Why Do Cases Like the Cornell Fraternity Rape Lawsuit Keep Happening?

Brian Lehrer (0:10)

Brian Lehrer on WNYC. In a way, the Me Too movement is back because of the Cornell case. The Associated Press reports that countless women and some men have been posting, I am Jane Doe. On social media, since the lawsuit became public, many are sharing their own experiences of sexual assault.

Some are trying to shield the woman who filed the suit from people trying to expose her identity online. One woman told the AP, we are all Jane Doe until nobody is. So joining us to talk about why cases like this keep happening, and for our last word on this for today, is Moira Donegan, Guardian US columnist and co-host of the podcast, In Bed With The Right. Her latest column is titled, The Horror of the Cornell Rape Case Is How Ordinary It Is. Moira, thanks for joining us on WNYC.

Moira Donegan (1:05)

Thanks for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer (1:07)

So a lot of reaction to these allegations has been shocked at the number of men accused, at the hours the lawsuit says it went on, at the group chat, to your headline, what's ordinary about this case?

Moira Donegan (1:20)

Yeah. So there's a kind of tension, I think, in a lot of our coverage and our understanding of sexual violence, which is both the sexual violence, like the kind that allegedly happened to Jane Doe at Cornell, is that on the one hand really egregiously horrible, it shocks the conscience, it is grotesque, it is horrifying, and on the other hand, it is very, very common. It's familiar, it has identifiable patterns, and according to a lot of the empirical data, we have a kind of like staggering prevalence. I think people tend to think of really horrible things as being almost necessarily rare. And sexual violence is different. It's really, really horrible, and also really, really common.

Brian Lehrer (2:07)

You write about the fraternities group chat. One of the accused sent a message that seemed to invite other men to join in, and no one in the chat objected. You see that as systemic?

Moira Donegan (2:20)

Yeah, you know, I think it's really interesting that this outpouring of first-person testimony, as you said, from many, many women and some men, is occurring in the wake of this Cornell case. Because there's also been a number of high-profile sexual violence cases in the news over the past few years, really sort of in the nadir of the MeToo backlash that have sort of highlighted sexual violence as a mass endeavor or a collective endeavor by large numbers of men. There was, of course, the long-standing and ongoing controversy around Jeffrey Epstein and just what, if anything, his extensive network of high-profile connections knew about his conduct with underage children.

Then I'm thinking, of course, as well about the Gisele Pellicoe case out of France, in which a shocking number of men were recruited, really from the vicinity of a very small provincial town, to rape an unconscious woman over a period of a decade. This sort of mass participation or mass tolerance by men of sexual violence indicates the commonness of these attitudes and of these behaviors.

Brian Lehrer (3:36)

You write again on the systemic nature of this, that the Fraternity, Cornell, and the Tompkins County DA, all quote a Peter Webb behaved abominably, and that none of them behaved unusually. Why do institutions so consistently respond abominably as you put it, if you think they do?

Moira Donegan (4:01)

Yeah. I think it is very, very common for institutions to recreate the cognitive dissonance that we have culturally around sexual violence and around rape, where on the one hand, we all profess to find this really egregious, really unacceptable, really offensive to our morals in the abstract. But in particular cases, the banality and commonness of rape tends to diminish our sense of its moral seriousness. So people will say we take sexual violence very seriously, and they will say that when they're talking in abstract terms about a social phenomenon. When they're talking about a particular case, they tend to find ways to not take it very seriously, to downplay the moral culpability of the perpetrators and overstate the responsibility of the victim. We do see that over and over again.

That is a sadly very predictable pattern.

Brian Lehrer (5:02)

And how quote ordinary it is, to use the word from your headline, here are some stats from the 2019 Campus Climate Survey. It found that 13% of undergraduate students experienced rape or sexual assault after enrolling in college. One in four undergrad women, 26% of them. One in 14 undergrad men, 7% of men, said they did. Among reports of rape involving college-age victims, college-age victims, 17 to 24, 60% involved a perpetrator known to the victim. Among those known perpetrators, 69% were described as an acquaintance or a friend.