Is College Getting Less Safe for Women?
· The Atlantic
One evening in 2024, a female undergraduate at Cornell University went to meet a friend of hers at the Chi Pi fraternity house. There, a recent lawsuit alleges, he and one of his fraternity brothers proposed having a threesome, even though the victim charges that she was already intoxicated past the point of consent. They gave her marijuana and high-proof liquor and, she alleges, pressured her to snort something that they indicated was ketamine.
According to the complaint, they initiated sex with her, and one slapped her so hard that he left bruises. Another man joined them. One of the three men then texted a group chat titled “Chi Pi Actives” announcing that there was “free pussy” in the fraternity house. Multiple other men then allegedly entered the room. The woman alleges that she was victimized for almost seven hours by seven different men. (Three of the seven men have responded publicly via attorneys, two denying that they had any sexual contact with the plaintiff and the third denying sexual assault.)
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Of the members of the group chat, a screenshot of a portion of which was included in the complaint, not a single one can be seen objecting to an inebriated woman being offered up for mass consumption. “I fucking love Chi Pi,” one man posted to the group. After the plaintiff reported what had happened to Cornell’s police department, all seven men were temporarily suspended as Cornell conducted a Title IX investigation. According to the woman’s lawyer, they were encouraged to mitigate their conduct by writing essays, and two were later expelled.
No criminal charges were filed, which the district attorney for Tompkins County has said was because the woman’s statement at the time did not demonstrate that she had been forcibly compelled to have sex against her will, had been mentally incapacitated by a drug administered without her consent, or had been rendered unconscious. Following the recent lawsuit, and mass outrage online, prosecutors have reopened an investigation into the case.
Is it fair to say Cornell University has a rape-culture problem? In 2022, the university was forced to suspend all fraternity-related social events after one person reported being sexually assaulted and at least four told university police that they had been drugged at off-campus frat parties. In 2018, Cornell’s Zeta Beta Tau chapter was placed on probation after an allegation of a suggested “pig roast” contest, in which new members would score points for sexual activity, with bonus points going to those who had sex with the heaviest woman.
The fraternity issued an evasive statement saying that it was “horrified at the notion of the degradation and/or objectification of women” (italics are mine). Cornell responded at the time by requiring Zeta Beta Tau members to participate in education programs and Campus Sexual Assault Awareness Week. The university had faced a frat-related allegation not long before: One year earlier, a former fraternity president at Cornell was put on probation after pleading guilty to a sexual misdemeanor at the Psi Upsilon house.
Perhaps I’m singling out Cornell unfairly. Yes, self-reported incidents of “nonconsensual sexual contact involving force or incapacitation” have increased at the university over the past two years, from 23 percent to 35 percent of female undergraduates. But available data suggest that similar incidents have been increasing nationwide. (Statistics don’t exist that allow me to compare national incidents over the same timeline, which is its own issue, but a 2019 survey conducted by the Association of American Universities found that rates of “nonconsensual sexual contact by physical force or inability to consent” had risen 3 percent among female undergraduates since 2015.) Campus sexual assault in 2026 is a national crisis that is not being addressed and that technological advancements are making significantly worse.
[Read: The unspeakable, enabled]
Consider the Cornell Chi Pi group chat, which seemed to be both a practical facilitator of the alleged abuse and a cultural accelerant. One 2020 study found that peer support for sexual violence “predicted perpetration” even more than someone’s individual beliefs regarding rape. The 2019 AAU survey estimates that one in every four female undergraduates and one in 14 male undergraduates will experience “nonconsensual sexual contact by physical force or inability to consent” after enrolling in college. But the sprawl of rape culture now precedes enrollment: Even before they arrived on campus this fall, some freshmen in the class of 2030 had their photos dissected and disparaged on social media by men who see them as target practice.
If you consider the recent history of campus sexual assault, it’s hard to argue that much has improved over the past few decades. In the early 1990s, female students resorted to writing the names of men who’d raped them on the walls of campus bathrooms, while official efforts to address the issue encouraged women to take charge of their own safety by learning self-defense and not walking alone at night. In 1990, the anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday published a book titled Fraternity Gang Rape, in which she wrote that fraternity houses fostered a culture celebrating camaraderie through domination, and where sexual aggression was encouraged as a male-bonding ritual.
One 1996 study found that fraternity members “were disproportionately involved in some forms of campus sexual aggression”; subsequent research has estimated that members are three times more likely than nonmembers to commit sexual assault. Nevertheless, fraternities—whose members are also five times more likely than nonmembers to donate to colleges after graduation—carried on unchallenged, while women were given rape whistles and lectured about staying sober.
During the 2000s, researchers and institutions recognized that this model wasn’t working, and experimented with directly encouraging students to intervene if they saw catatonic young women being dragged upstairs. This shift seems to have had little impact on the culture of fraternities, where objectifying women has remained a blood sport. But in 2011, President Obama’s Department of Education issued a letter instructing colleges to protect students from sexual violence and harassment or potentially face consequences for violating Title IX obligations. For a brief few years, the issue of campus sexual assault seemed to be drawing necessary levels of attention. In 2014, Senator Claire McCaskill introduced the Campus Safety and Accountability Act, a bill that would reform the way sexual assaults were investigated to better support victims. (The bill died in committee without ever reaching a floor vote.)
But in 2017, President Trump’s Department of Education withdrew the 2011 guidance for colleges. The past decade has seen a politicized back-and-forth over the issue, while incidents have continued to emerge that follow the same old behavioral patterns but involve new technological tools. Last month, Wired ran an astonishing story about an online community called the “burnerverse,” where groups of young men affiliated with different colleges use anonymous accounts on social media to victimize women. The subject of the story, Maddie Kowalski, a sophomore at the University of Florida, went one afternoon to visit a friend at a fraternity house, much like the woman who attended Cornell. Hours later, Kowalski learned that nude photos and videos apparently taken earlier in the year—of her engaged in sexual activity she couldn’t fully remember—were circulating on X. Within 24 hours, her name was trending nationally, and content about her had been viewed more than 8 million times. People started placing bets on whether or not she’d kill herself, and sent her messages urging her to do so.
The burnerverse, as Wired’s E. J. Dickson explains, is an amorphous online community associated with “large schools with prominent sports teams” as well as fraternities, whose pledges are encouraged to set up burner accounts with the goal of going viral. “Sometimes, this involves scouring their school’s incoming students’ Instagrams and posting photos of young women for the purpose of mocking or humiliating them,” Dickson writes. “But the most surefire way to go viral is to dox stereotypically attractive young women like Kowalski,” she notes. “There’s a sense that the health and vibrancy of the community is contingent on the sexual humiliation of women.”
[Read: No, women aren’t the problem]
What are young women who want an education to do? During the ’90s and ’00s, misogynistic communities on campus were at least locally confined; now the impulses that have always existed among fraternities to degrade and exploit women can be disseminated and amplified at global scale. There seem to be few consequences for men who take it upon themselves to ruin women’s lives. Colleges don’t appear to be making any efforts to address online communities devoted to tormenting female students. Kowalski reported her cyberharassment to campus police, which handed her case off to the Gainesville Police Department. Police subsequently filed charges against three men—Kamran Ahmed, Brendan Pitfield, and Jacob Gomberg—but the University of Florida dropped its Title IX investigation into the incident after concluding that the events had occurred off-campus, and both Ahmed and Pitfield were still enrolled when Wired’s story published. (Ahmed and Gomberg declined to comment to Wired via attorneys; Pitfield didn’t respond but has pleaded not guilty to the charge against him.)
Some college sports departments, Dickson reports, tacitly condone and even encourage the burnerverse. (According to the advocacy group RAINN, college sports and rape culture are associated in other ways—sexual-assault reports spike by 41 percent on home-game days, when partying and alcohol use intensify.) X, under Elon Musk’s tenure, is almost entirely unmoderated, meaning videos and images of incapacitated girls being sexually exploited can go viral in minutes. (One video of Kowalski reportedly got 11,000 views in 16 minutes.) The distinct behaviors Peggy Reeves Sanday wrote about regarding fraternities—the use of sexual violence as a means of enshrining male bonds and male power—are now defining characteristics of male communities all over the internet.
The outrage women have been expressing over the past week regarding the Cornell Seven seems to recognize the profundity of this shift. “It’s getting harder and harder to believe that they aren’t breeding a generation of young men who believe they can inflict unimaginable horror on others without fear of consequence,” the writer Claire Cohen wrote in Vogue. “Colleges/schools/universities repeatedly fail women around the world,” the actor Florence Pugh wrote on Instagram. “You build men that get taught through time and time again that they can do extreme harm and that they won’t be harmed in return.” Women who are subjected to sexual violence frequently go on to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder, and have marked decreases in academic performance. Some drop out of college altogether. If the explicit goal of tech companies and universities were to discourage women from going to college by creating a hostile environment for female students, I’d be hard-pressed to imagine what they could do differently.
If not, here is what schools can do: abolish—or, at the very least, take ownership of—fraternities, the social and hierarchical hosts of rape culture on campus. Punish with expulsion any student found participating in the victimization of female students online or offline. Here is what tech companies can do: moderate their platforms and block users found engaging in the sexual victimization of women. It could start happening tomorrow. And the fact that it won’t should lead us all to be constantly asking why male bonding is more valuable than female safety.