For parents of girls just learning of the alleged 2024 gang rape of an undergraduate by seven fraternity members at Cornell University, the emotional response is likely maddeningly familiar: anger, fear, revulsion, and a here-we-go-again type of exhaustion.
Parents of boys, though, may be grappling with feelings that are a bit more complicated — confusion and dread, for example, wondering how in the world all the boys have gone along with the assault. And asking: How can I ensure my son won’t ever do the same?
What We Know About Group Think and Sexual Assault
“What we know is that the potential for the peer group to rule is powerful, and begins quite early in a boy’s life,” says psychologist Michael Reichert, an expert on boys and men and author of books including How to Raise a Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men. “It’s reinforced not just by the reward of being included and in the in group and cool, but by not being as subject to harassment and bullying. For some boys, it becomes a matter of survival.”
Boys are conditioned to collude with the masculine group norm at the expense of their own value system very early in life — at around 4. That’s according to research by Stanford psychologist Judy Chu, he says, which showed that boys, from age 4 to 6, “all changed and began conforming to a set of masculine norms at the expense of individuality and personal expression,” shifting everything from the toys they played with to the way they walked to align with conventional masculine norms. They also “spontaneously formed themselves into what they called a ‘mean team,’” and began to harass girls in class.
The early pressure toward group think, he adds, pushes boys to “other” girls, retain a certain social position, and feel more bereft and alone, “with less access to someone they can really be themselves with.”
This early conditioning and endorsement of hostile, patriarchal masculine values tends to lead to a belief that aggression is a way to solve problems, says Sarah Murnen, professor of psychology at Kenyon College who has studied toxic masculinity and sexual assault. And according to research, those are the men more likely to perpetrate sexual violence — particularly if they move in groups, like fraternities, that are insulated from outside forces, value group secrecy and loyalty, subscribe to rigid ideas of gender, frequently objectify women, think that heavy use of alcohol and sexual promiscuity are ways to be masculine, and believe that “if a woman gets drunk, she’s fair game.”
How Can Parents Counteract These Toxic Male Messages?
Reichert believes the trick is to be the person their son can rely on to be himself around — or at least to help foster a relationship with someone else who can be that person.
“Every boy needs someone that they can tell knows and cares about him,” he says, whether it’s a parent, teacher, coach or anybody “that has a strong sense, in the boy’s mind, of who they are and what they’re capable of — not just athletically or academically, but morally. It’s about holding them to who they known themselves to be.”
As far as helping your son not buckle to peer pressure, Reichert points out that there will be “lots and lots of opportunities” to notice, from an early age, when your he is “giving into that pressure and going along with things that really don’t represent who they are.” And rather than react with scolding or shaming, he suggests, it’s important to “build upon what hopefully is an open channel where the boy can tell that there’s room for him to be honest about what he’s feeling.” Which might be prompted by simply saying, “I don’t understand why you did that. I’m sure there’s a reason, but why don’t you talk to me about it?”
The whole point, he says, is to “reinforce the boy’s own internal moral voice, rather than impose one’s own.”
Murnen says that support for healthy male behavior should not only fall on Mom or Dad.
“Yes, parents have a role to play, but we definitely need comprehensive sex education,” she says, pointing out that sex education in the U.S. is left up to the states and that lessons that focus on anything beyond physiology and few and far between. Instead, she advocates for education that includes “focusing on gendered sexual stereotypes, on consent, and on what healthy relationships look like,” as well as on “pornography literacy,” as it’s where a lot of young people are getting their education.
Until such education is a reality, though, parents can help fill in the gap. “It’s not just ‘the talk,’” she says, crediting the writings of Peggy Orenstien. “It’s talking all the time in a very casual way about sex — and talking about consent is crucial. That a person cannot consent when they’re intoxicated.”
Murnen also stresses the importance of boys having male role models, echoing Reichert’s emphasis on their “healthy expression of feelings in general.”
“We kind of put boys in ‘the man box,’ where they’re not allowed to express certain kinds of feeling — and if you can’t express certain kinds of feelings like fear, or love, or appreciation, those feelings get transformed into what is more acceptable, as anger and hostility,” she says. “We have a fear of what’s associated with feminine in the culture, and we need to allow boys to break out of that.”
Because while a lot of parents think that they must teach their boys values and morality, Reichert stresses, “I just haven’t found that to be the case. I think that we’re born with a strong sense of right and wrong, and what happens to boys is that they get it buried by the culture and the masculine socialization they go through.” An important job for parents, he says, is to help them let it out.
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