Editor’s Note: This article includes mentions of sexual violence.
How is it that every woman knows someone who has been raped when most men don’t know a single rapist? How is it possible for women to report being assaulted while their perpetrators walk around guilt-free? How do we punish acts of sexual violence in a way that promotes healing rather than breeding further violence?
For me, the worst part of the Cornell Seven case is the overwhelming sense of déjà vu I felt reading the articles and watching the video op-eds. All of a sudden I was 10 years old again, with my mom sitting me down to talk about Chanel Miller, the young woman whom Stanford swimmer Brock Turner raped in 2015. It is hard to think about how much time has passed and how little has actually changed. No matter how many social media campaigns and awareness-raising educational efforts have sprung up in the decade since Turner’s attack on Miller, we are still having the same conversations, still trying to assert women’s humanity.
Part of our inability to effectively address sexual violence is due to the dominant cultural narratives that surround it, namely the idea that rape is an anomalous crime committed by a few disturbed individuals, coupled with our rather narrow definition of what sexual violence is in the first place.
Argentine feminist and anthropologist Rita Segato explained in an interview earlier this month that rape is no freak accident. It is a social crime, and the prevalence of group rapes like the one at Cornell is one manifestation of it. Segato argues that, even when a male rapist is acting alone, he is not alone; he violates a woman to prove to other men that he is worthy, because masculinity is not a given fact but a title earned through a continual process of subjugating women. It follows from this that the reason young men are more likely than women to commit rape is that they have more to prove.
Drawing on the image of an iceberg, Segato describes sexual violence as the most visible, superficial tip of the iceberg, something that is looked at as shocking and deviant. In fact, she asserts, it is the direct result of how we think about and interpret the world around us. By ignoring what is hidden, we allow the system to continue and women continue to experience harm.
This is why the idea of isolated incidents, especially bad apples who can be found guilty and publicly castigated or imprisoned, is actually counterintuitive, as it creates the illusion of justice while burying the violence imbued in every aspect of our patriarchal culture. Furthermore, the narrative of law and order promotes carcerality — the system of social control and punishment that relies on surveillance, confinement and police power — as a solution.
For feminists to look for protection and resolution from an incredibly unjust legal system is problematic in two ways. First, by placing trust and emphasis on the criminal system in the United States, victims are set up for failure in a legal process that is not built to serve them: A 2018 report from RAINN and The Washington Post found that less than 1% of reported rapes lead to conviction.
The second issue with a reliance on the carceral state is that law in this country has never been colorblind in its application. If sexual assault victims and their allies advocate for greater police presence and an increased involvement from the criminal justice system, we would likely only see a new kind of violence emerge against already marginalized populations. We cannot forget the history of criminalization of rape in this country — feminists who call for carceralism as a solution cannot do so without intentionally burying the terrifying history of lynching Black boys and men for even whistling at a white woman. There is a point, I think, where violence becomes hegemonic and self-reproducing.
Jeremy Saland is the lawyer representing Scott Kretzschmar, one of the Cornell Seven. He said he was sure his client would be exonerated. “Please let the process work before recklessly proliferating or coming to a wrongful conclusion about him,” Saland stated. Crucial to his argument is the notion and veneration of process, of a set of steps laid out by the law to mete out “justice” and “proportionality.”
What this argument fails to mention, though, is the fact that these processes are not the paragon of impartiality they claim to be. How can we expect justice from a process that is built to protect institutions and those in power? In the case of the Cornell Seven, some or all of the accused likely come from supremely privileged and affluent backgrounds. As such, they will not have the same interaction with the criminal justice system as marginalized people accused of the same crime. Our current president is proof that men with money and influence are above the law when it comes to sexual violence. While certain rapists get the death penalty, others get elected into the country’s highest office and we are to believe that justice exists.
The biggest concern I have with the law and order approach to rape is that it is, by nature, formulaic; it promotes definitions of assault that do not align with most women’s experiences. In other words, it erases the violence of the quotidian, and the culture that exists to keep said violence running smoothly and quietly.
There is a chasm of understanding between men’s and women’s understandings of what constitutes sexual violence. One of the hardest things for me about my own experience with assault was trying to reckon with the fact that the man who hurt me would never in a million years consider what happened between us to be violent or coercive. How do we square that circle? How do we bridge the gap between a woman’s PTSD and a man’s support for feminism outside of the bedroom? It all goes back to our socialization and the culturally dominant narratives we consume about what “counts” as sexual violence.
Sexual assault, as we all know, is woefully underrepresented in the media. When we do talk about it, it is usually in the context of brutal rapes, of undeniable transgressions committed against an unwitting and innocent Jane Doe. This is problematic for a plethora of reasons, perhaps the most profound of which is that it creates a single narrative for what fits into the category of sexual assault. This narrative is so deeply disturbing, so emblematic of every woman’s worst nightmare, that to compare anything to it is to deny its power and minimize its atrocity. Sexual assault, in this cultural imagination, is what happened at Cornell and nothing less.
This is why I have so many friends at CC with stories of less-than-consensual sex who would never say that they have been sexually assaulted, even when their experiences fit the description. Instead of calling it what it is, we use workaround terms, make jokes or — even worse — make excuses. We have the textbook image of assault in our heads; if you’re not unconscious or kicking and screaming, you are not a victim. This oversimplified heuristic masks the fact that intimacy and interpersonal relationships are rarely black and white. The difference between a forceful no and an enthusiastic yes is almost too big to imagine, and it is in this gray area that many women experience very real, unrecognized harm.
The issue of naming sexual assault when it happens to you is rendered even more complicated by the fact that we see textbook “perfect” victims experience slander and slutshaming. If someone who experienced something undeniably “worse” and more violent than you did, and she is called an attention-seeking liar, why would you speak up? It feels, at least on the surface, safer to avoid using the big, scary terminology, the one that places you into a category of “victim,” or “slut,” or both.
Equally awful is that it turns your aggressor, who may be a partner or a friend, into an “assailant.” These labels carry substantial emotional weight in a society where men are always given the benefit of the doubt, and women are always treated as suspect. Unfortunately for the women who have experienced the gray area, leaving their experiences unnamed and unaddressed is harmful to the body as well as the mind. We feel in our bodies that something traumatic has occurred, and in ignoring and minimizing it, we guarantee that we can never move on. We feel guilty, dramatic and that we deserved it after all.
If we think capaciously about sexual violence, we arrive at a much more concerning reality in terms of who perpetrates it. While not all men are violent rapists, 95.1% of young men have engaged in at least one form of coercion to get a woman to have sex with them after she said no, according to a 2026 survey of more than 2,000 young men. Of the 36 strategies listed, which include asking repeatedly, isolating the victim, giving them drugs or alcohol and using a female friend to make them feel safe, the average number of strategies ever used was 8.94.
Even more shockingly, 65% of these instances resulted in successfully forcing the woman into sex and 70% of the men reported no negative outcomes. Most of them said the assaults were not premeditated, which suggests that something about the way we socialize men teaches them to unconsciously manipulate women, believing that doing so will get them what they want. It also suggests that men don’t seem to care whether a woman wants to have sex with them — they only seem to care whether they will be arrested or ostracized for having sex with her anyway. Of those who reported negative outcomes, only seven of the 2,689 men surveyed considered that the assault traumatized the woman.
If we pursue carceralism as a solution to sexual assault, we will either end up punishing an inconsequentially small amount of very violent perpetrators or having to imprison nine in 10 adult men. The latter is utterly unfeasible, not to mention impractical, indicating that sexual violence is much bigger and more pervasive than most Americans believe it to be. It is not an issue of a few bad apples, of some rapists and many non-rapists, but a symptom and manifestation of broader cultural rot, of a society that tells men their impulses take precedence over a woman’s autonomy.
The idea of rape as a black-and-white issue that can and should be dealt with through the bureaucracy of law enforcement and court systems erases and forgives everything that happens in the gray area between violent assault and consensual sex. A comment from Saland perfectly encapsulates this phenomenon. Referring to the Cornell Seven Snapchat group chat that advertised “free pussy” and asked if the “shop [was] still open,” Saland said, “Taking part in an offensive conversation is not the same as taking part in a rape.”
On its face, this assertion is true. But to most women and victims of sexual violence, it is also true that being on that group chat and not intervening makes you complicit. Even if you’re not a rapist, you’re not-not a rapist. This obsession with criminality and meeting legal standards sidelines the complicity of the other 57 men in the group chat who did nothing to intervene. From a legal approach, they are perfectly innocent. However, taking a humane approach that centers the victim’s right to bodily autonomy tells us that their silence is unacceptable and criminal in a different way.
Carceralism, and the other commonly proposed educational solution, are aimed at the symptoms of the problem rather than the root. They also do nothing to support victims while relying on the idea that all we need to prevent sexual violence is stricter rules, stricter enforcement and greater awareness of what the rules are. This approach supposes that men who engage in sexual coercion would feel guilty enough to abstain if only they knew that what they were doing was wrong and could lead to serious consequences.
However, this is risk aversion, not gender equality. It misses the fact that violence against women is an essential part of masculinity, that hurting women gives men power and that power is the point. It is a superficial and individualistic solution to a societal problem, a “no means no” pamphlet handed to a boy who is taught that degrading women elevates his position in the hierarchy. Most of all, it prevents us from changing underlying incentive structures and finding ways to love and relate to one another without sacrificing our collective humanity.