US universities are failing to protect victims of sexual assault
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Cornell University’s internal processes for responding to sexual assault reports failed “Jane Doe”. In 2024, the third-year student reported being sexually assaulted by seven men while incapacitated at a fraternity house. Cornell launched an investigation that would last months, but the process failed to deliver the accountability Jane Doe sought. She was left feeling unheard and unsafe, dropping out without completing her degree. No criminal charges were brought against the men she accused. She is now suing Cornell over its handling of her case. None of the administrators involved in those processes have been named. They have yet to face accountability.
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Her experience reveals the ways in which confidential procedures at universities are intended to make “problems” go away, rather than work towards any form of justice for victims. It also reveals how those in positions of authority – deans, provosts and presidents, alongside Title IX and Affirmative Action officers, and university lawyers – are primarily invested in protecting their institutions. That is the real goal. They are not here to advocate for vulnerable students, staff, or faculty.
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Every week, students on campuses throughout the United States – overwhelmingly women – are sexually assaulted. A 2025 Cornell University survey found that 35 percent of undergraduate women respondents had experienced nonconsensual sexual contact involving force or incapacitation since enrolling. The problem extends well beyond Cornell: a 2025 Michigan State University survey found that approximately one in five undergraduate women had experienced sexual assault since enrolling.
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Yet most incidents go unreported. A US Department of Justice study found that fewer than 5 percent of completed and attempted rapes were reported to police.
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Students – and their parents – must understand that the pathways for reporting violations are strategically designed to be difficult to navigate, or outright broken. Although you will hear administrators make all the right noises, they ensure that their publicly-touted systems remain labyrinthine and impossible to access. This army of well-paid administrators – lovely, trustworthy-looking senior faculty and members of staff that welcome you on Parents’ Day and at Alumni functions – answer to the institution, making them unreliable allies of the victim.
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Those who are victimised are expected to be the responsible party, documenting what happened to them in detail even as the trauma of the experience is ongoing. They are forced to repeat the particularities of the assault multiple times – to campus policemen and various administrators supposedly there to protect the student. As research shows, being forced to repetitively “perform” for various administrators makes one relive the violation and compounds trauma.
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Educational institutions often weaponise incompetence, blaming it on systems that are purposefully nonfunctional in order to avoid dealing with legitimate, even catastrophic, concerns. On top of this, administrators strategically perform care while caroming anyone who reports harm from one office to another. This seemingly absurd game of musical chairs is aimed at exhausting the victims. As feminist scholar Sara Ahmed argues in her 2021 book Complaint!, this process frames the complainant as the problem and dissipates the threat they pose. It ensures that lessons are imprinted on those who dare to voice dissent and demand accountability.
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Strategic dysfunction has a purpose: It safeguards the institution and silences victims. The “broken” system encourages victims to keep things in-house, assuring them that institutional processes will be less injurious than reporting a violation to the police. Disciplinary proceedings are kept secret, ostensibly to protect the victims. (Indeed, those traumatised by sexual violence deserve privacy. But these are not the reasons that institutions want to keep things quiet).
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Wondering why students, staff, or faculty members who have experienced a violation do not immediately get “lawyered up”? As Dr Sonia Cheruvillil, a public health advocate, noted, “Getting a lawyer is rarely what happens in sexual violence cases anywhere. The vast, overwhelming number of sex crimes are not reported to any authority because they are committed by friends, family. Authorities are not safe. University campuses are a microcosm of a larger eco-system of harm that keeps survivors and victims in place, individualizes their experience, and denies them justice.” Students may not be able to go to family for support, because not all families are safe.
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Some are actively discouraged by their families from making formal complaints. Universities across the US often flaunt their programmes aimed at educating students about sexual assault.
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They harangue faculty and staff to complete (useless) online “compliance exercises”, supposedly to teach them how to recognise and report gender-based violence. But try to actually report one’s experience of gender-based violence and you’ll likely hear crickets. As one of my students said, don’t be fooled by those cute flyers declaring campuses as “safe zones”, touting the university’s zero-tolerance policy towards discrimination or assault.
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They are the public face of the institution and, importantly, part of its strategy. These are performances, necessary for inaction, for the sleight of hand administrators employ.
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And essential to these performances on which educational institutions rely for covering up embedded practices of violence are the women and minoritised people that institutions appoint to prominent positions, meant to safeguard those who are vulnerable to gender-based violence and other forms of discrimination: The Affirmative Action Officer, the Title IX Officer.
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As my colleague Rinaldo Walcott, former professor of Africana and American Studies at the University at Buffalo, said, “Title IX administrators – many of whom are women, Black, minoritised people – are often deployed to do policy [work] as well as to do identity-related emotional work.
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Their identities are necessary, essential. They are in those jobs to calm us down. To make us believe the institution identifies with us and will care. The affective labour of identity recognition that is then betrayed by non-action or other policy claims plainly reveals that not much can be done.” They are the compromised wingnuts that hold tertiary educational institutions together, protecting them from being held accountable, and deeply imbricated in the creation and continuation of a culture of impunity. Instrumentalising these willing “representative bodies” to be the face of institutions’ public-facing policies is crucial for plausible deniability.
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Their actual job is to block any efforts to file formal charges or seek accountability or redress. At Cornell University, colleagues – often those with the least protection and power – are organising teach-ins, sit-in protests, and coordinating efforts alongside their students. Many students still want to believe that institutions can be improved with well-known research focused on reducing harm: “Trauma-informed” approaches.
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My colleagues, who have firsthand knowledge of institutional violence, know better. Through their efforts, they are hoping to convey that better communication, even more education about consent, or banning parties at fraternities may not be enough. Cornell University’s systematic “failure” was, in fact, its success story.
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Universities have powerful incentives to protect their reputations and keep donor money flowing.
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What can be done, given universities’ strategically broken systems? As my colleagues at Cornell said, institutional processes are “designed to cause trauma, not to offer relief, justice, or reparations”.
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Let’s focus, instead, on building working counter-systems outside the institutions.
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If – and only if – we have powerful, independent support systems, and the outcry is significant enough to affect public perception and all-important donor funds, then institutions may do the least possible. We would do well to understand that universities – and those highly-paid administrators charged with protecting students, faculty, and staff – are also guided by shame and the fear of losing positions and power. Working against what they know will keep you silent – shame, fear, and lack of resources and support systems – is the only way to drag “strategically broken” systems into taking action.
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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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