Sometimes a story is so so appalling, it captures the public’s attention, including the attention of people who don’t focus on the issue otherwise. Such is the case with the alleged 2024 gang rape at Cornell University.
For feminists who focus on violence against women or anyone who has ever cared about campus rape, the claims made in Jane Doe’s civil lawsuit against the alleged perpetrators may be unusual in its severity – but we know the statistics that show that somewhere between 20% and 25% of women college students will be the victim of a sexual assault (no statistics tell us what percentage of men students will be rapists).
This makes the public outcry to punish seven male students miss the point, which is that there are tens of thousands of campus rape stories, few of which make the news.
We know that nearly every campus in the US has a plethora of rape victims and rapists. We also know how it often happens. The Johns Hopkins University “student well-being” blog summarizes a key aspect:
“The ‘Red Zone’ is a period of time that lasts from the start of the fall semester through Thanksgiving break when the majority of sexual assault occurs on college campuses ... It’s a six-to-10-week time frame when many students are going to parties, gatherings, and other social events to celebrate their return to campus. Data shows that over 50% of sexual assaults that occur on college campuses occur during this time. New students can be especially vulnerable during this period, due to their unfamiliarity with the campus, new social experiences, and the resources available to survivors.”
We know that the Greek system that sets the rules for most sororities and fraternities does not permit alcohol at sororities, which makes fraternities the hosts of the alcohol-saturated parties, which sends young women into enemy territory, which is where they are sometimes manipulated to get them drunk and stranded and abused.
The Hopkins blog notes: “Alcohol is the tool that is most commonly used by perpetrators in cases of sexual assault ... A person who is incapacitated by drugs or alcohol is not able to consent.” We know that fraternities often make the news for their excesses and abuses, including sometimes-harmful-to-fatal hazing of their own potential members.
We know the Cornell student newspaper editorial that brought this case to light declares that 15% of all students there have experienced “nonconsensual sexual contact” and a disproportionate fifth of those incidents took place at fraternities.
The Cornell fraternity in question was suspended from campus for a period, as a November 2024 Guardian piece about the incident reports. Meanwhile, campus rape is a nationwide issue, and the Trump administration’s assault on Title IX continues.
The non-profit organization Human Rights Campaign reports that the Department of Education just rescinded a Biden-era Title IX rule: “Specifically, this move puts back in place rules for colleges and universities from the first Trump administration that suppress the voices of survivors of rape and sexual assault and make it easier for their perpetrators to get away with their actions.” It also affects LGBTQ+ students.
The Trump administration appears comfortable in the company of alleged perpetrators. Last year, it intervened on behalf of Andrew Tate, who is charged with several counts of rape, trafficking and assault against women. This past week, administration members selected Russell Brand, likewise awaiting trial on multiple charges of sexual assault, to co-moderate a panel at a Maha conference on 29 September, and then there’s Trump, who has been held liable for sex abuse, and the allegations against the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth. (All of the men deny wrongdoing.)
While the criminal justice system should address reports of rape, we know that rates of conviction are appallingly low for a number of reasons. Although, thanks to feminist interventions, the legal system is better equipped to understand this crime and less prejudiced against victims, we will not change the world through that means.
Sexual assault arises in part through both the entitlement and the desire to abuse and dehumanize women, which is in part about definitions of both masculinity and femininity: masculinity in that domination, violation and degradation are seen as status-enhancing, femininity in the perception that women’s bodies are for men to use, women’s voices and rights to be ignored.
The most compelling thing I’ve read in response to the Cornell case is in an essay by feminist writer Soraya Chemaly. She cites anthropologist Peggy Sanday, who told her that there are “rape-prone” and “rape-free” societies: “She found that in rape-free cultures, women have far more authority, status, safety and freedom.”
They’re societies in which women’s rights to bodily and social self-determination are respected, and a man who violates those rights would face severe consequences. “Rape-prone cultures, on the other hand, treat rape as an entitlement in a system that revolves around masculine contests and hierarchies.”
Sanday also wrote a book titled Fraternity Gang Rape, documenting “daily life in the fraternity, highlighting the role played by pornography, male bonding, and degrading, often grotesque, initiation and hazing rituals”. In 2020, an 18-year-old Cornell freshman died from an alcohol-intensive hazing ritual at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, neighbor to the fraternity where the 2024 gang rape allegedly took place.
The only effective, lasting, far-reaching solution is the political, legal, economic and cultural equality of women. This requires the liberation of men from the kind of misogynistic male supremacy Sanday describes in the fraternities, which may give them power and status in the context of that supremacy, but also corrupts and distorts their psyches into the kind of dehumanized grotesquery described in the Cornell case.
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Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility
