Raising Men Who Make the World Safer

The allegations of sexual violence at a Cornell University fraternity house in 2024 may infuriate us, or shock us, or disturb us—but, sadly, they should not surprise us. We live in a time when one in four female students enrolled in college are sexually assaulted, and where 60% of perpetrators know their victims. If there is a surprise in this instance, to me, it’s that the Cornell case is receiving the attention it is.

What should be done with this attention? How do we ensure that this is not a passing moment of outrage, but a lasting movement for safety, awareness, and prevention? Over the past month, I have encountered a number of assertions that we must raise our boys to be the kind of men who will interrupt the group chat. We need men who have had real lessons on bodily autonomy and consent, instruction in the dangers of substance abuse, responsible use of social media, and upstander training. These are all important ways of building capacities that boys can apply in potentially difficult and perhaps dangerous situations, and Browning’s K-12 curricula in advising, health, and wellness teach these skills intentionally. 

But we also recognize that these skills only work if they are built upon a foundation of greater understanding and awareness of the opportunities and responsibilities of healthy manhood. This must start at the youngest ages, with the disposition to interrupt unkindnesses—mean-spirited teasing, hurtful epithets, social exclusion—in everyday life; the disposition to support (and, when appropriate, exhibit) personal vulnerability; the disposition to examine the status structure of one’s groups, and to seek those groups that reward boys and men for authenticity, discernment and open expressions of care, rather than degradation, dehumanization or dominance.

One way we have responded to the Cornell incident was by having Upper School boys witness a constructive dialogue between several male faculty members about the Cornell case. They saw men that they interact with every day talk honestly about how hearing about the case made them feel, about peer pressure, and about how to remain true to oneself. This was not a lecture, nor was it a how-to-stay-out-of-trouble guide. It was, rather, an attempt to have the boys see the values that we live by—honesty, dignity, curiosity and purpose—modeled in real time, with no explicit skill-building as a goal. The goal instead was an opportunity to watch older men talk about hard things with compassion, self-awareness, and vulnerability. 

A Browning, we want to create intentional cultures in which boys rehearse and practice bystander intervention, where help-seeking and help-giving are normalized and celebrated, where students are both mentored and mentors, where compassion is the preeminent virtue modeled by adults of any gender, where there are clear and restorative responses to conflict, and where boys are given significant opportunities to practice caring for others. This is countercultural work whose rewards are not always immediately apparent, work which requires flexibility and openmindedness—and which is absolutely essential if we are going to fulfill our mission of graduating boys who make the world better, healthier, and safer by their very presence.

The painful reality is that too many girls and women (and, indeed, boys and men who do not fit narrow constructions of reductive masculinity) grow up with fear that their identity may make them a target of those men who have not internalized a healthy understanding of manhood. Too many boys and men join groups where status is cultivated by degrading women (or any social “other”), where expressions of sincerity are derided, and where conforming becomes more important than doing the right thing.  If boys have not had a lifetime of practicing courage and integrity in the face of real stakes—for these virtues to be constitutive of their moral identity and their self-understanding—these groups retain their shameful attraction, and all of the scenario-specific training in the world will likely fall short when it is needed most. The persistence of alcohol-fueled sexual assault alongside the application of consent and health and wellness training at campuses across the country has shown us that.

At Browning, we surely work to teach boys to interrupt the misogynistic, dehumanizing group chat. We ask them to name their feelings using mood meters, and we teach about sexuality and consent in our health and wellness classes. But that's not enough. We’re even more intent on helping boys become the kind of men who will seek out, support, and even create cultures of compassion and accountability where the group chat is made unimaginable in the first place.

The building of such orientations, of such lives, has long and decidedly been the work of this boys’ school, and it is work that must persist, both for the world in which our boys will enter, and for the dignity and decency of our boys themselves.