Why Do Boys Assault Girls In Front Of Their Friends?

When the link to a news story about a group of private school boys sexually assaulting a teenage girl went around the office yesterday, we all assumed it was, for lack of a better word, “old” news: the horrific Scots College sexual assault incident — in which one 13- and two 14-year-old boys were accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in a Bondi Junction laneway — happened last week. Had our colleague been living under a rock? (Or more likely, consumed by a deadline?) How did she miss that story?

Except she hadn’t. This was an entirely new story with an almost identical cast – meaning almost identical headlines – only this time involving boys from a different private school. 

In the newest horrific incident, three teenage boys, including two students from St Gregory’s College in Campbelltown, were charged on Wednesday over the alleged sexual assault of a teenage girl that occured on Saturday. 

One boy has reportedly been charged with 11 offences (including six counts of aggravated sexual assault in company with others and three counts of rape); a second boy was charged with six counts of sexual assault in company with others, rape and common assault; while the third boy was charged with two counts of aggravated sexual assault in company with others. All three were denied bail and were due to appear before the children’s court (children’s court) on Thursday.

“In company with others.” It’s a chilling phrase, but one that’s permeated the news this week, the same week that we heard about Sydney Swans players accused of sexual assault in the early hours of Monday morning after celebrating a win against Essendon. (No police interviews have taken place and no arrests have been made. The AFL has suspended the players from the rest of the season, but has not implied guilt, simply stating that their behaviour fell short of the standards expected of them.)

What is it, exactly, that compels boys and men to (allegedly) sexually assault women “in company with others”? That’s the question that’s been doing the rounds in the marie claire office and in many of our group chats. Don’t men have better things to do on boys’ night than having allegedly non-consensual sexual encounters with women in front of each other? 

This article is an attempt to answer that question: why do (some, not all) men and boys attack women with their friends? We’re not going to go into the specifics of any of the cases that were in the news this week because of certain legalities and due process, and also because, as Chanel Contos, the founder of Teach Us Consent, says, these are not rare occurrences. “This stuff happens every week,” she says. “It’s just that sometimes the media has a moment with it, usually when there’s been a high-profile case, and there’s a cognitive bias towards reporting on other cases.” There are a lot of women in indescribable pain this week, and every week, with many of their stories going unreported — to the police or by the media. 

Dr Katie Seidler is a clinical and forensic psychologist and the director of LSC Psychology. She specialises in assessment and treatment of offenders, including sexual offenders, and she agrees with Contos that these types of cases aren’t new. “I think we’re identifying them better and people are more comfortable with coming forward and identifying their experience than they have been previously.”

Looking for an answer as to why these attacks happen can be misconstrued as trying to find a reason, as if there could be one, or an excuse or a justification. So, to put it plainly: the desperate search for answers lies not in explaining away the atrocious behaviour of some men and boys, but understanding as a pathway to intervention and prevention. Ensuring the safety of women and girls is at the centre of the matter, always.

Samuel Ware is the executive director of The Men’s Project at Jesuit Social Services, which works to promote healthy relationships and prevent violence, abuse and harm, with a particular focus on men and boys. His team’s Man Box research is a study that focuses on the attitudes to manhood and the behaviours of young Australian men aged 18 to 30, and the organisation collaborates with the University of Melbourne on researching harmful sexual behaviour among young people, looking at how harm develops, what might interrupt it and where action could taken earlier to prevent it. “We’re interested in hope and what we can do about it,” he says. “Understanding these things gives us somewhere to intervene.”

When it comes to group sexual assaults committed by men and boys, he says there isn’t a simple reason for it. “There’s no single impulse or thing that drives [this behaviour],” he says. “There’s not one cause, nor is there one type of boy or man who causes sexual harm or commits sexual assault.” 

Instead, he explains, it’s the conditions that surround these boys and men that need to be looked at. “It’s the interaction between personal attitudes, masculine expectations and group dynamics.”

Here’s the recipe for disaster: take one boy who hates girls, give him an outsized sense of entitlement, sprinkle in toxic notions of masculinity and a big scoop of misplaced aggression. Put him in a time of his life when peer pressure and the need for acceptance outweigh any individual morals or values he may hold, stir in the fear of being bullied for calling out bad behaviour, and top it all off with a girl who’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. On a side dish, place a sporting hero (or heroes) who role-model the same behaviour.

In a 2016 Vice article titled “What Drives Young Men to Gang Rape Girls?”, forensic psychologist Dr. N. G. Berrill said, “Teenage boys in a group can be the most dangerous human beings on the planet.” (Man or bear?) Individually, an adolescent boy may know right from wrong, but the group mentality drowns out personal values. “The men involved in gang rape may be worried more about their reputation with each other, and their status as dominant males, than the life of the women they assault,” said Berrill.

Contos echoes the sentiment, referring to a study of male behaviour on college campuses out of the US (Chris O’Sullivan (1991), “Acquaintance Gang Rape on Campus,”). It found that “gang rapes documented over a 10-year period mostly involved men who existed in all-male environments, such as fraternities, or were part of a sports team, such as baseball or football,” Contos explains. “This pattern of behaviour is attributed to the idea of group loyalty that’s found and fostered in small all-male groups, such as teams or living spaces or schools. And in these situations, group mentality can override personal integrity.” Loyalty to the boys, above all else.

In Ware’s Man Box research, 95 per cent of boys said they were bothered when they witness harassment of a woman or girl, but only about a third of them would intervene. “There’s a gap between what boys personally believe and what they think other boys expect of them,” Ware says. “Most boys recognise when something isn’t right. But there’s pressure around status, fitting in, sexual performance, proving yourself, not backing down.” 

“There are some very distorted and exaggerated ways that men perform their masculinity to their peers,” Seidler says, adding that the group dynamic is “where they need to get the validation of their peers that they’re a ‘man’.” In her experience, “there is often one person in the group whose idea it is to commit the sexual assault, someone who’s more deviant or aggressive than the others who starts the ball rolling, and then it cascades from there as other males in the environment jump in wanting to prove they’re not weak, that they’re a man as well, that they can do whatever they like to women, too.”

Matt Tyler is an adjunct professor at Monash University who has worked across research and policy with a focus on men and boys, and preventing domestic, family and sexual violence. He says another layer to this is that through pornography and online cultures, some boys are being socialised to “feel entitled to get what they want, and that when you hear ‘No,’ you have a right to assert your desire to get what you want”. 

“It would be naive to ignore the sexual and gendered culture young people are absorbing online,” Ware adds. “Our research with the University of Melbourne identifies pornography as one of several pathways associated with harm, and experts we’ve worked with suggest that pornography, for some young people, is contributing massively to a blurring of sex and violence, and that’s all sitting alongside misogynistic and hateful content online at a time when these adolescent boys are developing their understanding of sex, consent and relationships.”

And so, the next question is: what now? This week we’ve heard a lot about earlier intervention and education in schools – but we can’t wait another decade for that generation of fully realised and respectful boys to grow up and set new standards of what it means to be a man. What can be done now?

Tyler references the federal government’s promise to update the respectful relationships curriculum, which is currently lagging. “It’s not being updated as quickly as harms to young people are evolving,” he says. “The curriculum is not updated and teachers are not supported to implement it. It’s not rocket science: if you don’t resource the implementation, then most Australian kids don’t have access to decent respectful relationships education.” He would also like to see the implementation of peer leadership, where year 10 to 12 kids work with year seven to nine kids to help with group dynamics. Peer to peer messaging is very powerful.”

Ware says it’s also about rebranding loyalty. It’s about making it cool to care. “Don’t just teach a boy about his own behaviour,” he says. “Help a boy know what to do, safely, when someone else is crossing a line. We want to build peer cultures where care, consent and looking out for other people is what earns respect and what’s cool.”

In a statement to marie claire, Patty Kinnersly CEO of Our Watch, a national leader in preventing violence against women and children, said: “Peer culture matters. When disrespect towards women is laughed off or unchallenged, it can create a sense that abuse or even assault is acceptable. The opposite is also true. Men and boys can have a powerful influence on each other by challenging disrespect and making it clear that sexual violence is never acceptable.”

“These all-male institutions have such potential to be used as significant cultural-setters, if it was a priority for them,” Contos says. “It’s the perfect situation; you have captive attention and multiple touchpoints for mentoring, togetherness – they could be the biggest catalyst for change in this culture.”

When it comes to the adult men who offend in groups, education in schools is clearly not going to reach them. “There’s a really massive relationship education gap for boys and men aged 17 to 24,” Tyler says. He believes there are opportunities for campaigns, like Respect Victoria’s “What Kind of Man Do You Want to Be?” campaign that “push boys and men towards engaging online content that combats some of the more toxic voices through the manosphere.” It doesn’t need to be overly complicated, he says. “It’s about enabling boys and men to come off autopilot and think about the gap between the person they want to be and the actions they take.”

Seidler gives the analogy of treating sexual assault like a public health issue: you want to implement primary prevention, which wards against, say, smoking in the first place and takes the form of public education; then you want secondary prevention, which is aimed at people who are at risk of lung cancer, and try to reduce their risk with education and support services; and then tertiary prevention for people who have already been diagnosed with lung cancer. “The only way we’re going to be successful is by thinking of it in terms of primary, secondary and tertiary prevention,” she says. “Otherwise we’re not going to reduce the risk to the community.”

Seidler is hopeful that progress can be made. In fact, she’s seen it in the 30 years of her career. “I’m really pleased that we live in a world where we’re talking about this now, and our children are learning about this, and discussions are happening at home. Until we have these conversations as a community, we will never fix this problem.”

And in the meantime, for the next boy’s night, maybe they could try pjs, wine and a face mask “in company with others” instead? “Yes,” Seidler agrees, “they could stay home and talk about their emotions.”