Schools play an important role in teaching boys about consent, respecting boundaries, and recognizing harmful behavior. But are those lessons starting early enough or going far enough?
Those questions may be especially top of mind for educators following the recent allegations of sexual assault involving seven male students at Cornell University. One particularly troubling detail of the case involves a fraternity group chat of approximately 50 members, in which no one alerted campus police after a message suggested a female student was available for sex.
For K-12 educators, the case reignited conversations about consent and how experts recommend it should be taught starting as early as kindergarten. But comprehensive sex education varies by state and, in some cases, is very limited, said Dorothy Espelage, a professor of education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Only nine states require schools to cover consent, and 24 states mandate content on sexual violence, according to the National Library of Medicine. Instruction on abstinence and on sexually transmitted infections is more common, with 34 and 32 states requiring those topics, respectively.
“You could have a father that models appropriate discussions and treating women and girls respectfully, but if your peer group does not, you will not do that,” said Espelage. “If [the peer group is] disrespectful, our research studies [show] that sexual harassers lump together—birds of a feather flock together.”
Judy Chu, author of When Boys Become ‘Boys,’ has been researching boys’ relational strengths with their peers—both girls and other boys—and how this influences their behavior.
“We tend to write it off as ‘boys will be boys,’ and then we don’t hold them to higher standards that they’re perfectly capable of,” she said.
‘It’s like a perfect storm,’ one expert says
While Title IX is most commonly known to prohibit sex discrimination in K-12 schools, it can also be used to address sexual harassment and violence, said Espelage.
“A lot of people think Title IX is just women in sports [but] it’s not,” she said. “It’s actually that [schools] have to have a sexual harassment policy in place, have to have a curriculum to teach kids about sexual harassment and sexual violence—and in some places, that includes consent.”
After a federal court struck down the Biden administration’s 2024 Title IX regulations, the Trump administration formally restored its 2020 rules, which narrowed the definition of sexual harassment and allow schools to use a higher standard of proof during Title IX proceedings. Civil rights advocates have said that the rules have chilled the reporting of sexual assault and harassment incidents.
Espelage said K-12 educators could benefit from more professional development on Title IX.
“We’ve got generations of boys that are not having these conversations, and then we’ve got generations of educators that have no idea that Title IX covers sexual harassment prevention,” said Espelage. “It’s a perfect storm.”
How teachers can help prevent sexual misconduct
Espelage works with middle and high school teachers, helping them to understand how to protect students from sexual misconduct.
She said students do not typically make sexual comments or touch another student without consent in front of educators or other adults. Most of the time, she said, these inappropriate interactions happen in the hallways or stairwells, on a school bus, or when a teacher is not looking.
Espelage suggests schools do “environmental scans” and set up supervising adults in areas where inappropriate behavior is most likely to occur.
When boys are in kindergarten, they often readily express what they think and feel, but as they get older, they learn not to show those feelings as much, Chu said.
“They start to see that there are these external social expectations that constrain how they feel, is permissible or acceptable or desirable for them to be,” said Chu.
“That cuts them off from all the things that will, at the end of the day, be really valuable when down the line, they’re in a consent situation—to honor their own feelings and to respect other people.”
What can break the cycle for boys is seeing their peers break gender norms, said Chu, which educators can help foster. For example, teachers should reinforce that it’s normal for boys to express their emotions and encourage vulnerability without shame. When schools do this, they experience lower rates of bullying and higher chances of bystander intervention, said Chu.
“The most successful educators in changing minds are the ones who just create spaces” where it’s OK not to fit a gender stereotype, Chu said. “Then all of a sudden, [students] can see that other people are actually doing it, instead of being told that they are.”
