RECIPROCITY: Do Boys Lack Empathy? If So, Perhaps It’s Because They Give What They Get. “Society has too much trouble seeing harm to boys even when the harm is there for all to be seen. This pattern holds even in the context of sexual predation. The legal system appears to be significantly less willing to protect boys from sexual predation by adults than it is to protect girls. A study of a decade’s worth of cases in the New Jersey school system concluded that when teachers have sex with minor students, male teachers are more likely to go to jail for that transgression, and of those teachers who go to jail, male teachers are given longer sentences.”