Cornell, Rape, and the Reality of Male Violence
By Naima Schuller, WoLF Operations Director
The details are horrifying. But the larger reality is painfully familiar.
A former Cornell University student filed a civil lawsuit alleging that she was drugged and gang raped by seven men at the Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2024. The Tompkins County District Attorney has since reopened the criminal investigation.
As writer Linda Caroll recently argued in “Some needed context to the Cornell rapes,”, the Cornell case should not be understood simply as a story about fraternity culture, alcohol, or one university. The story lives in a larger societal pattern of sexual violence against women.
Cornell’s own 2025 survey makes that difficult to ignore. According to the university data cited by Caroll, 35% of undergraduate women reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact since entering Cornell. Nearly half—49%—reported sexual harassment, while 19% reported dating violence and 17% reported stalking.
Alcohol does not explain the problem away. The same Cornell survey reported that only about half of the incidents involved alcohol or drugs. In other words, even removing intoxication and party culture from the equation leaves an enormous problem.
National data tell the same story. RAINN reports that 89% of victims in reported rape cases are girls and women, based on FBI data from 2021–2025. It also reports that 76% of reported rapes are committed by someone the victim already knows.
The CDC’s national survey data estimate that 1.36 million U.S. women experience completed or attempted rape in a 12-month period, and more than one in five women have experienced completed or attempted rape during their lifetimes. And to be clear, attempted rape is not a lesser category of harm. The terror, violation, threat of injury, can have profound and lasting consequences whether or not the attacker completes the act.
Radical feminism asks us to look beyond each individual crime and examine the conditions that make violence against women so persistent.
Women learn to calculate risk constantly: where we go, how late we stay out, who we trust, whether we walk alone, whether we accept a drink, whether we report an assault, and whether anyone will believe us when we do.
That is not freedom.
Women’s Liberation Front is committed to the liberation of women and girls from male violence, sexual exploitation, coercion, and abuse. That requires more than teaching women how to avoid danger or managing the aftermath once a woman has already been harmed. It means confronting perpetrators, demanding institutional accountability, supporting women who speak about what has been done to them, and refusing to treat sexual violence as an inevitable feature of women’s lives.
Linda Caroll put it plainly: this is not merely a college problem. The statistics extend far beyond Cornell, fraternities, or campuses.
Women should not have to organize their lives around the possibility of male violence.
The goal cannot simply be better management of that violence.
Our goal must be its abolition.
With acknowledgment to Linda Caroll’s September 28, 2026 essay, “Some needed context to the Cornell rapes,” published at Baba Was a Witch on Substack.
The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2016/2017 Report on Stalking--Updated Release
RAINN: Facts & Statistics: Sexual Violence in America