The Uncomfortable Truth About Consent Education

As the Cornell rape allegations continue to roil beyond college campuses and into the homes of families across the country, a familiar question has played out: How do we educate our sons? Specifically, how do we raise boys who grow up to be men who will not rape women and who will stand up to perpetrators?

In discussing the case in my social circles, the mere suggestion that our kids could come to mirror the behavior of the so-called Cornell 7 is enough to induce genuine nausea right there smack in the middle of a 5-year-old’s birthday party. The allegations seem perversely unrecognizable to us and the inner lives of our families, leaving parents understandably grasping for strategies for a scenario they can hardly imagine. And so, it’s against this air of anxiety that favor has once again settled on sexual consent, and the need to drill its importance into the minds of our youth.

If consent as a talking point feels like grim deja vu, that’s because it returns with each cycle of outrage over alleged campus sexual assault. Consider how the topic has been the inspiration for two different Saturday Night Live skits across 25 years: a 1993 segment that ridiculed the “Ask First” policy at Antioch College, and another in 2018—albeit depicting consent education in a more favorable light—during the #MeToo movement that emphasized an unambiguous “yes means yes” approach to establishing consent. Which is to say that consent, in different registers and varying deliveries, has informed decades’ worth of discourse around sexual assault.

But too often, these conversations treat consent as the finish line—not the starting point to addressing more challenging aspects around rampant sexual assault on our college campuses. In doing so, we sidestep more uncomfortable questions of what makes something like rape appealing to perpetrators in the first place: the thrill of violating consent. That rapists don’t just disregard your consent but don’t want it.

“Sexual assault has nothing to do with consent,” Andrea O’Reilly, a professor at York University in Canada, said. “It’s about power, misogyny, and abuse. This is what we’re missing in the conversation with all these memes going around.” (Indeed, the Snapchat thread at the center of the Cornell allegations is littered with comments relishing this rot: “Free pussy” upstairs. “Shop still open?” “Like you can walk in and whip it out rn.”)

“Of course, we need to educate boys about consent,” O’Reilly added, “but we need to reframe the conversation. Why [do some men] even desire sex with an unconscious woman?”

It can be a deeply torturous thought experiment. Once you confront the psychological attraction, you start seeing strains of it everywhere, like an outbreak. When, amid this very climate, a comedian cracks jokes about gym “whores” on national TV. When, for decades, titans of industry prized the company of a known pedophile. When a man held liable for rape, to accompany the dozens of sexual assault allegations, wins the presidency twice over.

Of course, talking to boys about misogyny and abuse is a far more difficult, and frankly, intimidating, task than teaching consent. Who wants to acknowledge, accurately, that plenty of everyday men hate their mothers and that this hatred informs endless corners of an ugly society? But advocates of comprehensive sex education say that small bites at these difficult topics—sitting cross-legged on the floor, keeping hands to ourselves, etc.—can start at the earliest stages of a child’s education, and later, widen the narrow focus on consent to model what desirable, respectful sex looks like.

Robin West, a professor at Georgetown Law, told me that when we restrict the conversation to consent, parents run the risk of sending the message that “sex is the proper subject of a bargain and [once obtained], you’re off the hook.”

“It shouldn’t be problematic for parents to say that you need to make sure that this sexuality you’re introducing into your relationship is actually serving the welfare of all of you,” West added. “That you’re not just doing it for your own selfish ends.”

“There are so many other dimensions of a sexual interaction [than consent],” Jennifer S. Hirsch, a professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University, said. “A focus on consent is not really meaningful if somebody doesn’t understand that the other person is a sexual citizen, that people fundamentally are equivalent human beings. That yes, I have a right to choose my sexual experiences, and so does the other person.”

Such concepts might seem like the bare minimum to some. But in a country so lacking in gender equality—where, as Hirsch told me, so-called blue states such as New York do not mandate medically accurate sex ed—they are far from a guarantee.

“I’ve been working on comprehensive sex education in New York since 2008,” Hirsch said. “We’ve flown through many different legislatures, and it’s never even come to the floor for a vote once. So think about the thousands and thousands of people who have experienced sexual harm in that time because of their political inaction.”

The consent and education-based models of today can be traced to Barack Obama’s first presidency as an effort to address campus sexual violence. But despite their prevalence on college campuses today, campus sexual assault has persisted, with some studies showing that incidents of reported assault have actually increased in recent years. These worrying trends force a thorny question: Does education even work when it comes to reducing sexual violence?

“These approaches have an implicit theory of behavior change,” Ana Gantman, a psychology professor at Brooklyn College who, with several colleagues, conducted a 2024 meta-analysis of related studies, told me. “They assume that changing ideas related to sexual violence—like the endorsement of rape myths that claim ‘a woman says no before she says yes’—will change overall rates of perpetration and victimization.”

Though these programs appeared to effectively shift attitudes and beliefs around sexual violence, curiously, they had little impact on the ultimate goal of this education model: reducing instances of assault. None of which, as Gantman stressed, was to argue “that rape myths are not worth dispelling in their own right—they absolutely are. But as an avenue to reduce rates of perpetration, I think we have tried changing beliefs to change behavior, and it doesn’t seem to be very effective.”

In other words, successfully convincing someone that rape is bad doesn’t mean they won’t commit it. Gantman emphasized the need for changes beyond education, including creating spaces outside fraternities and dormitory bedrooms where students can socialize.

“What students are getting is the message that sexual assault is bad,” Hirsch said. “Don’t rape someone. Don’t get raped. Don’t let your friends get raped. But as public health professionals, we know that doesn’t equal effective prevention. It is a first step to make people aware of a problem, but it doesn’t give people the tools that they need to not rape somebody or to not get raped.”

One exception to this broad failure, Gantman said, was a school-based program called Safe Dates, which focused on students younger than college age. These educational approaches tended to involve the comprehensive approach Hirsch referenced, with curriculum focusing on more nuanced topics around sex, such as dating norms and gender stereotypes. “This program has been rigorously evaluated and has been shown to decrease reported rates of perpetration,” Gantman said. “It also paved the way for Shifting Boundaries, another school-based program that has been rigorously evaluated, and also takes the literal physical space of the buildings of the school into account.”

Physical spaces as a critical factor in campus sexual assault goes to the heart of the renewed calls to ban fraternities nationwide amid the Cornell allegations, which involve seven former fraternity members, and dozens of others who belonged to a now-famous Snapchat text thread.

“Fraternities represent a very dense concentration of many forms of power: the power of masculinity, the power of wealth, and frequently, the power of whiteness,” Hirsch said. “They also have the power to control alcohol, the power of being third- and fourth-year students, and the power of controlling social space.

But while some of these powers were modifiable—for example, a college could make it easier for younger students to socialize in spaces that weren’t controlled by older men—Hirsch said college campuses that remove frats would still struggle to address more systemic forms of inequality. “If people step onto campus not realizing that the people around them are equivalent human beings who have the right to choose their sexual experiences, the communities that raise those people have failed,” she said.

That might be true. But why not try eradicating just one of the many cradles for male entitlement, secrecy, and generally egregious behavior? Excuses for frats—bonding, community, career networks, alumni donations—are endless, and plenty of ink has been spilled on their supposed values. Yet, for so many of us, watching another round of campus sexual assault allegations unfold, these justifications seem to limp on arrival this time around. Could the current outrage open a rare opportunity for Cornell officials to lead the way to larger institutional change, including, yes, bans on Greek life? Will states like New York move to codify medically accurate sex ed in their schools and make a helluva big deal about it? It remains to be seen. But for now, we can at least go beyond the rallying call of consent.