Four weeks ago, I dropped off my younger daughter to start her freshman year at college. Parents of incoming freshmen at every school get versions of the same emails: about scheduling your kid’s move-in time and filling out forms for the health center and making sure to buy the extra-long sheets.
Parents of daughters get an extra assignment. It isn’t written down, but we all know what it is. In between buying shower caddies and LED lights, we have to give our girls a refresher course on Rape Prevention 101. Don’t leave your drink unattended at a party. Don’t walk home late at night by yourself. Make sure someone knows where you are. Watch out for your friends.
On move-in day, student volunteers wearing T-shirts in the school colors helpfully whisked my daughter’s suitcases, the single stuffed animal she brought to keep her company and her straining-at-the-seams IKEA bags up to her dorm room. Her father and I made her bed, unboxed her fan, helped her put her clothes in the drawers. We all went to lunch. She went to a meeting with her resident adviser group. Then it was time to say goodbye.
“Make good choices!” I called. I drove home, a little sad, mostly proud, thinking: My work here is done. I knew it wasn’t really true — she’ll still come home on breaks, and she’ll still need me — but it was a milestone. My kind, smart, big-hearted daughter was ready to spread her wings, ready to meet all the people and do all the things.
Twelve days later, news broke that a former Cornell student was suing the university and others, alleging that seven fraternity members had drugged and raped her at the Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2020, when she was 20. She said the university had failed to protect her or to adequately punish the participants, one of whom had sent an unprintable message to the fraternity’s Snapchat group alerting its dozens of members, in vulgar shorthand, that a woman’s body was available for the taking.
Hearing about it, I was incandescent with rage, as were a great many others. The immediate public outcry focused on the Snapchat message, the lack of any criminal charges, the apparent failure of anyone in the fraternity to intervene. Only two of the seven alleged assailants were expelled, and some of the discipline Cornell meted out included having the men write essays. I am so angry right now, I saw women posting on social media. We need to raise better men.
For women who’d gone to college decades ago, the ones who’d spent their undergraduate years marching and protesting and signing petitions and occupying buildings — the ones, that is, like me — the fury was laced with a kind of bewildered exhaustion. How is this still happening? Shouldn’t things be better by now? How could all of our activism have brought about so little change?
I started college in the fall of 1987. Back then, the idea of boys forcing themselves on girls, even girls who were passed out drunk, was still the stuff of punchlines in teen movies. The term “rape culture” wasn’t in wide circulation, but we could see it all around us — in what happened on weekends in the basements of the local social institutions, in the way some men talked about women. At a Take Back the Night march, where students walked through campus, stopping so that women could tell agonizing personal stories, a heckler held up a sign that said “We can rape anyone we want.”
Under pressure, the university hired a counselor to handle sexual assault cases — a start, but far less than was needed to address the problem. Back then, however, many universities were reluctant to address sexual assault head-on, lest their actions attract negative attention from alumni, donors or potential applicants.
In 2011, the feds stepped in. Under the Obama administration, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights sent colleges strict new guidelines for how to handle sexual harassment and sexual assault cases. In part, the rules were intended to make it easier for victims to prove their case, including by lowering the standard of evidence. To me and the people I had marched with all those years ago, it was a victory — too late for us, perhaps, but maybe not too late to help our children. But then a different population felt outraged. Opponents of the new guidance said it went too far, skewing unfairly in favor of accusers at the expense of the rights of the accused.
When President Trump took office, the pendulum swung back, hard. Now campus sexual assault accusations can be held to a far higher standard of evidence, and people accused of sexual assault can in some circumstances cross-examine their accusers, a terrifying prospect for survivors of trauma. Just this week, the Trump administration weakened the rules yet again, rescinding Biden-era protections for gender identity and sexual orientation.
The facts of the Cornell case are still coming into view. Prosecutors say the woman, who has not been publicly identified, did not make it clear in her initial report to campus police that she was the victim of nonconsensual sex. (What then did she report, and why? The authorities did not say.) Cornell has disputed some accounts of the punishments it handed out to the fraternity members in question, though it has declined to say what actions it took. A lawyer for one of the young men is now making the media rounds, saying that his client is an innocent victim and that the woman’s lawsuit is a “money grab.”
New York State sets a high bar for proving rape allegations. A person who has willingly consumed drugs or alcohol is not assumed to be incapacitated unless she or he is unconscious.
No one, however, is disputing that Snapchat message. The one showing that the fraternity brothers felt comfortable enough with their actions that night to advertise them. At some point in the evening, one of the brothers reportedly checked in to see if the activity was still underway. “Shop still open?” he posted. “Yea,” someone replied.
I keep thinking about the woman whose body they were referring to. I think about her mother, who, not too many Septembers ago, might have unpacked bags and hung up posters, feeling just as proud as I’d felt. And I keep thinking about my daughter and her female classmates.
Would some student on their campus be capable of sending a text that offered up a woman like a used futon on Facebook Marketplace? And if so, would the university allow him or some of those who participated to continue their studies?
I wanted to think the world had changed, that all those years of marching and making demands by students at colleges all over the country had resulted in more effective systems. That colleges had better ways of handling sexual assault. That we’d educated boys and girls about rape culture. That young men see their female classmates as people. That all our work meant something.
Looking at the screenshots the Chi Phi brothers sent that night, I think maybe all that’s changed since 1987 is the technology.
All I can do is hope that in another few decades, when one of my daughters is dropping off her daughters on campus somewhere, things will finally be better. Until then, we’ll have to keep giving our girls the talk, and hoping, truly hoping, that it’s enough.
Jennifer Weiner, a novelist, writes frequently about gender and culture. Her latest novel is “The Griffin Sisters’ Greatest Hits.”
Source photograph by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
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