From the classroom to the locker room: nine days of ‘deeply disturbing’ sexual assault allegations shake Australia

For the fourth time that week, youth advocate and educator Daniel Principe stood in a classroom and asked the same question: Are female teachers respected as much as male ones?

“The boys unanimously said no,” Principe says.

“If that is the case, why is this rewarded in some pockets of boy culture? Being callous and cruel and intimidating to women is being rewarded.”

From primary schools to universities, he steps into a classroom every day to have conversations about respect and violence. When he asks the boys if they’ve seen content that says degrading things about women – that they’re gold diggers, that they should be in the kitchen, that they all cheat – 90% of them put their hands up.

“Some of these social norms and gendered stereotypes have, of course, existed prior to this moment, but they’re just inflamed right now,” he says. “There is more social reward for acting this out.”

Outside the classrooms, five Sydney Swans players might have been in the spotlight, but they were far from alone this week. Across the nation, a series of high-profile sexual assault cases has put allegations involving teenagers, professional athletes and men in the centre of a storm.

In the past nine days alone, three Scots College students were charged over the alleged sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, and in another instance in Sydney, three 17-year-olds were charged over the alleged group sexual assault of a 17-year-old girl.

In Melbourne, a 13-year-old boy was arrested over an alleged attempted sexual assault of two women; in Brisbane, a 32-year-old man was charged with allegedly raping a young woman walking her dog; and in Perth, two men, 30 and 25, pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and were jailed.

The Swans players are not accused of sexual assault, and it is reported that none have been formally interviewed by police. No one has been arrested or charged in relation to the alleged incident.

The culture goes beyond private schools and sporting clubs, and its prevalence is hard to track. While many people do not report sexual assault, the most up-to-date data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed the number of sexual assaults recorded by police in 2024 exceeded 40,000 – over 100 a day nationwide and an increase of 10% or 3,735 victims, from the previous year.

Nationally, around two in five victim-survivors were aged between 10 and 17 years old at the time of incident, and 81% were female. The majority of sexual assaults occurred in homes.

Patty Kinnersly, the CEO of Our Watch, says the country has seen “some deeply disturbing, high-profile allegations of sexual violence” this week, but the increase in reporting shows more women are coming forward.

“Police-recorded sexual assault increased by around 67% between 2014 and 2024, with 2024 the highest rate recorded since the national series began in 1993,” Kinnersly says.

But the population-level picture is more complex, she says, with personal safety survey data showing recent sexual violence towards women has risen from 1.2% in 2012 to 1.9% in 2021/22, while the long term rate remained broadly stable.

She says the number of police reports and the volume of media coverage can’t paint an accurate picture of whether sexual violence is increasing, but that it is encouraging more women to speak up about sexual violence.

For Principe, there’s a clear connection between some of the attitudes he sees in schools and the violence directed toward women.

“When heterosexual men are socially conditioned to see sex and relationships as a conquest, that’s where a lot of this stuff goes awry,” Principe says. “When it’s not seen as something that should be mutual, but instead something to be taken from women, that is where it gets really troubling.”

Teachers and other educators who work in schools – and who could only speak on the condition of anonymity – told Guardian Australia a similar story: in class, male students will bark at female teachers, and the boys will laugh. They’ll post degrading content on Snapchat, knowing there are no repercussions because no one can trace it back to them. Covid has supercharged their views. And the government’s internet ban has all but failed.

This week, a first-of-its-kind report, Misogyny, Online Radicalisation and Youth Extremism in Australia, surveyed 3,429 Australians, including more than 1000 people 13 to 17, to compare attitudes on women and gender equality.

About one in three teen boys expressed misogynistic attitudes, mistrust of women, and a belief in traditional gender roles, according to the University of Melbourne research, with Gen Z more likely than men in other generations to endorse traditional or hostile attitudes towards women.

At the same time, Gen Z girls were twice as likely as millennial women to believe marriage entitled a husband to sex even if his wife did not want intercourse.

Sociologist Michael Flood says research in the US across male-dominated spaces like the military, sporting codes and fraternities shows there are consistent indicators for sexual violence to be more prevalent.

“There are risk factors in any setting that make sexual violence perpetration and victimisation more likely,” the professor at the Queensland University of Technology School of Justice says.

“Where there’s strong codes of loyalty and bonding between men, where there’s strong norms of sexism and sexual objectification, high levels of alcohol and drug consumption, high levels of pornography consumption.”

Flood says research across sporting codes shows there are higher rates of sexual assault among men who play team-based contact sports, such as NRL and AFL, than those who play individual non-contact sports like tennis or swimming.

“But further research has found that it’s not just the nature of the sport,” he says. “It’s also the particular character of the clubs and communities associated with that sport or that setting.”

He says the key problem is there has not been “enough effort to change”. Even when institutions like the AFL or NRL tried to shift the culture in the mid-2000s, it was not enough.

“It takes comprehensive effort in a sporting code or in a school to really shift the cultures of sexism and objectification that feed into sexual violence,” Flood says.

“And if our efforts are only piecemeal or tokenistic, then they won’t shift the problem.”

Flood says there is a growing body of research that shows multi-session programs that focus on the key drivers of sexual violence can help to bring the number of assaults down.

“Well-designed prevention efforts in a school and in a sporting code, in the military and other contexts, can make change,” he says. “The question is, are they being implemented? Are they being supported comprehensively?”