In this paper, Sunderland analyzes how mainstream Canadian newspapers framed a gang sexual assault at Toronto’s elite St. Michael’s College School. Departing from typical “bad apples” or “boys will be boys” tropes, coverage adopted a gendered and sociological lens, invoking toxic masculinity, school culture, and systemic bullying. Through discourse and content analysis, Sunderland shows how these framings often cast the perpetrators as passive products of a toxic environment, shifting attention from individual and institutional culpability toward diffuse cultural explanations. To explain this phenomenon, she introduces the concept of privilege diffusion—a rhetorical strategy that disperses blame so broadly across vague systemic forces that no single actor, institution, or structure is held accountable. This framing, she argues, depoliticizes sexual violence and sustains institutional privilege by allowing elite actors to evade meaningful scrutiny. The article advances scholarship on blame attribution by demonstrating how seemingly progressive gendered framings can obscure agency and re-entrench power, even while appearing critical. It also contributes to intersectional analyses of sexual violence by situating elite boy violence within broader structures of gender, class, and racial privilege by highlighting how media narratives selectively center or erase these dimensions. Sunderland’s findings challenge assumptions that adopting critical language inherently disrupts entrenched power hierarchies, showing instead how it can operate as a mechanism of protection for those already advantaged by them.
Read More: https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/soc4.70101
Jillian Sunderland is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at the University of Toronto and a Joseph-Armand Bombardier SSHRC Doctoral Scholar. Her research examines how masculinities are produced, contested, and institutionalized within sites of power, focusing on their intersections with male supremacy, governance, and gendered violence. Her dissertation analyzes two decades of governmental and RCMP reports on sexual harassment. She has published in Men and Masculinities, Social Politics, Sociological Forum, and Sociology Compass, and her work has been featured by CBC and CTV. She serves on the board of WCAPS Canada and is an active member of the Canadian Defence and Security Network.