Susie O’Brien: Unfairly painting all boys as rapists is put them offside

No one should not be teaching kids that they are to blame for violence because they are white, male or Christian – it simply alienates them.

Unfairly painting all boys as rapists or potential rapists will put them offside at this critical time when we need to bring people together.

Most perpetrators of violence are males, but of course this doesn’t mean most males are violent.

This is why singling out random 16-year-old boys and making them pay for the sins of violent men is no way educate boys about respect.

I am not surprised there is widespread outrage about the behaviour of a Kingston City Council worker who called boys at Parkdale Secondary College “oppressors” for being white, male and Christian.

The “lesson” came as part of a talk about privilege, pronouns and intersectionality, according to a report in the Sunday Herald Sun.

It’s the kind of woke madness we’ve come to expect from certain councils that care more about marking Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week than collecting our rubbish properly.

I believe schools are a good place for teaching about respectful relationships, the gendered aspects of violence and the role played by race.

However, unfairly painting all boys as rapists or potential rapists will put them offside at this critical time when we need to bring people together.

No one should not be teaching kids that they are to blame for violence because they are white, male or Christian.

As one parent said, it’s not the role of schools to indoctrinate kids with divisive ideas that tell them their race or gender is more important than their character.

A female Kingston City Council worker at Parkdale Secondary College last week has outraged parents

Such attitudes unfairly perpetuate the notion that males, not females, are the real victims.

The worker should not be sacked as her motivation was no doubt honourable, but she should be strongly counselled about her approach in singling out and shaming young individuals.

This doesn’t mean we should ignore the role gender plays in violence in our society. According to Our Watch, one woman is killed each week in Australia by her current or former partner, and women are three times more likely to experience violence from an intimate partner than men.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare stats show that in Australia in 2016, 71 in every 100,000 males had committed a sexual assault offence, compared to six in every 100,000 females.

One in six women and one in 16 men has experienced physical or sexual violence by a current or previous partner since the age of 15. One in two women and one in four men have experienced sexual harassment. One in six women and one in 16 men have been stalked.

There is also an important race element in gendered violence.

Kingston councillor Cameron Howe called the behaviour of the council worker “reverse racism” because it focused solely on white boys.

This is a fair point. Although there has been much in the news recently about the behaviour of white, privileged males, the reality is that migrant, ethnic and Indigenous women are all more at risk from their partners.

In Australia, Indigenous women are 34 times more likely to be hospitalised for after a violent episode than non-Indigenous women.

In the US, black and American women are 30 to 50 per cent more likely to be subjected to violence than White, Asian and Hispanic women.

Does that justify getting Indigenous or black males to stand up and be singled out in class? Of course not. It shouldn’t happen to them, and it shouldn’t happen to any individual.

We need to educate young males in a way that involves and engages, not makes them feel guilty or ashamed for being white Christian men.

I am glad these issues are on the agenda in schools; they need to be because we’re going backwards in some key areas involving young people. The National Community Attitudes towards Violence against Women Surveys, which I’ve talked about here before, illustrates this. The surveys show that compared to 1995, there’s been a decline in the proportion of people who think domestic violence is more likely to be perpetrated by men, and that women are more likely to experience physical harm and fear from this violence.

After many years of public campaigns, one in seven young people think women often make false allegations of sexual assault and one in eight aren’t aware that non-consensual sex in marriage is a criminal offence.

Interestingly, one of the biggest predictors of having attitudes supportive of violence is believing that women shouldn’t be equal. Another key predictor of violence is holding prejudicial attitudes towards others on the basis of their disability, ethnicity, Aboriginality or sexual orientation. These things are much more important than where people live or what their parents did.

So not only do we need to talk about these issues in schools and elsewhere, we are obliged as a community to talk about them.

But let’s do it in a way that involves and engages young males, not makes them feel guilty or ashamed for being white Christian men.

Susie O’Brien is a Herald Sun columnist