by Asante Haughton for The 44 North, Emotional Health Editor, Contributing Writer, and Host of Life Outside the Box
This essay is the third in a three-part project on modern-day misogyny. You can read our introduction and the other two essays by Jeff Perera and Cole Martin in our October-November 2026 issue, or follow our newsletter to receive them directly in your inbox.
When I first heard about the “rape academy” web networks, I was shocked that such a thing could exist. Surely, as a society, we couldn’t—wouldn’t—allow something like this to fester. However, not only did it exist, but as I learned after a quick Google search, it was an extensive community that had proliferated for years before being ‘exposed.’ I put ‘exposed’ in quotations because this community of men, who traded strategies on how to incapacitate women without their knowledge to perform sex acts or other acts of humiliation, operated openly. This wasn’t happening in the shadowed back alleys of the internet, but right under its streetlights, roots above ground and unmasked. All we had to do to find it was look. So why, as a society, weren’t we looking?
When it comes to child protection, the watchful eye of society is perpetually alert. As such, the networks of individuals that seek to harm children operate underground, carefully concealed from the gaze of bystanders and the law. Even when we look, it’s hard to find them.
By contrast, as reported by CNN, the “rape academy” and other similar networks branched out rather publicly on the Telegram messaging app, as well as multiple popular porn sites (that I have made the decision not to mention here). Why weren’t they hiding? There is a reason they didn’t even bother.
The most obvious answer is sobering: They didn’t need to. Nobody was looking. And it’s not because the need to look wasn’t there.
According to a 2025 Statistics Canada report, 49% of women aged 25 to 34 have experienced at least one sexual assault. In 91% of these cases, the perpetrator was a man.
We should have been looking.
That we weren’t, or that we were too slow, says something about whose safety society deems urgent: We didn’t find it important enough to look; we don’t value women enough in our society to look. This is a pervasive cultural problem.
And it leaves us with two issues to tackle.
In the immediate term, we must do everything we can to prevent online communities housing men who harm women from operating. One idea is to expand the breadth of Canada’s Mandatory Reporting Act. Currently, this act requires internet service providers to report to law enforcement any IP addresses or web domains where child sexual abuse and exploitation material is suspected to be available. This act needs to adopt similar mandates obligating internet service providers to report when cyber spaces depicting or facilitating harm toward women are found. To ensure these mandates are followed, government officials and policymakers should levy painful fines upon internet service providers who neglect to comprehensively regulate user activities, particularly if such neglect leads to harm or could feasibly lead to harm against women via their networks. Actions such as these could catalyze further prevention approaches, halting online communities promoting violence against women from taking root.
In the longer term, we as a society must address the seed that threatens to take root in the first place. It’s vital that we eviscerate patriarchal pedagogies that position a devastating normalization: That women are vessels whose most important function is to serve men—instrumentally, sexually, or otherwise. We must then replace these deeply embedded societal beliefs with notions that consider women to have inherent worth equal to all other human beings. In simpler terms, we need to enact a complete cultural overhaul to address misogyny—the kind that teaches scores of men that exploiting women physically and emotionally is acceptable, as well as the kind that doesn’t value them enough to write measures that would protect them from exploitation online (or elsewhere) into law.
Platform design, regulation, recommendation systems, and legal profit incentives can all be interrogated, excavated, and revised as such to better reflect what we value—once we commit, decisively, to valuing it out in the open. That’s where men who harm women are circulating violence and expressing what they don’t value. We need to confront them there with what we do.
If we say protect all women, our values and actions as a society need to demonstrate that we mean it.