colonial powers including Britain participated in the slave trade, it is important that we revisit the very origins of the supply chain.

To begin with, the integral part played by exceptionally wealthy and powerful African kingdoms in selling slaves to European merchants should not be ignored. In the early 18th century, the kings of Dahomey – current-day Benin – established themselves as major players in the slave trade. King Gezo, who was King of Dahomey from 1818 to 1850, labelled the slave trade as ‘the ruling principle of my people’, being ‘the source and the glory of their wealth’. Indeed, there is a certain irony to Ghana proposing this resolution and Nigeria supporting it. The elites of the Asante and Yoruba kingdoms – in present-day Ghana and Nigeria respectively – also benefited a great deal from the slave trade.

It is undeniable that Britain was a leading slave-trading nation. But this fact should be qualified by the knowledge that so too was every seafaring nation or empire in history, prior to abolition. China, Arab states and indeed many African countries were enthusiastic participants in this evil practice. And, in many of these countries, slavery lingered on for many centuries longer than it did in Britain.

Indeed, Britain’s only unique contribution to the slave trade was in ending it before anyone else. In the early 19th century, Britain became the home of abolitionist campaigning, thanks to the efforts of leading philanthropist William Wilberforce. Britain then played a pioneering humanitarian role in suppressing the trade at great human and financial cost – especially to the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron, which patrolled the coast of West Africa, capturing slave ships and freeing in the region of 150,000 Africans destined for the Americas.

This was a costly and arduous campaign, which lasted decades. The squadron ships were generally not as sophisticated, dynamic and well-equipped as many of the slave vessels, contributing to high mortality rates for the sailors and significant expenses for the Royal Navy. Have those who are part of the reparations lobby called for a compensatory fund for the descendants of these fallen sailors, who made the ultimate sacrifice in the name of fighting the slave trade? Of course not.

So the role played by Britain, and the West, in the slave trade is far from straightforward. It can also be said that the part played by Africa’s powerful elites and rich kingdoms in supplying slaves – generating considerable wealth in the process – is commonly overlooked.

Nor should we be entirely trusting of the motives of those now calling for reparations. Many African countries need to look within to better understand the root of ongoing failures. The quality of internal governance and rampant institutional corruption would be a good start. In this light, calls for ‘reparatory justice’ could even be considered a deflection tactic. Slavery was indeed a great evil, but it is not the sole reason, or even the primary reason, why African countries are impoverished compared with their Western counterparts.

We are just a few years away from the 200-year anniversary of abolition in the British Empire. Britain should not shy away from acknowledging its historical role. But when all of its victims and beneficiaries have been dead for generations now, it is surely high time we moved on. Certainly, we should not be paying a penny in reparations.

Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.

I should have felt shocked when I read that one in eight parents now report that their child has a disability. That means that 12 per cent of British children – around 1.7million young people – are classified as suffering from a long-term illness, disability or impairment, according to figures just released by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

These figures have almost doubled since 2015, when around seven per cent of parents reported that their child had a disability. This massive expansion in the number of children deemed to be disabled has been driven by a dramatic increase in the number of kids diagnosed with so-called behavioural issues, such as autism and ADHD. According to the DWP, ‘behavioural issues’ now account for two-thirds of childhood disabilities.

The reason I’m no longer surprised by the rise and rise of childhood disability is that I have been tracking this development for well over three decades. Back in 1996, I remember when UK government officials discovered that between 1985 and 1996, there had been a 40 per cent increase in the proportion of British people who consider themselves disabled. According to the survey, the increase was much higher among teenagers between the ages of 16 and 19. It seemed that the younger you were, the more likely it was that you would have a disability.

The authors of that survey concluded that the difference between the 1985 and 1996 figures ‘appears too large to be explained by a real increase in the prevalence of disability’. This is hardly a surprise. After all, there had been no war or outbreak of serious disease in this period that would have rendered swathes of the population infirm. That the authors couldn’t explain this epidemiologically extraordinary figure in the 1990s is entirely understandable. Thirty or 40 years ago, society had a far more limited view of who was considered disabled.

The explanation for this unexpected rise in the number of young disabled people does not lie in the field of epidemiology, but in the realm of a culture that invites people to classify themselves as infirm. It is important to stress that how people cope with negative experiences is strongly influenced by the cultural and historical factors that shape the way people make sense of them. Such cultural factors may increase or reduce the ability of the individual to cope with adverse circumstances.

In recent decades, the meaning of disability has undergone a dramatic semantic shift. This is part of a broader trend by which negative aspects of human experience and behaviour have become medicalised. In addition, an enormous disability lobby has emerged, which constantly demands that a variety of newly discovered disabilities be recognised with a formal diagnosis. The most important achievement of this lobby has been to alter public perceptions of the relationship between ability and disability. It has also succeeded in transforming what used to be characterised as children’s bad or problematic behaviour into medical issues.

Many of the ‘behavioural problems’ now designated to children have always been part of family life. Disobedience, aggression, disruptive and anti-social behaviour – now defined as ‘oppositional defiant disorder’ – have always posed a challenge to parents and schools. Yet these difficult patterns of behaviour are now often branded as psychological or medical issues. And so they become accepted, rather than something to be amended by adult guidance or firm discipline.

Clearly, parents are now actively courting disability diagnoses for their children. After all, the discovery of newly invented childhood disorders provides a welcome explanation for their children’s bad behaviour or poor performance in school: ‘She isn’t naughty, she is ill.’ It is also undeniable that the many welfare benefits now offered to parents with disabled children have also played a role. Nor can we ignore the role of teachers, some of whom are promoting the diagnosis of ADHD as an alternative to managing bad behaviour in the classroom through discipline and authority. A pupil’s failure to finish homework, inability to focus on class discussion and boredom in school are now blamed on some ‘condition’.

Unsurprisingly, over the past 30 or so years, children have internalised the disability narrative. Today’s young people readily communicate their problems in a psychological vocabulary. They describe their feelings in terms of stress, trauma and depression.

One of the gravest consequences of the disability culture is that many children no longer attend school at all. Last year, it was reported that the number of children missing more than 50 per cent of the school year in Oxfordshire had increased by more than five times in 10 years. This has been put down to ‘emotionally based school avoidance’, in which a child cannot attend school due to anxiety or stress. Half of UK secondary pupils avoided school due to anxiety at some point in the past year.

As a child, I can testify that my friends and I were more than happy to avoid going to school, and we had more than our share of anxiety. But we also knew that our parents and the rest of adult society had no sympathy for our predicament, and that not going to school was not an option. These days, adult society has become complicit in normalising truancy.

It is about time that society woke up to the fact that the current epidemic of childhood disability is not a medical problem. It is a cultural failure. Telling children that they are disabled, and unable to cope with the demands of life, is setting them up for a life of dependency and unfulfilled potential. Our children deserve better.

Frank Furedi is the executive director of the think-tank, MCC-Brussels.