TRIGGER WARNING – This article contains mentions of sexual assault and rape.
As much as I love being a woman, it’s also one of the most dangerous parts of my identity because of the concern for safety.Â
Every time I leave my house, I have to make sure that the door is locked so that my two other girl roommates and I are safe. I feel safer walking home when I’m with my friends or with a man. If I have to walk home alone, especially at night, I call one of my friends in case something happens. If I come across a man when I’m out and about, my whole body tenses up. Every single time my friends are going home after a hangout, I tell them to text me when they’re home. It’s carrying pepper spray or a knife on you. It’s having to make sure everyone is home safe. It’s having each other’s location in case something happens. It’s having to stick together during a night out. It’s exhausting living like this.Â
The Cornell 7 incident is genuinely one of the most frustrating situations to hear about as a woman. For those that don’t know, a Cornell student (named Jane Doe for privacy reasons) was gang raped by seven men in the university’s chapter of the fraternity Chi Psi for seven hours while intoxicated at the frat house. This incident happened in October of 2024, and it is just now getting traction because the victim is suing Cornell.Â
What’s outrageous is that instead of being adequately punished, Cornell expelled two of the men and assigned an essay to the other five that explained why what they did was wrong. Are you actually kidding me?! If students are even caught plagiarizing, it’s expulsion, but a whole act of sexual assault gets a mere essay, something that I can write in 30 minutes? (By the way, I did write this article in about an hour and a half…insane right?)
It’s always “not all men!” While this could be true, in cases like this, it is always a man. In this incident, there was a Snapchat group chat with 57 members of the frat. The article that showed the Snapchat group chat revealed that Johnathan Newell texted the group that there was “free p*ssy” upstairs. Not only is this already a crazy text, not one person out of 57 people in that group chat thought it would be a good idea to keep her safe or mention how wrong it is or say the bare minimum of, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t do this.”Â
This incident has caused nationwide outrage. I’ve even seen men reposting content about this. However, to men, this just seems more surprising because of the intensity and crazy injustice of the situation. The problem is that to most women, this is just another fight that we have to endure because this happens so often. This isn’t just a Cornell problem, this happens on every college campus. According to RAINN, 1 in 3 undergraduate women experience sexual assault during their time as a college student. Additionally, about 70 to 80 percent of sexual assault incidents go unreported.Â
Men will never get it. No matter how educated, how gentlemanly, or how kind. A good man still has male privilege. They don’t have to live the life we live. They aren’t in constant fear of something like this happening. They don’t get frustrated that events like this keep happening. They can’t understand what goes through our minds when events like this happen. They don’t understand what it’s like feeling like our body isn’t ours. It’s a rough world to live in as a woman.Â
Here is the link to CU Boulder’s Office of Victim Assistance: https://www.colorado.edu/ova/sexual-assault