Content note: This story contains references to sexual assault and rape.
I came to Cornell from UCL this autumn for my year abroad. Weeks later, a horrific sexual assault by seven frat boys here dominate international headlines. Now I walk to class past reporters and cameras while messages from home are asking me, “are you safe?”.
Safe from what? Safe compared to where?
As though I was safe here before this story broke. As though I would be safer at UCL. As though women are safe anywhere.
There is something deceptively comforting about turning Cornell into the danger because then danger has a location: one campus, one fraternity, one group of men. Everyone else seems to imagine themselves somewhere safer.
The ‘story’ has become easy to package and sell: Ivy League, Greek life, the ‘Cornell 7’. Real people have become characters in a grotesque media spectacle. Sexual violence becomes something extraordinary to be shocked by when the horrifying truth is how ordinary it is.
Cornell’s campus has begun to feel like an eerie dystopia: lights, cameras, action. Reporters hound students for soundbites. Outrage has become content, heightened before the news cycle churns onto something new. If universities still respond to survivors the same way when that outrage disappears, what did all that attention change?
Eventually the cameras will leave and the headlines will move on. Rape culture will remain exactly where it was before anyone arrived with a microphone.
Hearing Jane Doe’s account disturbed me because I recognised the feeling from conversations with my classmates, friends and women I barely know. Constantly being told ‘not all men’, while every woman I know has a [story] to tell.
I know this does not begin and end at Cornell because UCL failed me after my own assault.
What happened to me already made campus difficult to enter. UCL’s response made it harder. My anxiety became so debilitating that I struggled to be there, yet I still shared academic space with a student involved. Too often, the survivor must move, miss class and reshape their education around everyone else.
Then came attendance emails asking why I was not attending the university I did not feel safe enough to enter.
UCL, the way you responded to my assault pushed me further away from my education and then your systems punished me for being absent from it.
My reasonable academic adjustments were not consistently put in place. I fell behind. Nobody seemed to be speaking to anybody else. I was passed around like a hot potato: email this person, try another department, explain it again. Eventually you are too exhausted to keep advocating and start to feel like the burden.
Disconnected bureaucracy turns accessing support into another thing you have to survive.
It takes enormous courage to tell somebody your body has been violated. Then you are told to recount it, evidence it and keep functioning. The criminal justice system can retraumatise survivors. A university has an extraordinary opportunity and obligation to be somewhere safer, not another institution you have to endure for scraps of help.
Universities cannot fail survivors twice.
Two members of staff became my main points of support. They treated me with humanity and advocated for me, but their roles constrained what they could do. Too often they had to work around the institution to support me. If those helping survivors must fight the system around them, the problem is bigger than individual compassion.
When a university response makes the survivor move, retell, chase and absorb the consequences of somebody else’s actions, rape culture is no longer simply something the institution responds to. At that point, it is reproducing it.
That is what I mean when I say rape culture has entered the bureaucracy.
Yet universities speak as though nothing more can be done. The law. Liability. Due process. Their hands are tied.
UCL, if your hands are tied, untie them.
Rules were written by people. They can be rewritten by people.
Give survivors one person with authority to coordinate support. Stop making us repeatedly recount what happened because departments cannot communicate. Put adjustments in place quickly and check they happen. Write survivor policy with survivors.
A policy can call itself trauma-informed while still traumatising people.
Rape culture does not begin and end with Greek life at Cornell. It is reproduced every time an institution makes the survivor carry the consequences while everyone else carries on as normal.
I study politics at universities that teach me about human rights, justice, power and resistance. You cannot teach us to interrogate institutions and then become defensive when we interrogate yours.
Practise what you preach.
My name is Grace Samuel, but you can call me Jane Doe. There are far too many Does: survivors withdrawing from education while institutions continue as normal.
Sexual violence was here before the cameras. It exists at UCL and far beyond either campus. It cannot be contained inside a fraternity house so everyone outside it can call themselves safe.
When the dust settles, the reporters will pack away their cameras and this will stop being breaking news.
Cornell, what will you have learnt when nobody is watching anymore? UCL, I am asking you the same thing.
Do not return to normal when normal is part of the problem. If your hands are tied, untie them.
The news cycle will end. Our fight against procedurally sanctioned rape culture cannot end with it.
If you have been affected by sexual violence, support is available.
Rape Crisis offer a 24/7 Rape & Sexual Abuse Support Line. Call them on 0808 500 2222 or start an online chat.
Into the Light offer support, counselling and additional resources to survivors of sexual abuse or someone who supports a survivor, based in London.
Students’ Union UCL’s Sexual Violence Liaison Officer service aims to provide “more options and greater access to support, whether what happened was recent, in the past, on campus or off campus”.