Reports emerged this week that three more teenage boys, all aged 17, had been charged over the alleged sexual assault of a 17-year-old girl in Sydney’s Macarthur region.
Two are students at St Gregory’s College.
This comes just a week after three students from The Scots College, two aged 14 and one aged 13, were charged over the alleged sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl, and off the back of the deeply troubling allegations surrounding the Sydney Swans.
It all feels pretty heavy.
And to be honest, as someone who works in the gender-based violence prevention space, there are moments when a run of stories like this can make the work feel a little futile.
I’m going to say something here that perhaps not everyone who works in prevention would be prepared to admit. I don’t think respectful relationships and consent education is going to prevent all incidents like these. I wish I did, but I don’t.
There seems to be an assumption sometimes that if only we could get into schools earlier, or deliver more consent education, young men would know better and therefore behave better.
Certainly, some young people do need better information and better education, and I’ve spent a very large part of my working life arguing for exactly that. But I also think we need to acknowledge that knowing better doesn’t necessarily mean choosing to do better.
When we work with boys in schools, I’m always conscious of this. Our programs are intensive, usually around half a day, and with Walk the Talk, which we run in partnership with Women’s Community Shelters, the education is followed by a year of service learning supporting a local women’s shelter. I think that really deepens the experience. The boys aren’t simply being told what respect looks like; they have the opportunity to actually practice being a force for good, alongside their mates, in their own community.
I think keynotes and one-off talks have a place too. They can be inspiring, affirming and motivating, and sometimes hearing the right thing at the right time really can shift someone’s thinking. But my instinct is that the deeper experience of actually doing something positive together, and seeing your peer group do it too, has the potential to be far more powerful.
Even then, I’m constantly aware that a boy could sit through every minute of one of our programs, spend a year supporting a women’s shelter, appear to understand everything we’ve discussed, and still go on to do something atrocious.
But that doesn’t make me think the work is pointless, because perhaps we sometimes think too narrowly about who prevention education is trying to influence.
Of course I hope it influences the boy who might otherwise go on to cause harm. But
I also hope it influences all the boys around him.
If something terrible does happen, I want his friends, classmates and teammates to be able to look at what has happened with more critical and informed eyes. I want them to be less likely to victim blame, less likely to search for excuses because the person accused is their mate, and more likely to understand that loyalty doesn’t mean defending the indefensible. I want young men to have the confidence to challenge misogyny and sexual entitlement when they encounter it among their peers, rather than recognising that something feels wrong but staying silent.
Professor Catharine Lumby, who worked with the NRL for many years around gender and player behaviour, once described a small minority of players as potentially “education-proof”. Speaking in 2019, she said, “They know what to do but they don’t care, apparently”.
It’s a confronting phrase, but I think there is something important in it. Prof Lumby has also compared this work with drink-driving prevention. We educate people about drink driving and impose serious consequences for it, yet some people still drink and drive. We don’t therefore conclude that decades of drink-driving education have been pointless. We look at the much bigger picture: whether attitudes, behaviour and social norms have changed across the population over time.
Perhaps we need to be similarly realistic about gender-based violence prevention.
Education has an important role to play, but it can’t carry the entire burden. We need meaningful consequences when people cause harm. And we also need schools, sporting clubs and other institutions to be prepared to uphold the standards they claim to hold. In comments published just this week about the Swans, Prof Lumby is again arguing for both better face-to-face education and stronger institutional responses.
I sometimes think we’ve come to talk about respectful relationships education almost as though it’s a vaccine: give boys enough information about consent and respect and somehow they’ll be inoculated against ever causing harm. Human behaviour simply isn’t that straightforward. Sometimes people who know perfectly well that something is wrong will chose to do it anyway.
I find that deeply depressing. But I don’t think it makes education futile.
I think it means we need to be realistic about what education can achieve, and perhaps broaden our understanding of what success looks like. If we can help create a generation of young men who are not only less likely to cause harm themselves, but are also less willing to excuse it, enable it, laugh along with it or remain silent when they see it in others, that matters enormously too.
Dannielle Miller OAM is the director of education at Women’s Community Shelters