In March, a 21-year-old student at the Fashion Institute of Technology fatally overdosed on fentanyl. Her name was Annabel Richter, and her mother described her as a “luminous presence.” She loved poetry and fashion, and photos of her depict a young woman with a dreamy expression and braided pigtails. Her roommate in an all-female dorm also overdosed and was lucky to survive.
In an indictment unsealed on Oct. 15, federal prosecutors allege that Moises Freire, 19, the man who supplied Richter with drugs, raped her while she was unconscious. They also allege that Freire sent photos of the victim, half-clothed and passed out, to friends. He claimed the drug was cocaine, but he knew that it wasn’t — Freire, who was not a student at F.I.T., previously described the narcotic as “poison.”
The alleged crime is monstrous and, at least according to prosecutors, reasonably unambiguous. This indictment comes weeks after the Cornell Seven story became national news, and the two cases contain a few uncomfortable similarities.
Some of Jane Doe’s assertions in the Cornell case are disputed by the frat brothers she has accused of sexual assault, and the outcome is not as dire — she is alive to tell her side of the story. Still, there are some facts that seem clear in both cases: Some of the alleged perpetrators were not strangers to the victims, hard drugs were present, and intoxicated women were casually dehumanized for a male audience. (The Cornell case involved seven men and one woman over the course of many hours. The participants were drinking and taking ketamine. At one point, one of the seven sent a Snapchat message to a group of over 50 young men inviting them to join in a maximally vulgar way.)
Since the Cornell story broke, I have vacillated between nihilism and anger. The nihilism comes from witnessing several explosions of press and outrage over college sexual assault in my adult life. I watched the outrage subside, the backlash ensue, and the problem remain, seemingly intractable. Jane Doe has recently expressed her profound disappointment in how her case was handled by the university’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, who she feels doubted the credibility of her account.
The most recent study of nearly 200,000 students conducted by the Association of American Universities, published in 2019, found that about a fifth of college women were victims of sexual assault and around 5 percent of men were victims, too. Women who attend college and live on campus are more likely to be victims of assault than same-age women who are commuters or who do not attend college at all, despite increased awareness of the problem of sexual assault among students.
I know that I have to teach my girls the reality of the world they will inhabit as they get older, but I deeply resent having to accept that their physical liberty may be curtailed. Perhaps more than most parents, I want my kids to enjoy their freedom. I do not think it serves children well, regardless of gender, to make them afraid of the world, because it may lead to anxiety and paralysis instead of agency.
I botched my first attempt to talk to my older daughter about this. It all came out in a jumble and ended up sounding like a “Reefer Madness”-style P.S.A. I would have certainly tuned out as a teenager. In order to impart something more useful, I called Charlene Senn, a professor of psychology at the University of Windsor in Ontario, who developed an evidence-based program for helping women prevent college sexual assault, which has also been recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The curriculum, which is called “Flip the Script With E.A.A.A.,” has three main components: assess, acknowledge and act (the triple A in the title). College students are most commonly assaulted by acquaintances, not strangers, and Senn’s framework recognizes that women too often overlook questionable actions from people in their social circles.
The “assess” portion teaches women common red flags to look out for in their male friends, like persistence after being told no, unwanted sexual comments and attempts to isolate them from a larger group. (Teaching bystander intervention is not a silver bullet, Senn told me, because many men know better than to perpetrate assault with an audience.)
“Acknowledge” helps women override their social conditioning to be nice and “for maintaining relationships at all costs,” Senn told me. Young women do not want to think of their friends as potential rapists, and that desire to see them in the best light can slow down their response time when a situation turns dark. The program gives them tips on how to emotionally prepare for and push back against common sexual coercion tactics. “Act” gives women a tool kit of verbal and physical strategies to use if the man does not respond.
I like this approach because the training places blame squarely on the perpetrators, not the victims; it is designed to make girls feel in charge of a situation even if it goes south, and it seems to work. In a randomized study, first-year college women in Canada who were taught Senn’s resistance program were significantly less likely to be victims of rape in the year following their training than a control group of students.
It’s On Us, a U.S. based nonprofit also focused on preventing college sexual assault, found that men with “strong ties” to women felt a greater sense of responsibility to their female friends and “anger at other men who perpetrate violence.” In a recent guest essay for Opinion, Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan, wrote about his decision to make fraternities on campus coed, and I agree that more socializing as equals is key to women being seen as more than sex objects. (Get rid of sororities, while you’re at it, too.)
“College should be a place where young people can learn, grow and pursue their dreams, not a place where predators exploit their vulnerability,” a special agent for the New York Task Force Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration said in a news release announcing the charges in the F.I.T. case.
Unfortunately, I cannot ensure that every man my daughters encounter at college will see them as fully human, whether or not the school has Greek life. But I can help them be confident of their own worth, which includes knowing how to defend themselves. As Senn put it to me, college women should be empowered to say: “We’re here. We have a right to take up space.”
End Notes
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Thank you to the hundreds of readers who wrote to me about their family histories after my Saturday newsletter about gaining Austrian citizenship. I might not have the time to respond to every note, but I am reading each one. I feel extremely honored that you are sharing your heart-rending stories with me.
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Whenever I am upset about something, I try to read as much as possible, in the hopes of gaining some crumb of understanding. The best thing I read while thinking about the Cornell Seven was “Everybody Knows,” by Elizabeth Schambelan in N+1, published in 2019. It’s a painful read but a vital one.
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