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 2024, 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.
