Well, I Think The Answer Is Staring You In The Face, Gaby

There were seven men in all, and it lasted almost seven hours. What followed, according to the woman at the heart of the Cornell University case that has gripped student campuses around the world, was less a sexual encounter than a grim pack-bonding exercise fuelled by booze and ketamine, in which she was passed around like a blow-up doll.Twenty years old and drunk at a college frat house party, she had reportedly agreed to a threesome with a student she liked, though her lawyer maintains she wasn’t sober enough to consent.

Were the males? Why does no-one ever consider that? 

But it is what allegedly followed – including a crude invitation sent to a group chat of more than 50 of the men’s friends, advertising “free pussy” upstairs if they wanted to join in – that really makes the blood boil. Could so many men really see nothing here to challenge?

All over social media, mothers are posting and swapping advice on how to raise sons who don’t just refrain from rape but who would, if they ever got such a message, realise something was wrong and be brave enough to intervene.

Simple, you bring thrm up with a moral code, but to do that, you have to possess one yourself and dispaly it frequently; No more rooting for a child killer just becauuse you share a sex, because kids will pick up on that sort of thing faster than you realise.

Bringing up our own boys to do better feels like the one practical step any mother can take. Yet it makes me angry, all the same; angry and exhausted. How has rape prevention become yet another thing on mothers’ to-do lists? Where are all the men – the celebrity dads, the sports coaches and the role models…

Mostly parading their sons in womens clothing, at least in Hollywood. 

If fathers don’t know how to raise these subjects – well, mothers are equally mortified, but we muddle through because we don’t want our sons to be a danger to other people’s daughters or themselves.

And what of those 'families' where fathers aren't even in the picture, Gaby? You know who I mean... 

Across the Atlantic, it is now for the courts to decide whether what happened at Cornell meets New York’s bar for prosecution, with the local district attorney – who decided in 2024 not to press charges – reopening an investigation into what he now calls allegations of “heinous and despicable acts”. But it’s already clear that lives were ruined that night; that it was a tragedy, and a preventable one. Precisely the kind, in other words, that parenting exists to stop.

Parenting used to exist to stop it - modern parenting however?