The Morrison ministry has long been criticised for being a boys club. Members are overwhelmingly white men who attended private schools. In fact, this has been common in both Labor and Liberal cabinets for decades.
Recently, thousands of testimonies from young women have been collated in a public word document detailing sexual assault by, predominantly, young men who went to private boys’ schools in Australia. The wave has prompted parents and students to demand better teaching of sexual consent in Australian schools.
Meanwhile, a scandal continues involving a current cabinet minister accused of the 1988 rape of a 16-year-old while she was on a school trip. Media organisations can’t go into details that would identify the alleged rapist for risk of defamation.
Of the 22 current federal cabinet ministers, 16 are men. Thirteen of those men went to private high schools. Of those 13 private schools, five were single-sex schools and seven were religious.
A string of allegations
The young women’s collected testimonies, most of which relate to incidents that occurred in the past five years, were collated by former Kambala Church of England Girls’ School student Chanel Contos who launched a viral petition drawing attention to student sexual assault. Many of the testimonies give damning accounts of students from NSW private schools.
Sydney Grammar, where Communications Minister Paul Fletcher attended, has been named five times in the testimonies. Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s school, Sydney Boys High School (a state school), has been named once.
Outside of those contemporary testimonies, many of the schools attended by ministers have allegations dating back decades.
A former teacher at Attorney-General Christian Porter’s Hale School faced sex charges allegedly committed against under-age girls. A former humanities dux at Xavier College, where Education Minister Dan Tehan went, later solicited young girls into prostitution. At Social Services Minister Stuart Robert’s Rockhampton Grammar School a pupil alleged he was sexually assaulted by a prefect.
A problem of private or all-boys schools?
University of Melbourne lecturer and researcher in sexual violence Bianca Fileborn told Crikey that while sexual violence occurs both in public and private schools, certain features of private schools need to be addressed.
Private schools may take action to protect their reputation and minimise a perpetrator’s actions, she says, while students are more likely to have access to legal resources to defend themselves.
“There are some concerns that all-male schools are a hyper-masculine environment … and the attitudes that underpin sexual violence can really be supported within an all-male peer group,” she said.
There’s is a growing body of research on groupthink and male peer support of sexual violence.
Finally, we may just be more likely to hear from private school students.
“It might also just be a reflection of who feels able to speak out and disclose their experiences,” she said.
Expert in gender and sexuality at the University of Western Sydney Professor Kerry Robinson told Crikey sexual violence was an issue facing all young people in schools.
“Single-sex boys schools can perpetuate a dominant masculinity that fosters aggressive competitive values that are about distancing themselves from any alignment with feminine values and powering over others,” she said.
“All schooling cultures and institutional practices in schools can reinforce gender and power inequities that contribute to the perpetuation of gender-based harassment and violence, including sexual harassment.”
Robinson says that consent education “needs to be part of young people’s learning from an early age”, something that can be done “in age-appropriate ways to teach body autonomy”.
Importantly, consent education likely wouldn’t have stopped the accused cabinet minister from allegedly raping the woman. As the woman’s statement outlined, the alleged rape appeared to be planned.
But it would take away the “ignorance” defence and help change attitudes toward sexual violence.
I don’t think consent training in itself is enough. I remember starting uni in the mid-nineties and suddenly meeting girls from very expensive private schools – they all had eating related disorders of some kind or/and significant body issues, were boy obsessed and all had sex very young. Coming from an outer suburban co-ed catholic school I was shocked by the self-loathing and idolising of the boyz. There was also easy access to booze, drugs and no parental supervision. Again, this was opposite to my suburban upbringing of limited money and therefore limited access to drugs/alcohol and parents or teachers hovering around. The combination of low self-esteem, hyper sexualisation at 12 or 13 and ability to set up parent free parties create the environment for bad things to happen. This creates an environment that enable boys to be predators and girls to seek validation in any form they can get it – putting themselves in situations that increase exposure to potential predators. Worse, is that this is normalised for both boys and girls, when really it isn’t normal at all.
Well done Anna.
For comparison, at the risk of over-generalising, it was not too different at the end of the 60s. Depending upon the company, from about 2pm Friday, the girls from private schools were like dogs off a leash. Bacardi, McWilliams Cream sherry and Stones Green Ginger (in that order of guest preference) worked wonders: a taste for red plonk appearing later.
It those days guys paid for everything including the ballgown and the shoes. Even now, I reject “Dutch”.
For what it is worth, private schools had the highest matriculation rates (by far) but (absence of strict discipline?) also the highest dropout rates.
Thanks Anna, my name is Anna too and I could have written this comment. I attended an all women’s college at uni having gone to a coed school in the country. Many of the young women I met seemed intimidated by the young men- certainly unaware that they were just normal sometimes insecure people too and many of the young men struggled so were vulnerable to misogynistic attitudes. I apologise for generalisations but in brief, the world is co-ed, single sex schools seem outdated and harmful to social development.
I had the same experience. As a teenager I was shocked by the lewd crude behaviour of the rich: both boys and girls. I would never have drunk alcohol alone with these boys. The girls were willing to marry them even though they were bad husband material.
Why blame the schools though? Shouldn’t the parents and other adults be more responsible?
I’m generalising of course. I know many fine expensively educated people.
Anna, my son and daughter went to a co-ed public school, that was always going to be the case due to my personal experience of the social education denied me by going to an all boys school. Surrounding said public school are most of the wealthiest and expensive private schools in Oz. Some of their friends from primary went to single sex schools and they regularly remark to me about the eating disorders, which they only see from the upmarket girls’ schools, and the latent or blatant misogyny, or at best, pathetic immaturity of the boys from upmarket boys’ schools.
It’s no accident, you come out of those single sex schools years behind your co-ed colleagues. It plays out further, with poorer uni results for those who come from private schools, which are mostly if not all single sex. Actual research outcomes.
I have no doubt that this is partly explained by them having to spend so much of their energies working out how to deal with members of the opposite sex. Sad that you have to leave school to get an education, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde. I think Churchill had similar misgivings about education generally.
Is the high incidence of sexual violence from the private school brigade in any way linked to the sacred Christian view that child rape is something to be forgiven and concealed by the nearest bishop or other church management dignitary ?
The single sex structure of schools is archaic – and you can’t discuss single sex male schools without acknowledging that single sex female schools suffer from an idealised view of males – having experienced school systems in Europe and the US returning to the NSW school system was like going back 50 years… single sex, outdated curricula, and conversations about private schools as though its some legacy of supremacy… just horrid.
Then unlike Europe, the obsessive culture in Australia continues with ‘pale and male’ sport after school years, whether participating, supporting or attending and surrounded by a fog of alcohol; how many national or state policies or deals have been agreed to over drinks in a corporate box or the MCC Long Room?
I can tell anyone, from personal teaching experience, that Europe and the USA, while quite different, have their own problems too.
Moreover, for any class of 14+ year olds about 80%+ of the class is living with a step-parent or a single parent.
My son in the 80s was selected to go to Sydney Boys, after public primary – he was the only one in his class with two original parents, still living together.
I was pleasantly surprised by the culture at Carey Grammar and how it emphasised respect, tolerance, understanding and celebrated diversity. This is largely as testament to the former principal, Phillip Grutzner, who has now become Headmaster at Melbourne Grammar.
While one swallow does not a springtime make, it is possible we are witnessing, overdue as it may be, a transformation of attitudes.
I initially read that as “Crikey Grammar” and thought a bit of post-COVID branching out was going on.
The fact that it costs $33k plus to attend Carey Grammar would suggest that ‘celebrating diversity’ is more a concept to be discussed in class than an actuality in the school yard.
I thought the “one swallow” allusion very relevant to the ill-weathered matters under consideration. I believe human nature does not change, but behaviors may, as with attitudes and training. I, myself being a gentle boy, was bullied at every one of the five public schools I attended. I recall an incident at lunchtime. It was 1944. Another boy was teasing me. I made a haymaker swing with my fist that whizzed by the nose of my aggressor, a boy named McDonough. The change of his expression from sneering contempt to total surprise is something I shall never forget. The bell rang at that moment, -in more ways than one. He never bothered me again.
Let us also see which party has the greater number of privately schooled party/members/supporters.
And what would that prove, in this argument?
“We only have a slight majority of good ol’ boys”
One might speculate that the attitudes and culture that foster such disregard and mistreatment of women (and the aged, and refugees, and the poor…) are to be found in the supporters of those who either commit such heinous acts or attempt to dismiss or downplay them. Worse still, they inform policy, and therefore adversely affect us all.