His words are scorching: “Visceral anger, deep disappointment, sheer disgust.” They describe his feelings about a school he knows intimately. He’s an ex-Scots College student who completed every year of his education at the all-boys campus in Sydney’s well-heeled eastern suburbs. For him, a consent crisis in the city’s most expensive boys school was inevitable.
The former Scots student says the college did little to stop “blatant misogyny” while he and his older brother were there from kindergarten to year 12. The now 25-year-old masters student, who asked to remain anonymous out of respect for his family and the handful of friends he still has from the school, is enraged by the sexual assault allegations plaguing the elite Bellevue Hill college.
But he is not surprised.
Making female teachers cry was commonplace at Scots, he says: “It’s about the power.” The college instilled a very specific set of values in the boys: “It’s all about sporting success, charisma and charm,” the former student says. These characteristics were seen as crucial to a successful, powerful post-Scots life. “This is an institution which ostensibly prides itself on being a place where boys become men,” he says.
However, it was Scots’ approach to educating boys about healthy relationships with women that troubles him most when he looks back on his years at the college. He says his consent education was focused on the reputational, financial and career risk that could come with a sexual assault allegation. The victim-survivor did not feature in such conversations, he says.
He hopes consent education has changed since he graduated from the school in 2018, but shocking revelations that three Scots boys – a 13-year-old and two 14-year-olds – are facing rape charges for allegedly assaulting a 14-year-old girl in a Bondi Junction alleyway has given the former student little reason for optimism.
By all accounts, there should have been change. Since 2023, consent education has been mandatory in Australian schools after Chanel Contos, a former student of all-girls school Kambala in Rose Bay, launched an Instagram campaign that forced a reckoning.
Contos collected testimonies from former Sydney schoolgirls about sexual assaults they had experienced at the hands of their male peers. Of the 7000 testimonies Contos’ campaign collected from around the country, 500 alleged sexual assaults were by current or former Scots or Cranbrook students. (Cranbrook was then a boys’ school but it has since opened enrolments to girls.)
“When I emailed the Scots College principal to share this and discuss next steps (twice), he didn’t reply,” Contos wrote in the Herald earlier this week. Nonetheless, her powerful campaign forced the hands of politicians, and in early 2022, state and territory leaders agreed to add consent education to the national curriculum.
But is it working?
At the same time as consent education has become mandated in schools, teenagers have overtaken adults as the most likely perpetrators of sexual violence towards young people.
Nationally, instances of child sexual abuse at the hands of adults have declined, according to the landmark 2024 Australian Child Maltreatment Study, but rates of peer-to-peer abuse among adolescents have increased.
“In contemporary Australian society,” the study says, “child sexual assault by known adolescents in non-romantic relationships is by far the single most common category of offending.
“As a society, we have never done enough to ensure healthy sexual and emotional development of our youth, and especially of boys. This is particularly concerning as the vast majority of child sexual assault is inflicted by males.”
The “toll of this neglect” is accelerating, the study says, and is worsened by technology, including the algorithms that control social media. For Contos, who founded the education and advocacy organisation Teach Us Consent after her Instagram campaign went viral globally, algorithms are at the heart of a dangerous new frontier in gender-based violence.
“Platforms are deliberately serving young men and boys a diet of misogynistic and extremist content designed to maximise engagement at any cost,” Contos will tell the National Press Club next month as part of her latest campaign, Fix Our Feeds.
“This is having real-world consequences. Now, a teenage boy is the most likely perpetrator of child sexual abuse – a devastating title traditionally held by adult men.”
In an open letter to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Contos’ organisation is calling on the government to require social media platforms to offer an option to “opt in” to algorithms, and to give Australians the autonomy to turn them on and off.
“This is about informed and affirmative consent: control over our data and our feeds,” the letter says. “The European Union has paved the way with an ‘opt-out’ policy, but this would be a world first, bringing genuine consent to our online experiences.”
The letter says young men and boys are being pulled into misogynistic spaces, seeking community and belonging. “Studies show that dummy accounts created to imitate 16- to 18-year-old boys were fed extreme manosphere content within minutes,” it says.
Contos was referring to research from Dublin City University that found it took just 23 minutes for teenage boys to be “bombarded” by misogynistic and anti-feminist content after signing up to social media platforms. The study from the university’s anti-bullying centre found that boys were being fed anti-feminist and other extremist content, regardless of whether they had sought it out.
At the same time, teenagers are being exposed to pornography at levels that far exceed the experience of previous generations, according to the latest research from the national violence prevention organisation Our Watch. Its study, published in 2024, found that the average age at which a young person has first seen porn is now 13.6 years (13.2 for males and 13.9 for females).
The data revealed that 72 per cent of young people surveyed for the study said porn often showed aggression and violence against women, and 79 per cent believed porn affected how women were viewed in real life. Almost a third reported using porn for sex education. More than 50 per cent of young men watched porn at least once a week, and 12 per cent watched it daily.
“Our Watch recognises that pornography is not inherently problematic,” the study says. “Rather, it is the way some people are represented in pornography that raises concerns, and that some pornography depicts criminal and harmful acts, most commonly perpetrated against women.”
Wentworth MP Allegra Spender, whose electorate is home to Scots College, and Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek weighed into the consent debate this week, which was even further amplified after five Sydney Swans players were embroiled in a sexual assault investigation.
“In less than seven days, an all-boys school and one of the nation’s most influential sporting clubs have been at the centre of concerning sexual assault allegations,” Plibersek wrote on social media.
“We don’t have all the facts, and there are legal processes under way that need to run their course. But here’s what we do know: the responses to these allegations have fallen alarmingly short. Both Scots and the Sydney Swans play a direct role in educating and inspiring men and boys.”
Instead, she said both had chosen language that was “passive and exculpatory”.
“When people in positions of power gloss over allegations of sexual violence, when they’re more focused on their reputations than their responsibilities – it reinforces the culture of disrespect and entitlement that fuels this violence in the first place,” she wrote.
“There are women and girls at the centre of these allegations.”
The Swans players have since all been suspended by the club for the rest of the season.
Spender, meanwhile, said she was “deeply distressed” by the Scots rape allegations and posed the question: “So what is going wrong, and what can we do to fix this?”
“This is a lot that needs to be done, but social media must be a major focus,” Spender wrote in a note to her constituents. “Algorithms are pushing content that degrades women towards young males every single day. Teaching consent in classrooms is not enough when young men are being told the opposite online. The government must regulate the algorithms – the age ban alone is not enough.
“We also must have an honest conversation about cultures of toxic masculinity in some schools – that is a challenge for institutions and parents alike.”
Scots’ long-serving headmaster Ian Lambert says “consent, dignity, respectful relationships, self-control and personal responsibility are taught age-appropriately and cumulatively throughout a student’s years at Scots, grounded in Christian conviction”.
The school is not alone as it grapples with scrutiny.
Days after assault charges against students from the harbourside college emerged, an all-boys school on the other side of Sydney faced its own crisis. St Gregory’s College Campbelltown, a private Catholic boys’ school best known for producing nearly 100 NRL players, was confronting a similar scandal.
On Thursday, three 17-year-old boys – including two St Gregory’s students – were denied bail after being charged with raping a 17-year-old girl at a home in the Macarthur region on Saturday after a football game.
St Gregory’s College principal Matthew Brennan immediately emailed parents on Thursday, saying the college stood with victims of sexual violence.
“We express our deep concern for the young woman police have said was the victim of the alleged sexual assault, and her family and loved ones,” Brennan’s letter says. “It is abhorrent what is alleged by police and is the antithesis of what we stand for and the values that we embrace.”
The ex-Scots student, meanwhile, has been watching on in horror as his former school seriously fumbled its response.
“In the time since this news has broken, people have rightfully voiced their deep concern. However, I have been disappointed to find few men talking about the significance of this allegation,” he says.
“You are not prejudicing a court case by educating your sons and peers about respecting women and girls. You are not harming an ongoing investigation by calling out the seriousness of these allegations, and why it never should have occurred.
“You have every right to be angry. I am.”
Support is available from the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service at 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) or the Men’s Referral Service on 1300 766 491.
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