Commentary: What the boy saw: A reflection on Cornell Seven

The country is arguing about what we should tell our sons. I want to ask what they have already seen.

In September, a former Cornell University student filed a lawsuit alleging seven fraternity members raped her in 2024. At least two of the accused, through their attorneys, deny wrongdoing. No criminal charges have been filed.

New York’s attorney general is leading the criminal investigation as a special prosecutor, though a lawyer for one of the accused has asked a judge to remove her from the case.

I do not know what happened in that house, and nothing I am about to say depends on knowing. But the case has put a question before every father in America.

Most of the responses I have read focus on the conversations we should have with boys about consent, courage, and speaking up. Those conversations matter. But I believe a boy begins learning what a woman is worth long before anyone sits him down for that talk.

What a boy learns at a stoplight

Picture two fathers pulling out of a church parking lot at 11:40 on a Sunday morning. Both have heard the same sermon. The first asks his wife what she thought of it and waits for her answer. The second says nothing until the next stoplight, then says something about her. She has heard it before. So has the boy in the back seat.

By Tuesday, the sermon will be gone. The stoplight will not. A boy can lose a sermon in two days and carry what he learned at that stoplight into a first apartment, a marriage, and a house of his own, never knowing where he got it.

I know because I was that boy.

What my father taught

I grew up in Kansas City. My father was an alcoholic and verbally abusive to my mother. The ballfield was the one place trouble could not follow me, and I spent the 15-minute walk home trying to figure out what I would be walking into.

If Dad was not home by dinner, we knew where he was and what kind of night it would be. Some nights, I hid under my bed, so he would not see me if he looked in. My mother was scared. We all were.

Yet when I was 10 and 11, that same man coached my Little League team, and the summer we won the championship was one of the few times he and I were simply happy together. I knew, standing in the middle of that joy that when we got home it could end. A boy does not learn from the average of his father. He learns from the room he is about to walk into.

Nobody in that house gave a speech about what a man owes his wife. Nobody needed to. I still received the whole course anyway: who holds power in a house and what a woman’s pain is worth when it changes nothing.

What the Bible understands

The Bible understood this long before researchers did. Moses told fathers to teach their children “when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up” (Deuteronomy 6:7 NASB95). There is no classroom on that list. The lesson happens at the table, in the hallway, at the second stoplight. A father driving home from church is walking by the way.

But a house is not a sentence, and I want to be careful here. Researchers who followed abused and neglected children into adulthood found their risk of arrest rose substantially, yet a little more than half were never arrested for anything beyond a traffic offense.

The prophet Ezekiel put it better. He described a son who “observed all his father’s sins which he committed, and observing does not do likewise” (Ezekiel 18:14 NASB95). Watching shapes a boy. It does not decide him.

What a boy decides

It did not decide me, though it came close. I drank for too many years. Forty-three years ago, I spent 45 days in a treatment center, and I have been sober ever since.

When my daughter was born, I decided she would not grow up the way I had. I spent the next six years with a psychiatrist and a psychologist, taking apart what that house had taught me.

Before my father died in 2019, I made peace with him. Peace was not an excuse for what I saw. It was setting down what I had carried, so my hands were free for the people in front of me.

So, here is what I would say to every father and to every older man in every church who could stand in for a father who is not there: The talk matters. But the boy is watching the stoplight.

He is watching how you speak to his mother when you are tired, what you say about women when you think he is not listening, and what your family does when a woman cries out. You cannot take back what the first boy saw. You can decide what the next boy sees.

It may be the most important thing you ever teach him, yet you will never say a word about it.

Eli Harden lives in Cypress, Texas, and writes Faith & Discernment at harden.substack.com. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.