What Are We Teaching Our Boys

This reflection follows a recent webinar where I had the opportunity to hear directly from Liz Stein, a survivor of Jeffrey Epstein, along with advocates and organizers doing deeply necessary work through World Without Exploitation and allied organizations across the country.

I was struck not only by the clarity of survivors’ voices, but by how consistently our public conversations still sidestep the most uncomfortable question:

Why don’t or should it be won’t we change what we are teaching our boys?

The data is not ambiguous. Gender-based violence is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men, and patterns of coercion, entitlement, and aggression do not emerge in adulthood out of nowhere. They are learned early, reinforced socially, and often excused culturally. Treating this as an unfortunate inevitability rather than a preventable outcome is both intellectually lazy and morally indefensible.

During the webinar, a participant shared the work of A Call to Men, an organization focused on engaging men and boys in examining masculinity, power, and accountability. I am sharing this resource here because prevention requires more than punishment after harm has already occurred. It requires intervention at the root.

This matters to me not only as a writer, but as a survivor and as someone preparing to volunteer with with a local rape survivor organization in my area. Survivor support and perpetrator accountability are essential, but they are incomplete without a serious cultural reckoning around how boys are socialized to view women, power, and themselves.

I do not write this lightly. The past several months have been personally difficult, and the broader social climate—marked by fear, instability, and sanctioned cruelty—has made clarity harder, not easier. Still, avoiding hard truths has never produced safety, healing, or justice.

“My earlier piece, Teaching Boys How to Handle Themselves?…Anyone? laid out how cultural norms excuse male entitlement and fail to give boys real responsibility or emotional grounding. What I learned in the webinar reinforces and deepens that critique and points us toward evidence-based approaches for prevention and education.”

This addendum to my original query is not an answer. It is a refusal to keep circling the problem without naming it. We as a culture have got to get to the root of this problem and stop pretending we don’t know what it is.