Josephine Campos, 19, was feeling optimistic when she started her sophomore year at the University of Vermont. After spending the last few years focusing on herself, she was ready to date. She was going to be intentional, explore her options on the apps and at parties, put herself out there. But in September, when news broke of a former Cornell University student’s lawsuit against several men alleging they coerced her into taking drugs and then raped her, Campos told me she reconsidered. “Wait, do I really want to be doing this right now?” she asked herself.  

For many college women, it’s a fair question.

In the time since Campos first learned of the lawsuit, the public has reacted with outrage over the school’s handling of the incident. The New York attorney general appointed a former federal prosecutor to investigate the allegations — yet, none of the seven accused men, who deny wrongdoing, have been criminally charged. The university’s faculty senate voted no confidence in Cornell’s administration “to effectively address the ongoing crisis of sexual assault.” Cornell’s board of trustees, however, said it still has faith in the administration. 

And just this week, New York Focus uncovered a 2023 lawsuit against Cornell in which two students alleged the school did not take their accusations of sexual assault seriously. This mirrors what many women on America’s college campuses are feeling right now: Despite decades of advocacy and education around sexual violence, these incidents are still not taken seriously. 

Campos was just 10 years old when the Me Too movement exposed the prevalence of sexual assault in America. Today’s college students had reason to believe that the harrowing stories and bravery from young women like Chanel Miller, Emma Sulkowicz, and the survivors of Larry Nassar could change the culture. Now, more than a decade later, the Cornell allegations represent another tipping point — where women’s safety would finally be taken seriously.

But the young women who spoke with me for this story don’t see that happening any time soon. 

Many say they still feel overwhelming pressure to protect themselves because they believe the institutions charged with their care have failed them. After waves of outcry following each high-profile campus assault case, young women are losing hope that meaningful progress will ever materialize. 

“I would like to think it would be a turning point, but I’m just not sure,” 22-year-old Hannah Butler, a senior at Western Carolina University, told me. “I’m not sure because I feel like we hear so many stories of campus sexual assaults and nothing ever really happens a lot of the time. It’s just so unfortunately normalized. I’m worried that this is going to be another, ‘Oh crap, that happens,’ and then everybody continues on because everyone’s so desensitized to it now.”

“Cover your drinks” 

Campus sexual assault is common. A 2017 study concluded that the “one in five” statistic that is often used to quantify it is “is a reasonably accurate average across women and campuses.” In New York, a state that requires schools to report sexual assault, more than 25,000 incidents of sexual misconduct involving a student were documented between 2018 and 2024. Today, women continue to bear the brunt of speaking out mistreatment and sexual assault: They lean on “Are we sharing boyfriends?” Facebook groups and other whisper networks to voice their negative experiences with certain men and to warn other women. Most acts of sexual violence are not reported to authorities, and even fewer actually make national news. 

But when cases do capture the public’s attention — as Cornell’s did — they bring awareness to the prevalence of the problem. Campos said the Cornell case opened her eyes to the widespread issue of campus rape, and said the ongoing news coverage has made it easier for her and her friends to discuss their past sexual experiences, stories that might not have otherwise come to light.

“It’s not just happening at these really big schools,” Campos said. “You forget that it happens everywhere until you hear someone talking about it and then you’re like, ‘Oh wait, that happens here.’”

Butler said she and her friends have had similar conversations informed by their own experiences with sexual harassment and abuse. Butler remembered one of her friends texting their group chat for help while being cornered in the laundry room by a man. Others have been sexually assaulted but didn’t even realize it at the time that what happened to them had a name. 

“What our conversations generally sound like is shocked and horrified,” Butler told me, “but not super surprised.”

Gen Z has grown up in a precarious world full of perceived risks and threats, who have practiced school shooter drills since kindergarten; they are a generation that highly values safety. This attentiveness has filtered into their dating lives, too. Josie Stoffan, a 21-year-old senior at the University of Michigan, told me that being hyper aware is already part of their mindset. “I feel like it hasn’t really changed because we’ve already been, I don’t know, very vigilant about everything going on,” she said. This awareness stems, in part, from discussions on social media where young women share tips on how to avoid potentially dangerous situations, Stoffan said. 

This heightened vigilance is true for Campos, too. Despite her initial hesitations, she has decided to date after all — but she makes sure her friends have access to her location, and she only meets during the day in public locations. Butler’s friend group took location-sharing a step further: They’ve purchased trackers to monitor each other’s whereabouts. They also avoid alcohol on first dates — water only. “Girls are always taught to cover your drinks and be safe,” Butler said.

This undercurrent of fear and vigilance has swelled beyond the student body in recent weeks. At Pennsylvania State University’s Beaver campus, nurse Jessica Judy has fielded fresh questions from students who pass through her office that she believes was spurred by the Cornell outcry. Others have shared their outrage with her, their support of Jane Doe, their apprehension with dating. “Students are a little bit more leery now after hearing what potentially could happen,” Judy told Vox. “I think that they are really thinking things through and there is a small bit of fear there.”

Following many highly publicized incidents of sexual violence, news reports and social media commentary can empower people to speak out against rape or share their own experience, which was especially true in the years following Me Too. Society has made progress in recognizing the severity of these crimes and supporting victims, Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who studies campus sexual assault, told my colleague Rachel Cohen Booth. But, Armstrong noted, most college campuses lack adequate resources for survivors of campus rape: mental health support, learning accommodations, and perhaps refunded tuition. Judy believes her students, both men and women, would benefit from more comprehensive sexual education about what consent is and how it can change within a single encounter.

“Is it voluntary? Is it enthusiastic? Has something changed?” she said. “I think that there’s an intimidation for some students, I’ve noticed, to really ask questions or set boundaries.”

But this responsibility to self-educate, to communicate, and to suss out whether a date is safe still falls on women. Shortly after learning about the Cornell case from social media — especially the details of the fraternity members’ group chat — Zoie King, a 21-year-old senior at San José State University, began asking her boyfriend what he and his friends discuss in theirs. “I definitely think it’s more, for me, asking questions like, ‘Oh, your friend hooked up with that girl. What did he say?’” King said. “You learn a little bit more about the friends and you’re like, ‘I don’t really love that. Oh, that’s kind of weird.’”

King was also taken aback by how differently she and her boyfriend’s attitudes toward safety. While she hardly ever walks alone at night, her boyfriend doesn’t bat an eye. “For him, it was just very surprising hearing how different women, especially women in college, see the world, how vigilant they have to be all the time,” King said.

“It’s a bunch of frat men around you, and they don’t really care”

It’s impossible to separate the Cornell allegations from the longstanding issues with Greek life: Hazing, rampant alcohol and drug use, and an intense party culture can create unsafe scenarios for both women and men. One study found that fraternity membership was correlated with sexual aggression. Fraternity houses are among the most common locations on college campuses where students reported being sexually assaulted.

Over the last decade, some fraternities and sororities have implemented rules to reel in Greek culture. “Sober monitors” — party attendees who remain sober throughout the night — are a common sight at social events. Their duties include checking IDs and making sure no one goes upstairs at houses unless given permission. Some schools have raised GPA requirements for Greek participation or banned fraternities and sororities altogether. Still, until a critical mass of universities or Greek organizations commit to systemic and cultural change, opting out remains an individual decision — which can effectively lead to alienation in schools where all socializing revolves around Greek culture.

Before the Cornell story broke, Campos had decided to rush a sorority. “The news came out right after I got in, so it was a very weird introduction to Greek life to have all this come out right after I finished recruitment,” she said. Her sorority offered members a discount on the She’s Birdie personal alarm systems — devices marketed toward young women and their parents — hosted self-defense classes, and committed to avoiding partnering with fraternities for events.

Lucy Walker is a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, a Southern school with a large Greek presence. While she isn’t a member of a sorority, she has attended fraternity parties and said these organizations still maintain a lot of influence on campus.

At most college campuses, sororities aren’t allowed to throw their own parties, and so members — and the campus at large — end up relying on fraternities to host. And most of the time, women get in for free. Walker told me she hasn’t seen any collective moves from her peers to avoid frat parties: “I feel like [sororities] have a lot more power than they think they do — because without the sororities,” Walker said, “the frats are kind of nothing.” Walker said. But that still puts all of the pressure on women to take action.

Stoffan, the University of Michigan student, was in a sorority but said because of the drama and partying, she left Greek life. She’s not dating this year — she’s moving soon for a job — but she told me she still hears from fraternity boys who make inappropriate jokes like, “You don’t want to get Cornell seven-ed.” 

Stoffan has tried calling them out for their insensitivity, but feels largely ignored. “It makes me very disappointed in, especially, the frat men. What is it going to take for them to stop making those jokes and maybe stand up for what’s right?” Stoffan said. 

“There’s only so much you can do, and it’s a bunch of frat men around you and they don’t really care.”

BERLIN — Most cases of sexual misconduct in Germany’s armed forces go unreported, according to a major study presented Wednesday, as Defense Minister Boris Pistorius acknowledged a “systemic problem” in how the military handles complaints.

The report found that sexual misconduct was three to six times more common than official figures suggest. The findings come as Germany tries to recruit more soldiers, including more women, as part of efforts to rebuild its military.

Four in 10 female soldiers and roughly one in five male soldiers said they had experienced at least one form of sexual misconduct in the previous year.

That includes unwanted sexual comments, sexual images, unwanted touching and sexual violence. Over the same period, 2% of both women and men reported experiencing sexual violence.

More than 8,100 soldiers completed the July 13 to Aug. 27 anonymous survey, about 18% of those contacted. The researchers said they had adjusted the results to reflect the makeup of the military.

The study found that only one-sixth to one-third of sexual incidents were reported, depending on the type of misconduct, with many victims saying they didn’t want to draw attention to themselves. Others feared consequences or doubted that reporting an incident would lead to action.

Pistorius presented the findings to the defense committee in the country’s parliament alongside Germany’s top military officer, Carsten Breuer. Speaking afterward, he promised “zero tolerance” for sexual misconduct.

Pistorius called the handling of complaints a “systemic problem.” He said military structures and the traditional responses of some commanders to complaints were partly to blame.

He announced a 34-point plan to improve protection for victims and make it easier to report incidents, including a new advice service outside the usual military chain of command. The service is currently available daily but is expected to become available around the clock.

Commanders will also be assessed on how they respond to complaints, and victims will receive more information about investigations. Commanders who tolerate misconduct or fail to deal with it properly “will no longer hold a leadership position,” Pistorius said.

The study also found that women had reported less misconduct in units where they made up more than 15% of personnel.

Asked what he would tell a mother worried about her daughter joining the military, Pistorius insisted the Bundeswehr remained a “safe employer” because it was taking action.

Die Bundeswehr soll wachsen, doch eine neue Dunkelfeldstudie offenbart eine erschütternde Realität für Frauen in der Truppe. Wenn 70 Prozent der befragten Soldatinnen von sexualisiertem Fehlverhalten berichten, wird das Kulturproblem zur existenziellen Gefahr für die Einsatzbereitschaft. Verteidigungsminister Boris Pistorius steht vor der drängenden Frage, wie die Armee weiblicher werden soll, solange interne Strukturen versagen.

Im 200-Sekunden-Interview ordnet die CDU-Bundestagsabgeordnete und Berufssoldatin Vivian Tauschwitz den Schaden für die Bundeswehr ein. Sie erklärt, warum Täter sich im System bisher zu sicher fühlen und welche konkreten Führungsinstrumente sowie Ermittlungen jetzt greifen müssen, um das toxische Verhalten zu brechen.

Währenddessen verbringt Friedrich Merz seinen 71. Geburtstag nicht auf der Weltklimakonferenz, sondern im harten Ringen um die heimischen Finanzen. Rasmus Buchsteiner analysiert die Verhandlungen vor der Bereinigungssitzung des Haushaltsausschusses und beleuchtet, warum die Abwesenheit auf dem internationalen Klimaparkett ein politisches Signal ist.

Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.

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Nvidia hired law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to lead an investigation into reports that CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang was the target of a Chinese intelligence operation.

Law firm partner Joon H. Kim will lead the probe. Kim, a former acting attorney of the Southern District of New York, was appointed in 2021 as an independent investigator by New York Attorney General Letitia James to probe allegations of sexual harassment by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

The company’s board of directors on Sunday launched an independent investigation into Jensen Huang following reports of his romantic relationship with former Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, an alleged Chinese spy. The board said that Jensen Huang supports the review.

Jensen Huang’s relationship with Alice Huang was first brought to light in an October New York Times report, which alleged the businesswoman had ties to Chinese intelligence. Officials suspected Alice Huang helped funnel advanced Nvidia chips to China, according to the report.

Jensen Huang in a message to the company Sunday admitted to an affair and pledged to cooperate with the investigation. He did not mention Alice Huang by name.

In October 2017, just one day before The New York Times published its investigative report exposing his long career as a rapist, Harvey Weinstein blew into the newspaper’s offices with a phalanx of lawyers. The film producer was intent on attacking Ashley Judd, the actress, activist and humanitarian who is one of the authors of this piece, saying she had “mental issues.” For support, Weinstein brandished a photograph of the two of them taken in 1997 during the Oscar party his company Miramax hosted at Beverly Hills’ Peninsula Hotel. 

When she learned of his spectacle at the Times’ offices, Judd immediately recognized Weinstein’s slippery strategy as DARVO and felt a sense of relief. She knew there was language and a body of research that plainly identified and unpacked what can otherwise be a head-spinning distortion of reality. 

An insidious response tactic — it never happened, you’re a liar, you’re the one who hurt me — DARVO is intended to disorient the victim, painting them instead as the villain. It follows a predictable pattern: deny the harm, attack the credibility of the person who named the harm, and reverse the roles of victim and offender. The acronym, introduced to the world in the 1990s by Jennifer Freyd, another co-author, has grown in usage by individuals, media and institutions as an increasing number of people have come forward to report sexual assaults and harassment. Since then, DARVO has become so ubiquitous that it has now been canonized in the Merriam-Webster dictionary and added to its list of trending terms. 

DARVO was inspired by an infamous confirmation hearing. In 1991, Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Clarence Thomas, her former supervisor at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, who was then a nominee for the Supreme Court, had sexually harassed her. Thomas and his supporters responded quickly. While he denied the allegations and claimed to be the victim of a “high-tech lynching,” Republican senators attacked Hill’s credibility and motivations — and Thomas was narrowly confirmed to the Court. Freyd, a psychology professor and trauma researcher, took notice. As she saw it, the collection of responses followed a specific pattern. Several years later, she introduced DARVO to the world in a research article. 

At the time, Freyd called her acronym capturing how perpetrators deflect responsibility “very speculative.” Thirty years later and a #MeToo movement later, it’s no longer speculation. A growing body of research, some of it conducted by Freyd and Sarah Harsey, another co-author of this column, has provided important insights into this tactic. A database tracking DARVO research now counts 33 peer-reviewed studies investigating it. 

The studies tell us that DARVO can shift observers’ beliefs about who is really to blame. This is a fundamental goal of DARVO-users: Convince others of your innocence. When study participants were exposed to a fictional perpetrator’s use of DARVO, they assigned less responsibility to the perpetrator and more responsibility to the victim. When a fictional perpetrator used DARVO to explain away sexual assault allegations, participants were less likely to say the perpetrator should face punishment and more willing to agree that the victim should be punished. 

This research is consistent with what happened during Thomas’ confirmation hearing. After he testified, Thomas gained credibility in the public’s eye. Hill’s credibility, on the other hand, was damaged. 

Research has also shown that DARVO is relatively common. When study participants were asked to report on their experiences confronting other people, nearly 72% had heard a denial, attack, and reversal of victim and offender. And the more DARVO participants heard, the higher levels of self-blame they felt. In a different study, exposure to DARVO was also linked to greater levels of psychological distress. Although these studies are correlational — which means it isn’t clear if hearing DARVO causes increases in self-blame or distress — they still suggest that being the recipient of DARVO is at least connected to worse well-being. 

But what do we know about people who use DARVO? In a survey of over 900 participants, people who used more DARVO to respond to confrontation also reported perpetrating more sexual harassment. One reason for this finding is that people who engage in bad behavior — like sexual harassment — may be accustomed to responding with DARVO as a way to get away with their actions. This survey also found that people with greater DARVO tendencies were more accepting of rape myths, which are common but inaccurate beliefs about rape that excuse the actions of perpetrators and place blame on victims. The connection here may be simple: People who personally engage in victim blaming agree that victims, including victims of rape, are blameworthy. 

As research continues to tell us more about DARVO, highly visible examples appear regularly in the news cycle. President Donald Trump, for instance, often reaches for denials, attacks, and victim-playing responses when faced with information that threatens his power or reputation. When talking about E. Jean Carroll — the writer whom Trump was found civilly liable for sexually abusing — the president has denied the sexual abuse, attacked her appearance, motives and sanity, and claimed to be the target of a witch hunt. Even Carroll herself couldn’t help but point out the pattern. In a 2019 interview with Anderson Cooper, she observed, “He denies. He turns it around. He threatens, and he attacks.”

Striking examples of DARVO can be found outside of the things political figures say. Beyond his noxious attacks on Judd, Weinstein has repeatedly used DARVO tactics in his many attempts to discredit the many women who come forward about his crimes. 

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More recently, the investigation into the seven Cornell University fraternity members who are accused of sexually assaulting a female undergraduate has unleashed a torrent of DARVO against the student known as Jane Doe. A visible part of the discourse about the Cornell Seven reveals how some have flatly rejected the possibility that Doe was assaulted, attacked her credibility and her appearance, and labeled the case as a “hoax.” Sympathy for the fraternity members is not too hard to find, either; Trump himself shared that he felt “badly” for the accused men.

Many may wonder whether DARVO is a necessary response to an accusation. How else is someone supposed to respond? But DARVO is not inevitable. Someone can admit their responsibility for causing harm and sincerely apologize, which is the most constructive path for all involved. If someone is innocent of the accusation — or wants others to believe they are — they can respectfully deny the allegation without attacking or putting themselves into the victim role. Thomas, for instance, who had chaired the very agency charged with enforcing sexual harassment law, could have responded to Hill’s testimony by saying: “I do not remember the events in this way but I know these conversations about sexual harassment are important, and I want to understand your experience.”

DARVO poses a significant social problem. For even the smallest transgressions between two individuals, it’s antagonistic and fails to provide a productive resolution. On a larger scale, DARVO stands in the way of justice by encouraging a pervasive and hostile disbelief of victims. Even our institutions can use this chilling tactic, resulting in a particularly harmful form of institutional betrayal. This may be one reason many people fear coming forward to seek accountability and are effectively silenced. 

Two stories of institutional betrayal were prominently featured in the 2015 documentary “The Hunting Ground,” which investigated sexual assault on college and university campuses. In 2007, during her freshman year at the University of North-Carolina, Annie Clark reported being sexually assaulted to campus officials. One employee compared rape to football. Annie was the quarterback; what could she have done differently? She had come seeking support and instead found herself being asked to account for her own supposed failure. Four years later, while a student at Harvard Law School, Kamilah Willingham encountered a struggle for accountability after reporting a sexual assault. 

The stories of Clark, Willingham and others brought institutional betrayal painfully close: the place where you hoped to learn, belong and flourish can become another place entirely, one where you must fight to be heard.

When the documentary was recently screened at Harvard — one of the institutions whose responses it challenges — those stories were given particular force. They also offered a lens for examining institutional responses at Cornell University, the University of Chicago and beyond. 

DARVO helps us name how institutional self-protection can become an attack on the person seeking help: deny responsibility, undermine the survivor’s credibility and cast the institution or the accused as the injured party. The student asking for protection becomes a threat to someone else’s future or reputation. Freyd has identified this institutional DARVO as a particularly harmful form of institutional betrayal.

But the film also follows Clark and her colleague Andrea Pino building a network of survivors who refuse to leave one another alone with these experiences. Universities could learn from them. The Center for Institutional Courage’s 12 steps call on institutions to welcome truth-tellers, respond well to disclosures, acknowledge harm and sustain the resources needed for change. Imagine the difference if a student’s disclosure was met with care — and a commitment to stay for the work of accountability and repair.

This underscores the good news of what we have learned: DARVO loses some of its power when people know what it is. In one experiment, some participants read a one-paragraph explanation of DARVO — what it stands for and why perpetrators may use it — before reading a fictional scenario in which a perpetrator used the tactic. Compared with participants who had not read the explanation, DARVO-educated participants believed the victim more and supported the perpetrator less.

Institutional DARVO can be combated, too, with institutional courage. By taking actionable steps such as cherishing whistleblowers, practicing transparency, and committing to seek truth and engage in moral action, institutions can act in ways that restore trust and help people who have been harmed come forward.

Judd has described the effect in her own life. “When I know I’m being attacked, I immediately remind myself that that is a common strategy,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017. “It’s DARVO.” 

This is why Merriam-Webster’s entry for DARVO matters. Its presence in the dictionary makes the term available to a wide audience; anyone can look it up and learn what it means. This access is especially important for victims who have been made to doubt themselves, who can now more easily reach for a term that shines a light on their experiences. It also offers a critical reassurance: No, you’re not crazy — you’re being DARVOed. The tactic’s efficacy depends on a confused audience, and every person who learns about the acronym is a little bit harder to fool.

The post DARVO is now in the dictionary. That’s a win for abuse survivors appeared first on Salon.com.

Last month, a former Cornell University student identified in court papers as “Jane Doe” sued her university and seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity, alleging they raped her at the group’s house in October 2024. Cornell’s own disciplinary process for the incident had ended with two of the men expelled, two suspended and put on probation, one (who had already graduated) barred from campus, and two found not responsible but ordered to complete trainings and write reflection papers. The local district attorney declined to press charges.

Since the lawsuit was filed, the DA has reopened the case and New York state officials have launched an investigation. Students have also held sit-ins, and some are calling for the university’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, to resign. Cornell has suspended fraternity parties for the rest of the year.

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But this kind of case — and the issues it raises about campus life — are not new. Educators, students, activists, and politicians have spent decades debating how to prevent sexual assault, how to protect victims, how to balance the rights of the accused, and what to do about Greek life. At times, those conversations have resulted in significant changes to policy — which in turn have also generated backlash and brought more changes in response.

Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, began researching campus sexual assault in the early 2000s, embedding at a Midwestern university to understand how fraternities, alcohol, and the lack of anywhere else to go put students at risk. She has seen attention to the issue come and go in the public discourse across generations of students, often spurred by high-profile incidents like a Time magazine cover in 1991 spotlighting a first-year William & Mary student who was date raped, and a Stanford swimmer in 2016 who was sentenced to six months in jail for assaulting an unconscious woman after a frat party.

I wanted to know what Armstrong makes of Cornell, and if she thinks anything is different this time. Has anything actually gotten better since the Title IX fights of the 2010s? What do people who haven’t been on a campus in a while misunderstand about how students socialize? And what could a school like Cornell do right now, without waiting on the courts or Washington, DC?

I talked to Armstrong about Greek life, what survivors of sexual assault actually want from their schools, and the reforms she thinks colleges need to be paying attention to. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Could you start by sharing briefly the kind of research you’ve done on campus sexual assault?

I did ethnographic and interview work at a Midwestern university, starting in 2003, and published a paper in 2006 on the organizational conditions that lead to sexual risk on campus. I later co-authored Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, a 2013 book based on that research.

Were there many people talking about this back in the early 2000s?

It was in something of a hiatus period. Interest in this issue essentially goes in waves. There was interest in the ’70s, then again in the late ’80s, and then there was a hiatus. My research and writing happened right before things started to build back up again with interest. 

So before we get into Cornell specifically, could you paint a bit of a picture of how campus social life tends to work? Where students gather, who hosts parties, and where Greek life fits in?

So the basic gist is that at four-year American residential universities, students often live in residence halls or they live off campus, or if there’s residential Greek life, they live in fraternities and sororities. 

Young people like to congregate, and they like to party, to have fun, and drink, and figure out opportunities to hook up. One of the things that has emerged, particularly on campuses with fraternities that have their own houses, is that these organizations control the party resources — like the space and alcohol, and time and energy to host.

So it’s hard to avoid them if you are someone who wants to party.

Yes, and one of the things that’s been coming out of the discussion related to Cornell is that the pandemic really flattened the number of bars, restaurants, and cafes in Ithaca — places where people might have otherwise had opportunities to hang out. So it gave an already really dominant Greek scene even more centrality and power over the way students socialize.

My next question was going to be what do people who haven’t been on a college campus in a while tend to misunderstand about the party scene, and that pandemic shift seems like an answer to that.

Yes, and people often don’t understand that for a lot of first-year students, who are generally under 21 but still wanting to drink, figuring out how to get alcohol, where the parties are, where the fun is going to be, is a challenge for them. Students entering college often don’t have good resources to know what’s safe and not safe. 

Yeah, and it seems like colleges just cover their eyes and deploy a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy on underage drinking.

Yes. Years ago, when I was doing more traveling and speaking on college campuses, cab drivers would be telling me how they’d deposit students drunk all the time. And if a school was religiously affiliated or anything, they would just deny that their own students were partying with alcohol at all. And so the students were just vastly more at risk than even at campuses where officials were willing to admit what actually goes on. 

Based on your research of party rape, what parts of campus life do you think we should be paying attention to with Cornell and other colleges? 

Here I’d bring up a book, Sexual Citizens by Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan. They did ethnography at Columbia University, and they pointed out some concepts like “sexual geography” — which is this idea that you can go onto any campus and see the ways things are organized to be more risky. 

They point out, for example, that if students have nowhere to socialize except in dorm rooms with beds, that’s more risky than if they had lounges or other kinds of nonsexual spaces to congregate. And like, are there fun things to do that are substance-free if people want that? Are there spaces for queer students or students of color to hang out? What are the social options, and who controls where the fun happens?

That makes so much sense. If there’s no alternative, then people will go to whatever option is available, even if it’s less safe. 

Yeah, and I mean it’s tricky because sometimes it’s not considered hip or cool to do that. When we were doing our observation research way back in the early 2000s, the university we were studying was trying to create some non-frat party options, and the women that we studied thought those were just hopelessly nerdy and uncool, and they didn’t want to go because they were not seen as being high-status things to do.

What do you think colleges could be doing differently when it comes to parties?

One thing I think that colleges could do — like now that we do have Uber and Lyft — they could get a Lyft subscription where students can call up 24/7 to get home safely from wherever they happen to be, no questions asked. That could be expensive, but it’s a lot more expensive when serious harm happens. So ensuring people can get home safely could be one measure.

And Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan, had an op-ed this week in the New York Times suggesting that universities consider making these organizations co-ed. That’s another option. Not abolishing them completely, but transforming them.

I’ve been really struck by the dissonance of having this conversation around male loneliness and male bonding on one hand, and this separate conversation about fraternities and whether they’re good or bad on the other.

I have a student, Anna Wood, who’s done interviews with fraternity men. She’s very interested in young men’s mental health, and loneliness, and friendship, and she’s finding that men get a kind of brotherhood more than friendship in fraternities. In other words, the fraternities aren’t really solving the male loneliness problem.

Are there any campuses today that you think are modeling something that is safer or better? Are there any other schools you think we should be paying attention to?

Well, there’s Wesleyan and Swarthmore; the students a few years ago organized to abolish Greek life on their campus. And I think in a lot of universities there are these “learning-living” communities that are organized around various kinds of themes or interests, like it could be organized around being interested in business or interested in international relations or STEM. But something where universities take on the project of helping young people form friendships.

I know we’ve been talking a lot about Greek life, but there’s sexual assault on campus outside of Greek life, too. 

Yes, it happens everywhere from honors dorms to sporting teams to residence halls. And it’s not just sexual assault; it’s also intimate partner violence in more committed relationships. I mean there are undergraduate students who are murdered by their boyfriends. So just addressing Greek life would not solve the problem across the board.

So I was in college between 2010 and 2014, when the Obama administration’s 2011 Title IX letter reminding colleges to address sexual assault complaints helped ignite a national debate over campus investigations and discipline.

Ah, you were right in the Dear Colleague letter era.

Exactly. It was a big issue on my campus and across the country. I understand those guidelines were loosened under Trump. As I’ve been following Cornell, I’ve seen a number of people respond by saying, “Well, nothing has changed or improved, and Title IX doesn’t work.”

I would love your thoughts on all of this, on where things stand. Do you see progress as just a ping-pong back and forth, or do you feel like things have improved at all from when you first started studying this?

One thing that seems to me that is better over time is that every single time this issue rises to the level of public awareness, there’s more people who get it. Like in each wave, more people understand that women don’t report sexual assault because they’re afraid of retaliation, because of trauma. More people understand this.

Like this time, as soon as the facts of the case became widely public, there was just sheer horror on the part of so many people. When I was in college in the ’80s, that would not have been true at all.  I mean, there was a case here at the University of Michigan when I was an undergraduate where it felt like just four feminists on campus understood what was going on. So there’s really been a gradual sort of cultural awareness over time

Even just talking to you, the composition of journalists writing on this is very different now.

What do you mean?

You’re a woman who graduated from an elite college around the time when the Dear Colleague letter was introduced. Not that long ago in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, where anyone who had a position to have any kind of way of impacting the public conversation, it was all men. There weren’t women who had access to that kind of public conversation. So I think that’s also a really, really important piece of what’s changed. The journalists are changing and helping the public get it. 

Can you talk about what happened beginning with the Trump administration?

So on the Title IX front, and after the Dear Colleague letter from 2011, and the whole campus anti-rape movement that happened around that time — well, on the heels of that there was a really major backlash. And that’s something my colleagues and I are studying, like the men’s rights activists and people who are more middle of the road, like civil libertarians, who felt things had gone too far.

And then the Dear Colleague letter was revoked under Trump, and in 2020 new Title IX regulations were put forward as a result of the Department of Education’s work during the first Trump administration. Those regulations made it very, very, very, very difficult to find somebody on campus responsible for sexual misconduct. Those are still in effect, so from that perspective, the fact that Cornell actually managed to expel a couple of those men and hold all of them, you know, responsible in some way, shows just how compelling the evidence against them was because it’s actually really, really hard now. 

And this was all wrapped up in the backlash to Me Too?

The backlash to the campus sexual assault stuff was already well underway when Me Too was getting started, but yes, there was this wave of stuff, and then we get the 2020 regulations, and the Biden administration tried and failed to undo them. 

Why did they fail?

Well, it took a really long time because they went through this notice-and-comment period, and they got everything redrafted, and then as soon as Trump was elected again, it was legally challenged.

So it took too long, and then they ran out of time?

It’s not even clear that the regs the Biden administration wanted would have fixed anything because we also have these processes where there’s just so much legalization and complexity. I mean, what survivors want is they want this to stop. They want people to believe them. Survivors want different things, but often they don’t want some yearlong process where everyone’s asking them what happened again and again and again. They want to just do school.

We still don’t have a good process in place for survivors on campus through either Title IX or the criminal justice route.

No, and one of the things I think that is most straightforward that could be improved is on the notion of what’s known as supportive measures. So those are the things that are very consistent with Title IX, because the point of Title IX is for people to not be deprived of their access to education. So if you think about it from the point of view of the survivor, what do they need to be well, healthy, and stay in school?

They may need their tuition refunded for a semester. They might need mental health services. They may need somebody to contact all of their professors and tell them that they can’t get their work in. They may need some sort of immigration support. At Michigan State, after the Larry Nassar scandal, they built something called the Center for Survivors, which is supposed to operate as a kind of one-stop shop where a survivor can go and get all of their various needs met. You can imagine more schools building those out.

Hopefully not every school needs a Larry Nasser type figure to get them to step up.

Yeah, hopefully not. I don’t know if that’s come up in any of the Cornell conversations, but one of the things they could do is use this as an opportunity to really, really massively build out their supportive measures.