Content warning: This article contains mentions of sexual assault.
Cornell University is best known as a highly esteemed Ivy League, and while that title might imply some prestige, the university has recently become synonymous with another, less generous association. Cornell is currently under intense public and national fire for a lawsuit filed by one of its former students, referred to as Jane Doe, that accuses the university of failing to “exercise reasonable care to prevent student defendants … from sexually abusing Plaintiff when Plaintiff was in its care, custody, and control.” Presented to the court more than two years after the incident, the lawsuit exposes that college institutions are trapped in a vicious cycle of their own making, where victims are unprotected when they speak up about sexual abuse; abusers are not given proper repercussions to help protect victims, which, in turn, only encourages more abusers to engage in predatory sexual acts because they know, at the end of the day, their university will protect them.
There are two main reasons colleges fail to properly address sexual assault cases on their campus. One is the fear of ruining the lives of perpetrators, as most institutions have judged that the potential of convicting an innocent person is more dangerous than the risk of letting a guilty person go free. Secondly, for most universities, when dealing with a sexual assault case, it’s a matter of reputation. At the end of the day, universities are a business, and their customers are students and parents. They can not afford to deter incoming students and lose money to headlines about sexual assaults on their campus. When victims are not viewed as a main concern to colleges, it translates directly to survivors not reporting or making the details of the case public.Â
In fact, research conducted at Washington State University found that young women who attend college are actually at a much higher risk of sexual violence than women who aren’t. And out of those women, only one out of five female students ever report crimes to authorities, and most will never see a courtroom or prosecution. In the case of Jane Doe, her lawsuit has largely attracted so much attention because of the extreme rarity that a college woman’s assault case is publicly taken up in court.Â
So why are college campuses viewed as the first line of response for college sexual abuse cases, if they have a motive to conceal those reports? Well, victimized students tend to view the criminal justice system as re-traumatizing, with the process tending to be longer and involving a more intense legal procedure. On campus, the required standard of proof is much lower, meaning survivors just have to prove to a school board that the assault was more likely to have happened than not. However, just as the standard of proof is lower, so are the stakes. Colleges can’t substitute for an entire legal system, so in this process, assaulters aren’t facing prison; at most, just expulsion. Beyond that, they could turn the case over to the police to face criminal charges, but when only one out of five cases ever get reported, we can see that this is rarely desired and is rarely the case.Â
Outside of college campuses, a conviction for sexual assault is typically classified as a second-degree felony, which can be punishable by prison time and up to a $10,000 fine. Is expulsion an adequate substitute for that? As an interview with an NPR sexual assault reporter details, “By way of example, I spoke to one survivor who declined to prosecute; took her case to campus, she won on campus. The guy was expelled. But then he enrolled in another school. And that’s when the victim decided she did want to prosecute because, as she put it, the only way to stop him from doing this again was to go to a court that had the power to put the guy in prison.”
The Cornell case puts this issue into further context, outright proving that colleges can not keep serving as substitutes for the criminal justice system in sexual assault cases. As former Senator Chuck Grassley puts it, the sooner sexual assault is treated as it would be outside of universities, “the sooner that the message is going to get out that you can’t get away with something on a campus that you couldn’t get away with someplace else.” When these cases are put into the hands of institutions with limited power outside their own domain, we get a system where consent can be debated, and victims can be negotiated into silence.
You don’t need every man to be a predator to build a society that normalizes sexual violence; you only need a system that rewards it. In discussions around the Cornell case, I find people may be focusing far too much on the seven assaulters, and not the systems that allow these behaviors to go unpunished. Should we be upset about the extreme lack of accountability and punishment given to the seven assaulters? Yes, but in the same breath, we can acknowledge that perhaps a much more actionable and productive way to address the case may lie in asking how, for years, unqualified institutions have been allowed jurisdiction over one of the most dangerous and underreported crimes in the US.Â