As a sex therapist and an educator, I keep thinking about what the “Cornell 7” case is illuminating. A brief overview: A woman, publicly identified as Jane Doe, has sued Cornell and seven male students, accusing them of drugging and raping her in October 2024.1 Details of the case are still emerging, and I can’t speak to what happened because I wasn’t there, but what I can say with confidence is that we cannot meaningfully address sexual violence only by teaching people to identify consent at the point of sexual contact.
Over the last few years, consent has rightfully taken a more prominent place in society. We emphasize it in conversations, seminars, and the law. If someone says “no” to sexual activity, it’s a no, and they haven’t consented. But we also have to look at what people learn long before the moment of sexual contact. How do they understand another person’s desire? And it’s important to understand that a sexual assault should not be understood through the same framework as mutual desire because it involves a violation of another’s autonomy as well as consent. We have to ask: What do those who commit sexual assault believe they are entitled to? What happens when sexual behavior becomes a way of establishing status with other men?
We see the status aspect play out in numerous ways — men bragging about their “body count,” i.e., the number of women they’ve slept with, how they rank women based on attractiveness, and how they talk about women amongst themselves. For instance, a message in the Snapchat group chat from the Cornell case suggested that Jane Doe was available for sex. A later message asked if the “shop” was still open, and someone replied, “Yea,” as though she was an object for the taking.
It’s disgusting and vile, but is anyone actually surprised? I know I’m not, and many of the women and people from historically marginalized communities I am talking with aren’t either. They are angry and tired. Some are disgusted. But there is a familiarity to this case that is hard to ignore.
Teaching about consent is not enough. And individual accountability isn’t either. If we stop at the individual, we miss too much because that doesn’t ask, “What allows this to continue?” What allows it to continue is cultural and systemic. There is a long history of cisgender men finding protection within systems built largely by and for other cisgender men. Research confirms this. A 2024 review article found that institutional betrayal, or causing further harm to survivors of college sexual violence, is rampant.2 Protecting cisgender men does not always require someone consciously deciding to protect another man. Sometimes the system does the work. People follow procedure but the procedure favors the perpetrator over the survivor.2
Or, it could be that the people at a university seek to protect the institution’s reputation. I’ve known this for decades, and when I was in college, I cofounded a group called Sexual Assault and Violence Ends (S.A.V.E). This was necessary on that college campus to help raise awareness about sexual assaults that get brushed under the rug by institutions, and to create a safe space for students to seek support.
Sometimes protecting cisgender men means remaining loyal to their friend, or deciding what’s occurring is none of their business. Eventually, responsibility becomes so dispersed that everyone can tell themselves it belongs somewhere else, and that’s what allows sexual violence to fester.
To take a case that is not disputed, look at Jeffrey Epstein. The abuse itself is no longer a mystery.3 Neither is the fact that Epstein moved among people with extraordinary wealth and power for years. What remains difficult to comprehend is how sexual exploitation could continue for so long with so many people and institutions around him. I am less interested in treating that as the story of one exceptionally predatory man than in asking what made his continued access possible.
Systems do not always protect people equally. Survivors of sexual violence know something about this. Women do too. Black people have their own history with institutions in this country, as do queer and trans people. I’m not sharing new information – this is all widely known – but what I am saying is that until we stop treating sexual violence as only an individual problem, it will likely continue.
