Louise Roberts: The zeal to get teen boys for sex offences will have consequences

Australia’s young male population is undergoing a wave of abusive suspicion and guilt trips which could lead to serious issues as they become men, writes Louise Roberts.

It’s now the job of teenage boys to prove they are innocent. They have to build a strategy to deal with the abusive wave of misandry and suspicion that smashes them on the rocks again and again like the dark waves of a night ocean.

Where are the advocates for our young men, because they sure as hell need us paddling towards them at speed.

Is their plight not sexy enough or woke enough? It’s easier to assume they are all predators so all young women can be empowered, always ready to fend off the boys’ poisonous and inevitably criminal masculinity.

What began as a mission to teach sexual consent in Australia has now descended into an unforgivable and ugly situation in our society.

Sydney Boys High School principal, Dr Kim Jaggar. Picture: Supplied

That a Sydney boys high school can spend tens of thousands of dollars on a program about sexual consent, when there have been no cases of inappropriate or illegal treatment of girls by their students, is sending a very clear message.

The living Australian male is being painted as a figure that everyone needs to radically change.

That’s how it was encapsulated to me this week by a professional in the mental health industry, someone who has seen his share of angst and helplessness in dealing with suicidal males.

“I am a teenager. I am white. I am male. I am the arch enemy” is what he gets told on terrifyingly high ­rotation.

We need to be empowering boys like we do girls.

Instead we are making young males cynical and defensive. Don’t forget, these are the fathers and husbands of tomorrow, so what is the destructive end game here?

Sure, there are some vile and abusive men out there, as there are women.

Sydney Boys High School, where a program about sexual consent has begun.

And to be at a moment in history where women especially can be heard and get justice for being sexually assaulted is to be commended.

But the secondary school in ­question — Sydney Boys High School — says it is tackling a “culture of sexual harassment and “under-lying ­sexism”.

“Despite the fact that we have endeavoured to address behaviours around consent through our PD/H/PE units … our messages have not cut through comprehensively in the area of consent,” the principal told parents last week.

Meanwhile, an Education Department spokeswoman said: “Zero cases of sexual assault or rape involving Sydney Boys High School have led to the decision to expand the consent curriculum at the school.”

If I had a son attending that school, I’d be withdrawing him today.

We risk making adolescent males feel so under siege that they can’t walk freely in the community on their own. One of them is a lone wolf, more than two of them is a pack looking to prey on women. Or so the cliches go.

Boys are all being 'tarred with the same brush' over the issue of consent being taught in schools. Artwork: Terry Pontikos.

So, when will we mandate that boys have to travel in pairs so they can keep each other accountable?

The truth is, we want and need young men confident enough to intervene when they see wrong doing. In private and in public.

We don’t want them to feel so persecuted that they will walk past ­because it is just too hard to do the decent thing.

At a barbecue on the weekend, the conversation turned to our collective teenage sons and there was a realisation despite the smoke stinging my eyes.

We rarely fret about the booze, the threat of drugs or the friend in the group we reluctantly tolerate, the apocryphal mate that has haunted parents for generations.

What keeps us awake at night is the persecution and the mental warfare being waged on boys now, the gender battle ripping out their masculine traits and instincts.

We don’t want to see our son’s light go out.

But based on the trajectory we’re on, a young man is going to end up as someone who feels inferior to everybody else, especially women.

Later in life, if he has a daughter, he’s not going to be able to take her swimming or wrestle on the sofa or tickle her good-naturedly. He will have to hold his daughter at arm’s length so we regress 100 years when females were held at arm’s length and inevitably subjugated.

The issue of consent has turned into a cycle of abuse. And we know the effects of long term abuse. We have to start treating our boys with more respect.

We tell girls to be strong, to stand up.

But how can we have their male peers feeling like they’ve done something wrong just by leaving their home, careering towards all manner of terrible mental illnesses, social anxieties and phobias.

It’s one thing to discuss consent.

It’s another thing to guilt trip teen boys and we have no idea what is awaiting us — and them — when these boys are men in midlife.

Our sons are not circumscribed by ideas about how and who they should be. We have built a hard world for them. Good work, us.

And we won’t succeed in teaching our sons to care for other people, especially their female contemporaries, unless we care for, rather than marginalise, them.