A Dark Precursor

The Cornell case has provided a reminder that police and juridical agencies are pretty ineffective at preventing sexual assault and at holding people accountable for it. One common response has been that a more effective strategy would involve education, ‘teaching men not to rape.’ If we’re serious about this, let’s talk about how deep the roots go, which means talking about bullying, hazing, and their connection to misogyny and rape culture. 

One thing about what happened at Cornell that strikes a lot of people is that none of the dozens of people on the group chat intervened. Speaking as someone who was persistently bullied from elementary school into high school, this is entirely unsurprising. In all those years of open peer bullying, never once did anyone else try to stop it, either directly or by going to authorities. Nor did adult authorities do anything proactive. The most peer support I got was a certain amount of kindness from some folks—mostly girls—when it was more or less out of sight of the broader spaces where I was typically a target. But when the bullies were doing their thing, I was on my own, even if lots of other people were there while it was happening.

The parallel between this and the ‘group chat’ episode should be obvious. But people should also think of some of the more high profile hazing cases they’ve heard about recently—and more to the point all of the cases they probably witnessed, were subjected to, or participated in and which have been more or less open secrets for years if not decades.

It should not be difficult to see how these are all iterations of a similar pattern: someone (or some group of people) is marked as vulnerable, and set beyond the bounds of protection. To intervene in their favor is, effectively, to set oneself outside those same bounds, to leave the protected group. And so people don’t do it. This sort of dynamic is much more common, especially early, among boys—but its social impact is wider and much more comprehensive. So that one could say that it’s one of the first lessons many children learn in the overall structure of patriarchy. Girls understand that their own protected status is contingent and revisable, and boys understand that active allegiance to the in-group is obligatory. Hazing practices are ritualized reminders of the same lesson from childhood: you’re protected, but only insofar as your loyalty to ‘the team’ is absolute, as proven by your willingness to endure a more or less serious round of violence and humiliation (which is often at least somewhat sexualized and feminizing). 

By the time people hit adolescence then, let alone college-age, the basic patterns of response here are well established and have been repeatedly and painfully reiterated—even for the most socially successful and privileged. Given the gendered patterns involved, which associate vulnerability and femininity (or femeninization) quite early, it is hardly surprising that college age women report having experienced sexual assault at extremely high rates, and that relatively few of those cases are reported or result in any sanction against those who commit assault. Nor should it be surprising that when official complaints are made and substantiated, the interests and well being of the victims are often discounted relative to the ‘future’ or ‘potential’ of the perpetrators. Sexual assault victim stigma is, in this light, another iteration of the stigma attached to social vulnerability. 

So given all of this, what would it take to ‘teach men not to rape?’ It might sound flip to say ‘dismantle the patriarchy,’ but it’s also strictly correct. But more to the point, what dismantling the patriarchy means in educational terms is preventing the cycle of social vulnerabilization of certain (typically feminized) subjects from establishing itself in the first place—or at least from continuing to reproduce itself.

As a matter of adult education, that means, as my colleague Whitney Cox put it when she read a draft of the above, “teaching men that these behaviors are intolerable whether they themselves are doing those behaviors or not.”* But even more broadly and as a social project, it means teaching everyone to collectively reject those behaviors and stop them. And that, in turn, as a practical matter means holding kids responsible for letting this stuff happen around them as well as holding parents and educators responsible for not putting a stop to it.  A lot of people are going to balk at how many people’s conduct becomes at least to some extent blameworthy under this standard. It’s going to involve a lot of uncomfortable examination of deep and well-established structures of complicity. But the alternative is to continue to accept the dynamic of stigmatized vulnerability and all the violence that flows from it. 

* Whitney notes that, in the context of our conversation, what she meant was already what I go on to say here, namely that everyone needs to be taught this.