Content Warning: mentions of sexual assault
Over the past couple weeks, my social media feed has been flooded with videos about the Cornell gang rape case and other women sharing their own sexual assault experiences — ones that, much like Jane Doe’s, did not result in any real action or change.
The “I Am Jane Doe” trend originated to support Jane Doe and other women who felt isolated in their experiences. While Jane Doe’s story is uniquely horrific, she is not alone. Her civil lawsuit against Matthew Ingalls, Jonathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris, Scott Kretzschmar and Cornell University is the change we need to see, but why hasn’t this change been made already? How did we get to the point where seven men were okay raping a woman for seven hours, and 50 other men were willing to let it happen?
Jane Doe has photos and group chats proving her experience was disgustingly real, yet an essay and a couple expulsions were the only punishments. This trend has made me reflect on the legal and political systems that benefit rapists while forcing women to live scared and ashamed as if it is our fault the systems designed to protect us continue to fail us time and time again.
Now more than ever, the severity of sexual assault is downplayed significantly. When the president of our country was found guilty of sexually assaulting writer E. Jean Carroll, he was only slapped on the wrist with a mere $5 million payout, which equates to a rough .07% of his claimed total net worth. This gives boys the wrong impression that there are no true punishments for rape — the impression that your career and life can proceed as planned, even if you rape a woman.
The unfortunate truth is that men continue to live their lives unencumbered by their formed discretions, while women live their lives in fear they could be next, and this is not a new phenomena. Eight separate women at eight separate times came forward to say former President H.W. Bush touched them inappropriately. These women included journalists and fellow politicians; such as Amanda Staples, who was a candidate for Maine’s State Senate.
Roslyn Corrigan, daughter of a CIA Intelligence Agent, said she was inappropriately touched by President H.W. Bush at only 16. His response? His spokesperson, Jim McGrath, claimed he “on occasion, he [has] patted women’s rears in what he intended to be a good-natured joke.” A good-natured joke? He believed sexual assault was a “joke.”
Just last year, the Justice Department shared a list of over 300 politicians named in the Epstein files — and those are just the ones Congress is willing to release. And yet, there have been no criminal convictions made.
Our political system is continuing to protect known sexual predators, and the wrong people are getting away with it.
Without clear and effective punishments for rape, men will not stop. A college frat brother will never be scared of their punishments when the men leading our country have yet to face any.
It is not an easy feat to win a sexual assault case. According to theRape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), only 8% of rape and sexual assault cases in the United States result in a conviction. In the U.S., you must prove someone is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, typically done through concrete evidence. This is extremely hard in a sexual assault case where there is typically little evidence. The most common evidence comes from medical examinations, otherwise known as rape kits. This includes DNA evidence along with bruises, scarring, scratches or tearing. Getting a rape kit done is described by survivors as extremely traumatizing, and results can take months to come back from the lab. After all the physical and emotional pain endured by a survivor during the rape kit examination, the success rate of rape kits in convicting sexual offenders is only 38%, according to the National Institute of Justice.
A rape kit alone is not enough to convict a person of sexual assault. Consent is key in prosecuting a rapist. Unfortunately, consent is repeatedly described as one of the hardest things to prove in court, according to the American Law Institute. Our legal system still recognizes implied consent as a reasonable form of consent, leading us to hear ‘she didn’t say no’ or ‘she didn’t try to stop me’ as excuses for sexual assault. Implied consent gets vastly more complicated when the topic of “voluntary intoxication” is in play, and according to the National Institue for Health, roughly 50% of sexual assault cases involve alcohol.
Women are often blamed for their assaults with the excuse that they chose to drink.. In her memoir Know My Name, Chanel Miller describes the questioning she endured after her infamous assault at a party on the Stanford campus in January of 2015. She was asked for the exact measurements of the alcohol she drank, exact time stamps of each drink and blamed for continuing to drink after she became intoxicated. She describes how when she drank after her assault she noted the exact amount and time of each drink because she wanted to be prepared for the next time she was questioned. She prepared for the next time.
The justice system failed Chanel Miller and it is failingJane Doe in an eerily similar way. Voluntary intoxication alone should never be considered a form of implied consent. Yes means yes and everything else means no. Without clear and informed consent, sexual encounters should always be considered assault, yet women are continuously forced to defend their choice to drink before surviving an assault.
America has built a political system that publicly protects men and a legal system that continuously blames women. That is why the men at Cornell got to write an essay, while Jane Doe was forced to leave what she described as her “dream school”. That is why we need change. Jane Doe’s lawsuit is brave, but she should’ve seen justice years ago. She should not be forced to pay for her own lawyer and relive her trauma yet again to get results. We need change in laws and policy to protect women and adequately punish men.