On raising boys, breaking silence, and teaching our sons to see the humanity of women.
Mothers, it's time to tell your stories to your sons.
We tell our girls all the time. We pull them aside. We tear our stories apart and feed them to our daughters like communion wafers. Little by little, they learn the truth about what has happened to us. One day, without knowing when or how, they will be able to recite the horrible things we suffered at the hands of brothers, uncles, friends, teachers, and neighbors.
We tell them because we want them to be prepared. Because we know what the world can do to a girl who isn't paying attention. Because we remember what it was like to be young and trusting, before we understood that the people who were supposed to protect us could also be the people who hurt us.
But where are the boys in all of this?
I knew my own mother's horror stories by the time I was fourteen. I knew them like they were my own. But did my brother ever hear them? Does he know them now, twenty-six years later?
My mother told me because she wanted to warn me about the dangers that might be lurking around the corner. But what about my brother? What did he learn about women's worth, about their bodies, about his responsibility to the women and girls around him?
This isn't an indictment of my mother, by the way. She was doing what generations of mothers have done before her. She was trying to keep her daughter safe.
But I wonder whether, in our efforts to protect our daughters, we have overlooked something important about raising our sons.
We have spent generations teaching girls how to survive the behavior of boys. Have we spent nearly enough time teaching boys why that behavior is intolerable in the first place?
Recently, the Cornell 7 case swept through the news, bringing with it the familiar horror of what can happen when young men begin to regard women as objects for their amusement/conquest. And almost as quickly as we heard about it, the story disappeared from the headlines. We moved on— there are other things to talk about, other outrages demanding our attention.
But I'm not moving on. I can’t. Because every day, another Jane Doe sits on my couch and parses out her story to me. Another woman tries to make sense of something that should never have happened to her. Another woman wonders whether she is exaggerating, whether she misunderstood, whether she should have fought harder or said something sooner. Another woman tries to reconcile what has happened to her body, her mind, and her future.
And I sit with her, knowing that her story is both uniquely hers and also devastatingly familiar.
So, what do we do with all of this?
Like many mothers, I talked about the Cornell 7 case with my seventeen-year-old daughter. But this time, with a fourteen-year-old son who has just entered high school, I brought him into the conversation, too.
My son is beginning to navigate the world of parties, dating, and all the complicated social pressures that comes with adolescence. I find myself praying that the foundation we've spent fourteen years laying is sturdy enough to withstand whatever comes his way. That when he is surrounded by boys who are laughing at something cruel, he will recognize the cruelty, name it, and push back against it. That when he is offered an opportunity to gain social standing at someone else's expense, he will have the courage to refuse.
During our conversation, I brought up the staggering prevalence of sexual violence against women. I said, “Something like 1 in 3 women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime.”
His eyes grew wide as he looked between me and his two sisters.
"So, it could happen to one of you."
"It already has," I said.
I held eye contact with him and watched the recognition come over his face.
And then, in the most age-appropriate way I could, I began to tell him my story.
I told him about some of the things that happened to me when I was a little girl. About what it felt like to be frightened and confused, to be hurt by people who should never have hurt me. I told him about the dangers I encountered as a teenager and young adult. About the ways those experiences followed me into adulthood, long after the events themselves were over.
I told him about the therapy, the medication, the fears I still face.
What followed was one of the most powerful conversations I've ever had with my son. He looked at my face and saw pain, and something that had previously only existed in the abstract became real.
He understood, perhaps for the first time, that the women and girls who experience violence are not simply statistics, strangers, or characters in stories. They are mothers and sisters and daughters and friends. They are people he knows— the people he loves.
And they are people he doesn't know, whose lives matter just as much.
In the days since, he has asked question after question. Why do boys hurt girls? Why does the legal system sometimes fail to protect victims? Why does this happen? How does it happen?
I can almost see his mind expanding, trying to make room for evil, pain, and complexity that he hasn't encountered before.
And he's ready.
Some might argue that fourteen is too young for these conversations. That boys should be allowed to remain innocent a little longer. That there is something unfair about asking them to confront the darkest parts of human behavior before they've even finished growing up.
But girls don't get to wait until adulthood to learn about these things.
If fourteen-year-old girls are old enough to be warned about sexual violence, then fourteen-year-old boys are old enough to learn about consent, coercion, exploitation, and the dignity of another human being.
They are old enough to learn that their friends' laughter does not make cruelty funny. That a girl's vulnerability is not an invitation. That silence can become complicity. That being a good man requires more than simply refraining from doing terrible things himself.
And perhaps most importantly, they are old enough to learn that women do not exist merely in relation to them.
A woman doesn’t have to be someone's mother, sister, girlfriend, or daughter to deserve protection from violence. Her humanity is sufficient. Her dignity is inherent. Her body belongs to her.
I don't want my son to care about sexual violence only because it has happened to his mother. I want what happened to his mother to help him understand why he should care when it happens to anyone.
To be clear: I’m not suggesting that mothers should disclose every painful detail of their lives to their children. Our sons are not our therapists, and they aren’t responsible for healing what others have broken. There are things children are not developmentally prepared to hear, and there are stories that belong to us alone.
What I am suggesting is that, when we are ready and when our children are ready, there may be something profoundly transformative about allowing our sons to see us as fully human.
Not simply as Mom. Not as the woman who packs their lunches, drives them to practice, and reminds them to put their laundry away.
But as a person who was once a little girl. A person who was vulnerable. A person who was hurt. A person who had to learn how to live with things she never should have experienced.
Because I wonder whether part of the problem is that we have so thoroughly separated women's suffering from men's moral education.
We teach our daughters to watch their drinks, to travel in groups, to be careful what they wear, to pay attention to their surroundings. We hand them a thousand little rules intended to keep them safe.
And then we send our sons into the same world, sometimes without ever explaining why those rules exist.
We have made girls responsible for anticipating danger while too often allowing boys to regard that danger as something that has nothing to do with them.
And I am beyond tired of that arrangement.
I’m tired of a world in which women must become experts in avoiding violence while men can reach adulthood without ever seriously contemplating their responsibility to confront it. I’m tired of hearing women wonder whether they did enough to prevent what happened to them.
Women have been so thoroughly trained to keep the peace— to avoid making others uncomfortable— to minimize what happened to us, that we sometimes forget how powerful our stories can be.
Our stories can interrupt the comfortable distance between an act of violence and the person who suffers it. They can challenge the jokes, the excuses, the casual dehumanization that often precedes more overt cruelty.
Of course, stories alone won’t end sexual violence. We need accountability, education, communities willing to confront misogyny, and institutions that take the safety and dignity of women seriously. We need fathers and teachers and coaches and pastors to have these conversations, too. The moral formation of boys cannot rest on the shoulders of women alone.
But stories are a beginning.
I don't know what kind of man my son will become. I know what I hope for. I know what we've tried to teach him. And I know that adolescence will present him with choices I just can’t make for him.
There will be rooms I can’t enter. Conversations I will never hear. Moments when doing the right thing will cost him something.
My prayer is that, in those moments, he will remember what we have taught him about the worth of another human being.
Perhaps he’ll remember this conversation. Perhaps he’ll remember the look on my face when I told him what happened to me. And perhaps, when someone makes a joke at a girl's expense, he will recognize that there is a person on the other side of it. Someone with a history, a family, a future, and an interior life every bit as rich and complicated as his own.
My hope is that he will have the courage to say something.
Mothers, tell your daughters your stories.
But please, don't forget your sons.
