Sickening, enraging, heartbreaking… so many words have already been used about the alleged gang rape of a Cornell University student by her peers. I’d add despairing, because here we are again, faced with a situation in which the message is clear: the futures and reputations of promising young men matter more than the shattering of a young woman’s life.
Was I surprised to learn that, of the seven male students accused in late 2024, only two were expelled from the Ivy League university? That the others were made to undertake workshops and write essays (I’m imagining, “Explain in 800 words why you sexually assaulted a fellow student and we’ll let you off”)? Was I hell, and you probably aren’t either.
The female student, known only as Jane Doe, went to the Cornell University Police Department about three weeks after the alleged attack. There was an internal investigation and several hearings – no actual police involvement, no criminal charges. She has dropped out of university, her future in pieces. Or as her lawyer put it: “She’s barely hanging on for what these guys did to her.”
Little wonder that she’s now suing Cornell, and those seven fraternity members, citing its failure to protect her. According to her court filing, while visiting a friend at the Chi Pi fraternity (motto: “truth, honour and personal integrity”), she was pressured into taking drugs by two male students, after which she was subjected to a brutal gang rape that lasted for hours, her body moved from roon to room before she finally lost consciousness.
One of the men sent a message to a group Snapchat inviting other fraternity members to join in, saying there was “free pussy”. Don’t take my word for that – there’s a screenshot of the thread, in which another student replied, “I fucking love Chi Pi”. That’s the fraternity with a stated mission to “build better men”, by the way.
So much about this case is disturbing, but I keep coming back to that Snapchat group thread – specifically the men who saw those messages and didn’t raise the alarm, or at the very tell their fellow frat boys to back off. That can only mean that they didn’t think anything of it in a culture where sexual assault is as normalised as keg parties, or that they didn’t think it was any of their business. I’m not sure which is worse.
We’ve long known that schools, colleges and universities the world over are failing the victims of sexual assault and protecting those who perpetrate it. But it’s getting harder and harder to believe that they aren’t breeding a generation of young men who believe they can inflict unimaginable horror on others without fear of consequence. If they believe it, it’s because it’s true: in England and Wales, fewer than three in 1,000 rapes (the ones that are reported) result in a basic charge or summons. In the US, fewer than four per cent of violent sex crimes result in convictions.
Now we learn that being tasked with writing an essay is apparently considered an adequate slap on the wrist for those accused of destroying a girl’s life. Was that a decision made by men? Men who essentially gave a free pass to other, younger men to graduate from an elite university, and go on to hold positions of power and influence themselves, upholding the rotten status quo for those who come after them? Boys will be boys, eh.
We see it all around us: presidents, sports stars, celebrities… even Supreme Court justices are accused of sexual assault, and somehow it all goes away. As Chanel Miller, the Stanford student who was sexually assaulted by “star athlete” Brock Turner in 2015, wrote in her memoir: “My pain was never more valuable than his potential.”
It all sends the clearest message possible that boys and men can get away with rape, and that girls and women shouldn’t bother reporting it (according to Jane Doe’s filing, the campus police didn’t even bother calling her back after the first time she contacted them).
Obviously, this is where I say “not all men”. Yes, yes, we know. But it’s also men who often stay silent when this stuff happens. I remember starting conversations with the men in my life about Gisèle Pelicot, after weeks and weeks in which women had been talking about little else. None of them knew what I was going on about.
Just not raping women doesn’t make you a good guy, sorry. Without men getting angry or speaking up, how can we stop this stuff from happening? It’s a sliding scale that ranges from not intervening when someone advertises gang rape on Snapchat to assuming that sexual assaults have nothing to do with you (oh, the privilege of not living with that fear). As a lone male voice on a Reddit thread about Cornell put it: “I have seen roughly 40 posts about this on my Instagram by women… I am the only man who has posted about it that I have seen and holy hell does that make my blood boil.”
The actress Florence Pugh wrote about it on Instagram – asking men to “be angry for us” – only to have her post censored (it nonetheless has more than a million likes). So now women can’t even ask men to talk about violence against women without being shut down.
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As for Cornell? It’s issued a statement saying that its Office of Civil Rights and Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards (that’s a long way of saying “not the police”) had adjudicated the allegations in accordance with university policy and barred the Xi chapter of Chi Pi from campus. “We take sexual violence extremely seriously,” said vice president for university relations, Kyle Kimball, adding that Cornell would “respond in detail through the legal process”.
Which makes it sound as though we need someone with a degree to explain all this to us. We don’t: when the response to a woman making an accusation of violent gang rape is to hand out essay assignments instead of forcing men – even young and bright ones – to take accountability, we have truly lost our way. And without a willingness to acknowledge that, I don’t know how we find our way back.