Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

The Architecture of Campus Assault

College sexual assault is predictable. Here’s how to change that.

A student sits on Cornell’s campus before a protest against the university’s actions following Jane Doe’s alleged sexual assault at a campus fraternity in 2024.

What would it take for this to be the last Jane Doe?

In September, a former Cornell student sued her university for failing to protect her from seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity who she alleges gang raped her in 2024. The public has fixated on her accused assailants, and on the perceived impunity they’ve enjoyed from the university. But Jane Doe’s lawsuit should make us consider not only her school’s lax response to the alleged assault but also how Cornell, and institutions everywhere, enable the kind of violence she endured.

We live in an “assaultogenic” society. How did we get here? Why are we still here? And what do we do to move forward?

Few people have thought as deeply about the answers to these questions as Jennifer S. Hirsch and Shamus Khan, authors of Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus. Hirsch, a professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia, and Khan, the Willard Thorp Professor of Sociology at Princeton, draw on years of interviews, ethnographic observation, and survey data at Columbia to expose the “social ecosystem” that makes sexual assault a predictable feature of college life.

Asking readers to consider more than just predation and punishment, the authors treat sexual violence as the consequence of power imbalances between students of different genders, ages, races, sexualities, and class backgrounds. Meanwhile, institutions render these dynamics more dangerous by funneling the vulnerable into physical spaces controlled by the powerful. Students arrive at college severely underprepared to navigate this landscape, having never been taught how to articulate their own desires and boundaries—let alone those of their peers.

“It takes a lot of work to teach kids to move their bodies safely through the world,” the authors write. “We know this about everything except, it seems, sex.”

—Lily Seltz and Lara-Nour Walton

Lily Seltz & Lara-Nour Walton: Part of what’s so striking about Jane Doe’s story is how many people are alleged to have been complicit in her assault—not only the seven named in the lawsuit, but also the more than 50 men who were part of the Snapchat group where one person advertised “free pussy.” The loyalty between these fraternity members seems to have overridden any sense of obligation to Jane Doe herself.

In Sexual Citizens, you have a chapter called “The Power of the Group,” where you argue that groups frequently enable sexual situations, including assaults. How do groups fit into the campus sexual landscape?

Shamus Khan: Groups are very involved in creating sexual opportunities. We already have language for this. We talk about “wingmen” and “matchmakers.” An individual can be “cockblocked” by someone. Sex is not just an interaction between two people.

This is important to recognize for a whole host of reasons. One is that consent understands sex on a very contractual basis: individuals consenting to individuals. But that’s an inadequate framework, because sexual experiences are often totally enmeshed within group dynamics.

The second thing is that groups often reflect societal power structures. Different groups are more powerful than others, and within the fraternity and sorority system, alcohol is given to men [sororities are not allowed to possess or serve alcohol by official Panhellenic rules]. There’s a reason why Jane Doe walked into a fraternity and not a sorority: Fraternities are the places that can have parties.

Also, if we look at national statistics, men drink more than women. Fraternities are disproportionately white, and white people drink, on average, more than other racial and ethnic groups. So schools have designed things such that a specific group on campus that drinks more also controls the spaces of socialization.

Jennifer S. Hirsch: When we think about the power of the group, we should also think about the power of groups that have fundamentally failed so many Jane Does. In our research, we show that women who’ve experienced comprehensive sexuality education with skills-based components are half as likely to be raped in college. Yet the New York State Legislature has not passed a requirement that schools provide such education.

The Legislature is a powerful group that, for some reason, has refused to use its power in ways that we know would work. It’s like if we had a vaccine that was going to prevent half of the deaths from a disease and lawmakers decided not to give it to people. Either we need new policies or we need new policymakers.

LS & LNW: You just mentioned comprehensive sexual education and the limitations of a consent-only framework. What is comprehensive........

© The Nation