Page after page after page. Story after story after story: hundreds of them. Stories of boys raping girls, boys forcing girls to perform oral sex, boys anally raping girls, boys assaulting their girlfriends, boys assaulting girls who are unconscious, sharing the stories and the images and the videos with their friends. In one case, uploading illicitly taken videos to a widely available porn website. Some girls are as young as 13. The boys are their peers.
These stories coalesced into a litany of horror over the past week as part of a petition started by former Sydney schoolgirl Chanel Contos, now 23, in an effort to convince the school principals of elite private schools in Sydney to implement consent education earlier and better.
The petition has now busted out of its eastern suburbs bubble and had, at the time of writing, grown to almost 3,000 testimonies and about 23,000 signatories from all over Australia and the world, now to be sent to MPs to convey the urgency of the situation.
While the testimonies are, to a layperson, shocking, sadly none of the experts working in the areas of gendered violence, criminology, or school gender culture spoken to by Guardian Australia was surprised by the revelations. Even more tragic is the overwhelming sense that no one in their teens is much shocked by it either. As a testimony from one girl stated: “Most of my friends had either been raped, sexually assaulted or received unwanted sexual attention by the time we were in year 11.”
The issue of consent is the red-hot centre of a broader ecosystem that has seen rape culture continue seemingly unchecked by the decades of awareness programs and years of school lectures about respectful relationships. The messages aren’t cutting through. A report out last year found that women in their late teens are more likely than other Australians to be victims of sexual assault, while young men of the same age group are most likely to be perpetrators.
So what is the culture that allows this to flourish? What are the weather patterns that create this climate for sexual assault to continue generation after generation, that allow the casual brutality, the animalistic mob mentality, the shocking sense of entitlement in young boys to take what they like from girls’ bodies without consent?
In the hundreds of testimonies publicly available at the time of writing, common themes emerged to point at these cultural factors.
‘I thought he was my friend’
Many of the testimonies presented in the petition involved an element of hurt and confusion around the status of the girls’ relationship with their perpetrators. They believed that they were safe being with them, or to go somewhere with them, to share a bedroom with them after a party because they “thought he was my friend”.
For Michael Salter, professor in criminology at the University of New South Wales and expert in masculinity, there is a crucial phase in adolescent development as gender identities start to form and there are vital questions to ask about boys’ transition from primary school to high school, and the sorts of peer structures that get established.
“At this age they become very gender segregated, and become militant around gender norms, in many cases boys are actively discouraged from seeing their female school friends as human beings – it’s a total failure of empathy, a failure to see a girl as human.
“Codes of behaviour are very strict during that period of time. Boys are subject to physical violence from other boys, can be seen in some way as weak or overly sympathetic if they are interested in platonic relationships which then become actively sexualised by young boys. That’s not necessarily true with girls.”
Victoria Rawlings, researcher in gender, sexuality and education at the University of Sydney, concurs about this time in boys’ lives and that “gender plays a big role in this”.
“Boys get rewards or punishments based on how successfully they perform their gender. They get compliments, social capital, even Instagram likes when they get it right, or inversely they get frowned upon, excluded and bullied when they get it wrong. Through these interactions, sometimes young men learn that the most valued masculinity is that with an aggressive heterosexuality.
“Research shows us that in many social environments, masculinity is seen as successful when it’s paired with a kind of misogyny – things like rating girls’ appearances or sexual performances in chat groups, taking and sharing non-consensual images of girls, or daring friends to perform sexual acts with particular girls or women, sometimes without consent,” Rawlings says.
The enduring idea that “that’s just what boys are like” needs to be constantly challenged, says Rawlings, by open and critical conversations about gender norms, gender diversity, and cultural values of masculinity.
“It’s not that all masculinity is the problem,” she says. “Masculinity is just a social construct – so we need to pay attention to when it’s constructed in a very narrow, reductive way that encourages violence.”
Bianca Fileborn, senior lecturer in criminology and researcher in sexual violence at the University of Melbourne, says “at the cusp of high school there’s a huge amount of anxiety around whether they belong or can successfully establish their identity as a man. In general there’s a lot of pressure to fit in and conform, and there are consequences if they don’t.
“They are actually being policed by other young men who are ensuring they are doing their masculinity properly.”
Salter says: “It’s an age where we see incredibly misogynistic and deeply homophobic cultures emerge and I don’t think these cultures are broken up purely by consent conversations or conversations about healthy relationships.”
‘Afterwards I had guys start messaging me and asking me to come over and give them head, as if it was a service I offered’
The above is the last line in a story from a girl who was orally raped in a park near a large group of friends drinking. Being forced on to her knees by a boy she’d just met was her first experience with oral sex. The assault aside, it’s one of many instances where boys are sharing details of their “conquests” with their friends. There are also many others of boys sharing nude photos and videos illicitly taken.
The mentality of the mob is something that is deeply disturbing here. According to experts it stems from gender straitjackets that get put on before puberty, and plays into the previous comments about what boys are rewarded for.
“When other people don’t say it’s not OK, how is it going to stop?” asks Anita Will of the Kingsford Legal Centre, UNSW, which works with schools on early intervention education programs about sexual harassment, including the difference between it and sexual assault. “If his friends are telling him it’s OK, and the girl is too afraid to talk about it, the silence continues.”
University of Western Sydney’s Prof Kerry Robinson, an expert in gender and sexuality who has been working in this area for decades, makes note of the number of stories in the testimonies where girls talk about boys standing by, doing nothing, and says this is a crucial piece of the rape culture puzzle: “These friends who won’t intervene are working in bystander mode, and that makes them part of it.
“The non-intervention is highly problematic. In that context I’ve said to young men before, ‘why don’t you intervene?’ and they say ‘we end up being targets as well’. Well, young men need to be challenging each other, but they can’t do that because of the power of not participating, of not being seen to be part of the group … it’s very powerful. They will not stand up for the girls, even though these girls are their friends, that’s the power of [masculine hegemony], it’s just wild,” Robinson says.
“We all have to be challenging young men’s relationships, and call each other out on this stuff. Culture shift will only happen when young people, schools, and families, are all working together, not in isolation from each other.”
‘I blacked out, and when I woke up he was on top of me’
Descriptions of blackouts and memory loss due to extreme alcohol use are integral parts of many of the stories: I woke up and he was pushing my head down; I came to and he was penetrating me with his fingers; I woke up and his penis was in my mouth; I woke up and he was raping me.
Alcohol and drugs are associated with over half of sexual assaults according to Bianca Fileborn, “so it’s an unsurprising feature here”.
“At this age young people are starting to party and drink and do social things with their friends without adults present. This creates a context where alcohol can be used, and they’re inexperienced,” she says.
Alcohol allows opportunities and excuses to occur, she says, but boys need to have a clear understanding of what the law says: that someone who is intoxicated cannot legally give consent.
“Alcohol reduces inhibitions,” says Victoria Rawlings, “but those attitudes are there somewhere. Alcohol allows them to manifest more readily, but the elements of culture that encourage or reward these behaviours is where the problem lies.”
‘He would put me in uncomfortable positions that he had seen from porn websites’
Many are quick to point the finger at the easy access to porn websites as a factor in both the objectification of women and the aggressive nature of male sexual behaviour. Certainly the thought of pre-adolescent boys seeing hardcore violent porn in the years before they receive any sort of education about sex and relationships is troubling.
According to an ABC investigation into the use of porn in Australia, the estimation is that more than 90% of boys and 60% of girls have seen online porn, and that 88% of the most popular porn includes physical aggression.
Michael Salter believes that access to porn should be age-verified: “It is well past time we had a serious conversation about regulation around adult content, we have age verification for online gambling sites – there’s no reason why this should not be applied to adult content sites as well. Basically we have an entire generation exposed to this material really in the absence of any government or industry regulation.”
Until such time though, context and education is needed: “Let’s be realistic,” says Chanel Contos, “You’re not going to stop 13-year-old boys from watching porn, but we can stop it being their sole form of sex education.”
‘It’s only now that I realise it was sexual assault’
Ignorance of what constitutes sexual assault is rife among the testimonies. The power of girls speaking out in this petition has not only empowered others to follow suit but has made many realise that they too have had experiences that constitute a reportable crime which they kept to themselves, sometimes for years, because of shame and the culture of silence.
The obvious point here is that boys are clearly ignorant of what constitutes a crime, and what constitutes consent, which is where this all began.
Every expert spoken to by Guardian Australia said that education around consent and sex must start, in an age-appropriate way, from early childhood in every school, and that it must be mandatory.
But schools have been reluctant, says Kerry Robinson, to get caught up in media furores about education in gender and identity: “This is all caught up in the same thing – it’s really quite complex, and what we’ve tried to do is treat it really simply, and there’s embarrassment around it, [it’s] taboo, and this gets passed generation to generation, and it becomes inculturated.”
In the home, she says, “the talk, the one talk” is not nearly adequate.
“Parents say, have you had ‘the talk’ but there can’t be just one. It’s an ongoing education process that is built on over years. You start with age appropriate stuff and you build on it and it becomes a more sophisticated story. That’s the way to change culture.”
‘He raped me twice and they let him get away with it. What more do you need to know?’
This one-sentence testimony above was bleak in its brevity, and sharp in meaning: boys and men get away with sexual assault, this is a large part of how and why it keeps on happening. Accountability for sexual violence is so low in our justice systems – only one in 10 reported cases of sexual assault ends in conviction – and the chilling effect trickles downwards to other institutions and schools.
Is there enough accountability in schools for this behaviour?
Bianca Fileborn says it’s a difficult question when dealing with children: “It’s not always appropriate to instigate a criminal justice response, given their age and inexperience, but we really lack alternative responses to hold young men to account without being overly punitive.
“I would like to see greater development in areas like restorative justice, and educational approaches, to be able to hold them to account, perhaps make reparations of some kind.”
For Michael Salter, questions of accountability go right to the top.
“There’s no question that what we’re seeing unfold around the allegations of Brittany Higgins are precisely the same dynamics writ large across many institutions and workplaces, including those involving children,” Salter says.
“These are the unwritten rules [of] sexual violence: you are very unlikely to be caught engaging in this behaviour and very unlikely to suffer consequences. The primary focus is on the victim, her credibility, her truthfulness. We have not developed cultural and legal mechanics that are effective in restraining sexual violence, we are just not seeing the reduction in harm after 40 years of activism and law reform,” he says.
“And we wonder why domestic violence is such an issue,” says Kerry Robinson. “Or why something like this happens in parliament and gets covered up. Schools would have to know these things are happening, and like our parliament, the whole thing gets pushed under the carpet, and the cone of silence drops down, and the reputation of the institution becomes the most important thing.
“And the collateral is young women.”
• If you or someone you know is impacted by sexual assault, family or domestic violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit www.1800RESPECT.org.au. In an emergency, call 000. In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 and the domestic abuse helpline is 0808 2000 247. In the US, the suicide prevention lifeline is 1-800-273-8255 and the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines can be found via www.befrienders.org
