That’s the whole lesson for my sons in eleven words.

“Keeping the peace” is what we call the opposite of it. The mate who’s abusive and nobody mentions it. The family dinner where everyone talks around it. “I don’t condone it, but it’s not my place.” Every one of those is someone choosing their own peace over her safety.

Peace that costs someone else their safety isn’t peace. And it isn’t quiet, either. I find it’s the loudest thing in the room — the moment the silence hits the chat. “Not my business” is what keeps this behaviour in business.

I’m a boy mum of three. So this is the question I keep coming back to: how do I raise better men? Sons who stand up for themselves and for other people — but who don’t become the bullies, and don’t become the ones who stand there and watch. Sons I’d want a daughter of mine around.

A father wrote about his nine-year-old son watching a group of friends assault a girl at school, and doing nothing. Not joining in. Not stopping it. Not telling anyone. Just standing there.

What stopped me wasn’t the incident. It was this:

I read that three times. Not because I see my boys in it — I don’t. Because of what came next.

The father’s realisation was that his son knew right from wrong every single time — and knowing didn’t move him. Five times he’d stood by while friends did something cruel. He felt sick each time. He said nothing each time. His reason, when asked: I didn’t want them to be mad at me.

That’s the whole thing, isn’t it. Not whether a boy knows. Whether he’ll act when it costs him something.

I know what it costs to act. I’ll come back to that.

I’ll be straight with you: the post was an ad.

It ends with a counsellor recommending a specific comic book series by name, a miraculous six-week turnaround, and a link to buy. The email screenshot that circulated with it is a generated image — the school has a .edu address a primary school can’t hold, there are two different domains in the one email, and it’s dated “Tuesday, 8 August 2026,” which was a Saturday.

I read content for a living. I know what a funnel looks like. This one was dressed as a father’s grief, and it used a child’s assault as the hook to sell a fifty-dollar book.

I know why I was served it, too. I’d spent the week reading and commenting on the Cornell 7 — seven young men at a university fraternity, and the woman who says they raped her. The university’s own investigation found enough to expel two of them and suspend two more. The messages they sent that night aren’t anyone’s opinion; they’re screenshots in a court filing. Seven. Not one man and six who walked away. The algorithm watched me care about that, and sold me a story about a boy who didn’t walk away. That’s how it works now. Your outrage about a real case is the targeting data for a fake one.

Because the question underneath it is real. The story selling it to me wasn’t — but the thing it was selling into, the fear every mother of sons carries, that isn’t manufactured. It’s been sitting in me for years.

I’m telling you it was an ad for the same reason I tell a client when their marketing problem isn’t actually a marketing problem. Find the real problem first. You don’t get to skip the part where you look at what’s really in front of you, even when the feeling is true.

The feeling is true. So let’s look at what’s actually in front of us.

We’re told there’s a male loneliness epidemic. I don’t believe that’s true. I believe what we’re seeing is a direct consequence of behaviour — and of attitudes toward women held by a large majority of men. Not all. But a majority.

That’s not a feeling. In the most recent national survey of community attitudes, 48% of young men agreed that women exaggerate how unequally they’re treated in Australia. Among young women, 25% did.

Nearly half of young men. That isn’t a fringe.

I know. Not all men. Let me tell you about the week I just had.

The Cornell 7 is the shorthand for seven members of a university fraternity and the woman who says they raped her in 2024 — in a case the local prosecutor first declined to touch, and has now been forced to reopen. That’s the headline. The part I haven’t been able to stop reading is the group chat.

Legal experts have spent the week explaining that the fifty can’t be charged, because there’s no legal duty to intervene. I believe them. I’m not talking about the law. I’m talking about what fifty grown men did when the cost of doing something was the group chat being mad at them.

You’ll recognise the reason. It’s a nine-year-old’s reason.

So yes. Not all men. Just the seven who went — and the fifty who read it and said nothing.

Here’s the number that connects those two things. Thirteen per cent of Australian adults — about 2.6 million people — watched violence toward a parent before they turned fifteen. Of those who saw their mother hit, 72% saw it more than once.

That boy standing three feet away at recess? There’s a fair chance he’s already seen a version of this at home.

Which brings me back to where I started.

As a society we are very quick to say “I don’t condone that behaviour” — and very quick to look away when it’s our friend doing it. Not a mistake. Not cheeky. Abusive, violent or neglectful behaviour, toward a woman or toward kids, over and over, from someone we know. We don’t condone it. We just don’t do anything about it. Apparently.

I don’t think I know one woman who doesn’t know a woman — or isn’t that woman — who’s had serious harm from a man. A stranger, or worse, a partner. Narcissistic abuse. Coercive control. Financial abuse. Neglect. Physical violence. The list doesn’t end, and f*ck, I am tired.

I want to be careful here, because I’m a strategist and I’d rather tell you the truth than the version that makes a better headline. The data does not say this is getting worse. Recorded domestic violence assault in NSW is flat. Self-reported violence in the community may even be falling.

What the data says is this: the number of women killed, and the number of women hospitalised, has not moved in eight years. With every bit of spotlight this has had — nothing has moved.

And here’s the part no dataset will give you. If you actually speak with women — and I do, every week — my opinion is that it is getting worse. What’s falling isn’t the violence. It’s trust in the system. Fewer women are willing to report, because they’ve seen what happens to the ones who do, and they fear for their safety. I can’t prove that. It’s my own truth, from what has been shared with me personally, beyond the statistics. I’m telling you which is which.

I’m not writing this as a woman who’s watched it from the outside.

I left my sons’ father. I left for reasons they understood long before I ever had to explain them. It cost me in every way a thing can cost you. And I would do it again tomorrow.

From what I’ve observed, the men who kept witnessing violence toward women went one of two ways. Some used it as their excuse — or as the reason they “didn’t know better.” They did know better. What they actually learnt was that you could get away with it. Others learnt from their mother’s strength: her willingness to remove them from it before it ever looked normal, and to model something else instead — what respect for a woman looks like, day to day, when nobody’s watching.

I love a lot of men. I’m raising three. And I am burnt out and disgusted in a way that surprises me — to the point that I can’t see myself opening up to a life like that again. I’ve found peace alone. Never alone with my sons. And never alone with my purpose, which is this business and the women I build it for.

That’s the part people don’t expect from a marketing strategist. It’s the whole reason I am one.

Think about what a woman without her own money actually does. She stays quiet, because the rent depends on it. She doesn’t leave when every part of her knows she should, because where would she go, and with what. She takes the job in the place that isn’t safe. She says yes to the people, the places and the situations she’d never otherwise go near — because survival doesn’t negotiate. None of that is weakness. It’s arithmetic.

A woman with her own income does different arithmetic. She can leave. She can afford the lawyer. She can keep the house. She can say no, and mean it.

And if you’re at the working-out-whether stage, the clearest thing I’ve found is The Divorce Course — a family lawyer and her daughter explaining, episode by episode, how it actually works in Australia. It’s in the list at the end.

In that same national survey, 1.6 million Australian women had experienced economic abuse from a partner. Money is one of the ways men hold women in place. Which means money is one of the ways women get free. Women and children are safest when a woman has her own financial security. I’ve learnt that personally.

So when I help a woman build confidence, skills and income, I’m not just building a business. I’m building an exit she may never need — and the power to never need it.

More on that soon. It deserves its own piece.

So. How do I raise better men?

I’ve already started. I showed them. But showing them once isn’t the end of it, and here’s what I refuse from here.

That’s the standard. For them, and for me.

I choose to have a backbone and call it like I see it — even when it won’t make me popular, and even when it costs me support. Someone has to say what other women don’t feel safe to. I will.