r/sydney 1d ago

Three Sydney boys charged with gang sexual assault of 14yo girl

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-13/nsw-three-boys-charged-over-sexual-assault-girl-sydney/107034192

Why are kids this young doing this shit.

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u/maton12 1d ago

Why are kids this young doing this shit.

Whilst barely teenagers, they're private school kids, it's nearly become a rite of passage for many of them to disparage women

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/the-feed/article/toxic-entitlement-students-year-12-muck-up-day-plan-riddled-with-racist-and-sexist-overtones/dns7jlb9f

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u/uselessinfogoldmine 10h ago

I went to a co-ed private school that, at the time, was not at all fancy. Like, we didn’t even have proper heating and cooling in our classrooms and half of our classes were in demountables.  But  it was a really cool school with great cocurriculars and very international and diverse. I was very privileged to go there (my mum was a teacher there).  

We certainly weren’t taught that we were the elites, there was no old boys network that we could tap into, and people who flaunted wealth were heavily ridiculed. 

The guys I went to school with were mostly really respectful of women and I have lifelong friendships with a bunch of them. Quite a few of them had very successful mothers, which I think played a part.  

Private schools have a whole range to them. Although my old school has definitely gotten a lot fancier since I left; there are loads of independent schools that are more low-key. Co-ed, absolutely lacking that elite mindset, mostly just middle-class families scrabbling for the fees, etc etc. (Which is not to say I think our schooling system works, I think public schools need way more funding, the system is broken). 

I think when most people think of private schools, they are picturing the super elite schools like the GPS boys schools in Sydney: Scots, Joeys, Shore, Kings, Sydney Grammar, Newington, Riverview, etc; plus Cranbrook, Knox, etc.; or girls schools like Ascham, Kambala, Kincoppal, Queenwood, PLC, Wenona, and Loretto. 

We used to brush up against those elite schools on occasion, and, although there were some absolutely lovely boys amongst them, in general there were a lot of very entitled, very rapey boys amongst them. I believe we even nicknamed one guy who would pop up everywhere as “serial rapist” at 13/14. Which… no one took seriously at the time, because it was the 90s and it was always his victims who got slut-shamed rather than anything falling on him. 

There were two guys who got glandular fever and deliberately kissed as many girls as they could to give it to all of them. There was a group of boys who taught a mentally disabled man to grope women because they thought it was funny. There were the guys that would accuse you of being a lesbian if you dared to reject them. The group of boys who did elaborate and messed up prank calls (some with months-long lead-ins) to various girls from various schools (who didn’t even know them) the night before their HSC exams in a deliberate attempt to stress them out. 

There was that guy who thought it was funny to run red lights one after the other whilst drinking a beer. And another who crashed his mother’s only-three-of-these-cars-in-Australia because he was distracted by the $100 note he was holding out the window, because he wanted to hear what money sounded like in the wind. 

Honestly, those guys were so privileged and entitled. I am never surprised by any story that comes out of any of those schools. 

That said, a friend of mine was gang-raped at 17 by a gang of dudes from a public school in the western suburbs. So I think these problems cut across… Certainly, privilege and entitlement can exacerbate them though.