I Believe Survivors: What We Could Learn From Cornell
I have been sitting with the story coming out of Cornell University, and I keep coming back to the same thought:
I believe survivors.
I realize that is a statement that makes some people uncomfortable. We have been taught that when someone discloses sexual violence, our job is to immediately start looking for inconsistencies. We ask what they drank. Why they were there. Why they went upstairs. Why they stayed. Why they didn't leave. Why they didn't report sooner. Why they didn't use the word "rape" the first time they told the story. Why they remember one detail clearly and another imperfectly.
We scrutinize the person telling us they were harmed before we scrutinize the culture that allowed the harm to happen. I am tired of that being our starting point.
There are pieces of this conversation that are personal for me in ways I don't intend to fully explain publicly. There are experiences from my own younger years that I understand differently today than I did when I was living them. Becoming a sex therapist gave me language for consent, coercion, power, trauma, and sexual violence that my younger self simply did not have. I know what it is like for the language to come later, and after years of working with sexual trauma, I also know that this experience is not unique to me.
People minimize. They compartmentalize. They blame themselves. They convince themselves that something wasn't "bad enough" to count. They worry about what will happen if they tell someone. They remember pieces before they can make sense of the whole. Sometimes they don't understand that what happened to them violated their boundaries until they have enough distance, safety, education, or support to look at it differently. They do this to survive what happened to them. None of those things make someone undeserving of belief.
The allegations coming out of Cornell are horrific. A former student has alleged that she was drugged and sexually assaulted by multiple members of the Chi Phi fraternity in 2024. Her allegations have now become the subject of a civil lawsuit, intense public scrutiny, and a reopened criminal investigation.
Inevitably, much of the conversation has begun focusing on her. Her words. Her timeline. Her previous statements. Whether she described what happened exactly the same way at every point afterward. I think we need to be asking much bigger questions. What kind of culture have we created around sexual violence that makes survivors anticipate disbelief before they ever disclose?
Why are survivors so often expected to tell perfectly coherent stories about experiences that may have occurred while they were terrified, frozen, dissociated, intoxicated, incapacitated, or traumatized? Why do institutions so often seem better prepared to protect themselves from the consequences of sexual violence than to care for the human being saying it happened? Why are we still teaching people, particularly young women, how to avoid being raped more often than we are teaching people not to rape?
Those are questions about more than Cornell. They are questions about rape culture. Rape culture isn't simply the existence of sexual violence. It is the collection of beliefs, behaviors, social norms, and institutional responses that make sexual violence easier to perpetrate, harder to disclose, and more difficult for survivors to be believed and supported when they do speak.
It exists every time we ask what she drank before we ask what someone did to her. Every time we treat a delayed disclosure as inherently suspicious. Every time someone's sexual history becomes more interesting than the behavior they are describing. Every time friends know something isn't right but decide it isn't their place to intervene. Every time an organization becomes primarily concerned with liability, reputation, or optics while a survivor is trying to figure out how to keep functioning.
And every time a survivor watches what happens to another person who speaks publicly and quietly thinks:
This is exactly why I never told anyone.
That is the conversation I want us to have, because believing survivors isn't only about what we say after someone tells us they were harmed. It's about building families, universities, workplaces, healthcare systems, communities, and organizations where people know that if something happens to them, they will not have to earn the right to be cared for.
Rape Culture Teaches Us to Investigate the Victim
One of the most effective things rape culture has done is convince us that victim-blaming only looks like saying, “She asked for it.” Most of us know better than to say that, but victim-blaming has become much more socially acceptable when we disguise it as investigation.
How much did she drink?
Why did she go there?
Why didn't she leave?
Why did she stay friends with them afterward?
Why didn't she immediately call the police?
Why didn't she use the word "rape" when she first talked about it?
Why are there details in her story now that weren't there before?
We can ask these questions so automatically that we don't stop to notice where our attention has gone. Instead of beginning with the behavior of the person accused of causing harm, we begin examining the behavior of the person who says they were harmed.
Underneath many of these questions is an assumption about what a "real" victim is supposed to look like.
A real victim fights back.
A real victim leaves.
A real victim immediately knows what happened.
A real victim tells someone right away.
A real victim remembers everything.
A real victim never willingly interacts with the person again.
A real victim tells the story the same way every single time.
Except real human beings, and real trauma, are rarely that tidy.
People freeze. People dissociate. People comply because their nervous system determines that compliance is the safest available option. People continue relationships with people who have harmed them. People minimize what happened. People blame themselves. People tell themselves they are overreacting. People wake up the next morning and try to go to class, go to work, answer texts, laugh with their friends, or otherwise continue with their lives.
I know this because it is what I did. I pretended it never happened. I tried to move forward as though it hadn't even happened. I minimized it, pushed it away, and tried to continue on as normally as I could. Not because it didn't affect me. Not because I didn't know, somewhere inside of me, that something was deeply wrong.
I did this because I was afraid of what would happen if I acknowledged it. I was afraid I would be blamed. That people would ask what I had been drinking, why I was there, why I trusted him, what I had done, or hadn't done, to stop it. I was afraid that instead of asking why someone I trusted had violated me, people would ask what I had done to put myself in that position. In fact, when I told one person, the response was: “I wish he would stop doing that.” Almost as if this was a bad habit of his and not the dehumanization of another person.
So pretending it didn't happen felt safer than telling the truth about how much it had hurt me. That is something I wish more people understood when they ask why a survivor didn't immediately report, didn't immediately call it rape, or seemed to simply go on with their life afterward. Sometimes continuing on is not evidence that nothing happened. Sometimes it is how we survive what did.
Sometimes people don't call something sexual assault because they genuinely don't yet understand that what happened to them qualifies as sexual assault. Sometimes it takes years before they do. This is one of the reasons education about consent matters so much. The more I have learned professionally about consent, coercion, trauma, and power, the more I have been able to look back at certain experiences in my own life with language I didn't have when I was younger. That doesn't mean the past changed. It means my understanding of it did. I think that distinction matters enormously when we talk about survivors.
We have to stop requiring people to have responded perfectly to an experience in order for us to take their pain seriously. There is no perfect way to be sexually assaulted. There is no perfect way to survive it. There is no perfect timeline for understanding it. There is certainly no perfect way to tell someone about it.
When we create an impossible standard for what a believable survivor looks like, we don't prevent false accusations or make our communities safer. We create an environment where people who have experienced sexual violence learn very quickly that before they disclose, they should be prepared to defend themselves. That is rape culture, too.
Additionally, when universities, workplaces, fraternities, churches, athletic programs, healthcare systems, or any other organization respond to disclosures through that same lens, the consequences become even larger. Because an institution has something an individual survivor often does not:
Power.
And what an organization chooses to do with that power can either create a path toward safety and support…or become another source of harm.
When Institutions Become Part of the Trauma
Sexual violence does not happen in a vacuum. It happens within families, friend groups, universities, workplaces, churches, athletic programs, fraternities, sororities, and other communities. And when it happens within an organization or community that someone depends on, the response of that institution can become an important part of what happens next.
There is actually language for this: institutional betrayal.
Institutional betrayal describes the harm that can occur when an institution someone depends on fails to prevent harm or fails to adequately support them after that harm occurs. Research on sexual trauma has found that negative institutional responses can compound the distress survivors experience following sexual violence.
This is where organizations have to do better. They have to do better because when someone discloses sexual violence, they are not simply handing an organization a problem to investigate. They are telling another human being that something happened to them that may have fundamentally disrupted their sense of safety, autonomy, trust, and control.
How that disclosure is received matters. A survivor should not have to become an expert in institutional policy while they are trying to understand what happened to them. They should not have to navigate a maze of offices, reporting structures, administrators, investigators, and paperwork just to figure out where they can receive support. They should not have to repeatedly tell the most painful details of their experience to different people because systems do not communicate with one another. They should not have to wonder whether the reputation of an organization, fraternity, university, team, church, or workplace matters more than their safety. Finally, they should not have to prove that they responded to trauma in exactly the "right" way before they are treated with dignity.
Supporting a survivor does not require an institution to abandon a fair investigative process. Those things are not mutually exclusive. An organization can investigate allegations carefully while also making sure the person reporting harm has access to advocacy, medical care, mental health support, academic or workplace accommodations, information about reporting options, and meaningful choices about what happens next.
It can communicate clearly. It can minimize unnecessary retelling. It can protect confidentiality as much as possible. It can take concerns about retaliation seriously. It can make sure the survivor understands their options without pressuring them toward any particular one. Perhaps most importantly, it can communicate through its actions:
You matter here. Your safety matters here. What happened to you matters here.
That should not be revolutionary. But too often, institutions begin somewhere else. They begin with liability. Reputation. Public relations. What can be proven. What policy technically requires. What they are legally obligated to do. Those questions may be necessary for institutions to address, but they cannot be the only questions.
We also have to ask:
What does this person need right now?
What would help them regain some sense of choice and control?
What barriers might prevent them from accessing support?
What are we doing to make sure another person does not experience the same thing?
Perhaps the most uncomfortable question:
Did something about the culture of our organization make this harm easier to perpetrate, easier to ignore, or harder to report?
Because responding well after sexual violence matters, but prevention requires organizations to be willing to examine themselves before the next survivor ever has to walk through their door. Organizations have to be willing to admit flaws and commit to doing better.
We Have to Stop Making Sexual Violence Prevention the Victim’s Job
Think about how we traditionally teach young people, especially young women, to prevent sexual assault.
Watch your drink.
Don't leave your drink unattended.
Stay with your friends.
Don't walk home alone.
Share your location.
Don't get too drunk.
Don't go upstairs by yourself.
Have a plan for getting home.
Text when you're safe.
There is nothing inherently wrong with teaching people strategies that may help them feel safer. I will probably teach many of these things to my own children. However, we need to be honest about what these messages communicate when they become the center of sexual violence prevention. They place the responsibility for preventing sexual violence on the person most likely to experience it.
We teach people how not to become victims when we should be spending considerably more time teaching people how not to violate another person's sexual autonomy.
Where is the education that says:
If someone is too intoxicated to meaningfully participate, you don't have sex with them.
If you aren't sure whether someone wants to continue, you stop and check in.
If someone's body becomes still or they stop participating, you pay attention.
If you have to repeatedly convince someone, wear them down, guilt them, pressure them, or make them afraid of what will happen if they say no, that is not freely given consent. And if your friend is trying to take an extremely intoxicated person upstairs, you don't laugh. You don't look the other way. You don't assume someone else will handle it.
You intervene.
This is the piece of sexual violence prevention we still don't talk about enough.
Consent is not simply the absence of a "no."
Consent requires the presence of choice. Choice requires someone to have the capacity and freedom to make one. As a sex therapist, I wish we taught this much earlier and much more explicitly. Not because sex needs to become a legal negotiation between two terrified people, but because caring about another person's experience should be an ordinary part of sexuality.
We should be teaching young people to notice whether the person they are with is present, engaged, comfortable, and participating. We should teach them that changing your mind is allowed. That consent to one thing is not consent to everything. That consent yesterday is not consent tonight. That being invited into someone's room is not consent. That flirting is not consent. That accepting a drink is not consent. That having had sex with someone before is not consent. And that another person's vulnerability is never an opportunity.
Prevention also has to extend beyond the two people involved, because culture is created by groups. It is created by what friends laugh about. What teammates tolerate. What fraternity brothers protect. What roommates ignore. What people say in group chats. What gets dismissed as "just how guys are." What happens when someone says, I'm worried about what he's doing. What happens to the person who decides to intervene.
If we want to talk seriously about preventing sexual violence, then we have to talk about bystanders, not as passive witnesses, but as people who have the ability to change what happens next. We need to raise young people who understand that protecting their friends does not mean protecting them from consequences. Sometimes protecting your friend means stopping them. Sometimes loyalty looks like saying, She's too drunk. You're not taking her upstairs. Sometimes it looks like walking someone home. Sometimes it looks like interrupting a situation that doesn't feel right even when you're worried about looking dramatic. Sometimes it means refusing to participate in the silence that allows harmful behavior to continue.
Also, organizations have a responsibility to create cultures where doing those things is expected rather than exceptional. Ultimately, we are not going to end sexual violence by creating increasingly sophisticated instructions for potential victims. We will make progress when we create communities where violating another person's autonomy is socially unacceptable, where bystanders know how to intervene, where people who cause harm are held accountable, and where survivors know that if they disclose what happened to them, the first question will not be:
What could you have done differently?
The question should be:
What can we do now to support you?
What Would It Actually Mean to Believe Survivors?
“Believe survivors” has become a phrase that people seem to interpret in very different ways. For me, believing survivors begins with something much more human than a legal conclusion. It means that when someone tells us they have been sexually harmed, our first response is not to put them on trial.
It means we listen. We take their experience seriously. We resist the urge to immediately search for the thing that would make what happened somehow less terrible. We don't ask what they were wearing. We don't ask why they were drinking. We don't ask why they went to the party, entered the room, kissed someone earlier in the night, or trusted people they thought were their friends. We don't require them to explain why they froze instead of fought, why they stayed instead of left, or why they didn't immediately understand what happened to them. We certainly don't make access to compassion dependent on whether their story would survive cross-examination. Support is not something survivors should have to earn.
I think this distinction is especially important when we talk about cases like the one unfolding at Cornell. There will be investigations. There will be legal questions. There will be evidence examined and statements compared. There are processes designed to determine what can be established and what consequences may follow.
The rest of us do not have to turn ourselves into investigators before we decide whether a person deserves care. We can believe someone when they tell us they have been harmed. We can stand beside them. We can make space for anger, grief, confusion, fear, numbness, or whatever else comes afterward. And, most importantly, we can do that without requiring a survivor to perform trauma in a way that makes the rest of us comfortable.
Unfortunately, we have created a very specific image of what victimhood is supposed to look like. We expect devastation, but not too much devastation. We expect emotion, but the right kinds and amount. If someone is calm, we question why they aren't more upset. If they are highly emotional, we question whether they are being rational. If they remember everything, we scrutinize every detail. If they don't remember everything, we treat the gaps as suspicious. If they report immediately, we ask whether they misunderstood what happened. If they wait, we ask why they didn't come forward sooner. If they continue interacting with the person who harmed them, we assume it couldn't have been that bad. If they cut that person off completely, someone may accuse them of being angry or vindictive.
There is almost no way to be the "perfect victim,” and perhaps that is part of the problem. When the standard for being believed requires someone to respond to trauma exactly the way we imagine we would respond, belief becomes nearly impossible to earn.
I want us to create something different. I want survivors to know that they are allowed to be confused and remember things gradually. They are allowed to have complicated feelings about the person who harmed them. They are allowed to grieve and be furious. They are allowed to tell no one or everyone. They are allowed to seek justice and decide they cannot withstand a legal process. They are allowed to understand what happened differently five years from now than they understand it today. They are allowed to heal without explaining every detail of what happened to people who believe they are entitled to know.
Believing survivors is not only something we do in the moments after sexual violence. It is a culture we create before a disclosure ever happens. It's making sure our children know they can call us at 2 a.m. without first calculating whether they are going to get in trouble. It's creating universities where students know where to go and what will happen when they ask for help. It's creating workplaces where reporting someone powerful does not mean risking your entire career. It's creating organizations that are willing to tolerate discomfort, scrutiny, and even damage to their own reputation rather than protecting themselves at the expense of the person saying they were harmed.
First and foremost, it's teaching all of us that when someone trusts us enough to say, Something happened to me, perhaps our first responsibility isn't to determine whether they have convinced us. Perhaps our first responsibility is simply to say:
I believe you. I'm here. What do you need?
Why This Is Personal for Me
Part of why this conversation has stayed with me is because my connection to it isn't only professional. There are experiences from my own life that I understand differently today than I did when I was younger. Experiences that, with time and with the language I now have around consent and sexual violence, I understand as rape.
I don't intend to share the details of those experiences here. They are mine, and I've learned that telling our stories does not require giving other people access to every part of them. What I will share is that both involved people I knew.
One happened in the context of a party with someone I had known for over a decade, someone I trusted, and was followed by harassment and degradation from people connected to him. Another happened after I had been drinking and had gone to bed for the night, involving a coworker I knew and had trusted enough to have in my home. A third was an ex-boyfriend that refused to admit I had ended the relationship. I knew them all, and I knew them all well.
For a long time, I didn't have the language I have today. I didn't understand consent then the way I understand it now. I didn't understand trauma responses, coercion, power, or the ways we sometimes make sense of sexual violence long after it happens. I certainly didn't have the perspective that has come from becoming a sex therapist and spending years sitting with other survivors as they try to understand their own experiences. Some of that understanding came later.
When I hear people dissect a survivor's behavior—what she drank, why she was there, why she didn't leave, why she didn't say something sooner, or why the language she uses today might be different from the language she used initially—I don't hear those questions only as a clinician. I understand them as a survivor, too, because I know how easy it is to turn those questions inward.
Maybe I shouldn't have been drinking.
Maybe I shouldn't have trusted that person.
Maybe I should have known.
Maybe I should have done something differently.
Here is what I understand now:
I was allowed to go to a party.
I was allowed to drink.
I was allowed to trust someone I had known for decades.
I was allowed to trust a coworker.
I was allowed to go to sleep.
I was allowed to end a relationship.
I was allowed to assume that people I knew would respect my body.
Knowing someone is not consent. Trusting someone is not consent. Attraction is not consent. Drinking with someone is not consent. Vulnerability is not consent.
Becoming a sex therapist didn't change what happened to me, but education, experience, and time changed the way I understood it. I think that is part of why I feel so strongly about what happens when survivors find their words, whether those words come immediately, months later, or years later. We should not meet those words by asking survivors to prove that they responded perfectly. We should meet them with care. We should believe them. We should make sure the systems they turn to are prepared to do the same.