Stop blaming the school for sexual assaults: the buck stops closer to home

OpinionFormer lawyerAugust 24, 2026 — 5:00amLast week, another private school sexual assault drama played out in these pages.Where to start? Perhaps with what we know. Three boys from Scots College, one aged 13 and two aged 14, have been charged with the aggravated sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl following an alleged incident well away from the school in Bondi Junction. The allegations are serious. They are also allegations. And all four involved are children.Scots College in Bellevue Hill, Sydney Sam MooyThere is a reason the law treats children differently, protecting their identities and surrounding proceedings involving them with safeguards. The ordeal ahead will be dreadful for four families, whatever happens. The laying of the charges was newsworthy. Then there was little more to say until the law had done its work.Instead, day after day, we heard from a band of anonymous Scots parents. The school hasn’t communicated enough. The boys should have been expelled. Their boys are being “tarred with the same brush”. The school is protecting the boys because their families are donors. The school’s “culture” is wrong. The principal should resign.Perhaps there is a boys’ culture problem here. But before commissioning another consent seminar for 13-year-olds, might we look at the behaviour and culture being displayed by the anonymous parents?Scots issued a lengthy letter to its community. Not a word was out of place. Sexual violence is never acceptable. Nor is victim-blaming. The allegations are serious, but guilt has not been determined. The alleged incident occurred away from school and outside school hours. The college has no first-hand knowledge of what occurred. It will not prejudice the legal process or disclose individual arrangements concerning children. Students have been offered support. Consent and respectful relationships have been taught from kindergarten through senior school for at least 15 years. Good God, what else could the headmaster have done?One sentence in the letter deserves attention: “Parents and families have the primary and enduring role in the formation of their children.” Exactly. Schools can help to form a child. They educate, create friendships and opportunities, and can help form character. Bad school cultures certainly exist and should be exposed. But a school is not a parent. And criminal charges against three young teens is not evidence of failure by a school.Some of the anonymous parental commentary is bewildering. For the father who complained the accused boys should be expelled apparently the solution is to punish three children before their guilt has been determined. Another declared: “It’s just not the culture I want my son in.”There is an obvious solution for these parents. If you possess evidence, give it to the police. If you know about institutional misconduct, produce it. If you believe your son’s school has a toxic culture, then take your son out. But if you intend to drop him at the school gates while anonymously briefing newspapers in ways guaranteed to unfairly damage the school and its pupils, perhaps think again.We have been here before. When Chanel Contos’ campaign exploded across Sydney’s private schools in 2021, the accounts of teenage sexual behaviour deserved to be taken seriously. A legitimate question arose: what had schools failed to teach? Principals met, curricula were examined and consent education was expanded.Yet I remember being struck at the time by another aspect of eastern suburbs adolescent culture, which I knew first-hand. I knew parents who dropped young teenage daughters at parties with bottles of gin tucked beneath coats. They knew their children were drinking illegally and excessively. They collected them in the early hours, stumbling drunk onto the footpath, and they would recount the exploits with amusement and a vicarious pleasure in their children’s participation in the “right” social scene. God knows what went on inside those homes, in unattended bedrooms.Nothing about being drunk diminishes a girl’s right not to be sexually assaulted. But this does raise an obvious question for adults. If parents permit teenagers to drink themselves senseless on weekends at unsupervised parties, why should foreseeable consequences be diagnosed as a failure of school culture?Some 70 years ago, William Golding understood something about groups of children that many adults seem to forget. Even without alcohol, adolescents can behave in groups in ways they would not behave alone. They need boundaries because they are not adults. Lord of the Flies did not end with the children in the line of fire. Its final message was that civilisation is fragile, and the capacity for savagery is not confined to children.None of this tells us what happened or about the four families involved – about whom we should have the decency not to speculate. Good parents can have children who make terrible choices and children themselves do have moral agency. But if we insist on searching beyond those directly involved for responsibility, it is a leap of logic to arrive directly at a headmaster.Once upon a time, we were better at this. Not necessarily better people, or blessed with better-behaved children. But more adults understood that belonging to a community imposed obligations of discretion and restraint, and that a school might help parents form a child but that it was not responsible for every choice a child made.The law can protect children’s identities and determine guilt or innocence. It cannot endow adults with judgment, discretion or common sense. It cannot mandate good parenting. The childish response by some adults to these serious and unhappy allegations is another reminder that civil society depends upon culture and habits that neither the law nor institutions such as schools can compel.Louise Clegg is a former lawyer.More:Private schoolsOpinionFor subscribersCrimeHigh schoolConsent crisisFrom our partners