Guardian columnist Emma Brockes has argued that the alleged gang-rape case at Cornell University shows that while the #MeToo movement brought progress, it was not enough to shift assumptions that still protect men and denigrate victims.
Seven male students are accused of gang-raping a 20-year-old woman two years ago in their fraternity house at Cornell University, and now face a civil suit brought by their alleged victim. Apparent failures by Cornell and the local district attorney to act appropriately at the time have triggered another round of commentary about the “death of #MeToo”, not least with the looming anniversary on 15 October, the date in 2017 when the hashtag first went viral.
Liberal overreach and the Stanford swimmer case
Brockes recalls the period before #MeToo, when it seemed as if questions of consent had been largely resolved. She points to 2015, when it seemed to many liberal observers as if, after almost eight solid years of President Barack Obama in the White House, a crucial line had been crossed; conservatism had lost, liberalism had won, and the biggest threat to female students on campus was the temptation to overpunish men for minor transgressions, thanks to the sheer force of the pendulum swing to their side.
Two things pertinent to the Cornell case happened that year: Valerie Jarrett, the Obama adviser tasked with co-chairing a White House panel on women and girls, came up with the idea of using civil rights legislation known as Title IX to prosecute sexual assault cases on campus. And, in January that year, a 22-year-old woman was sexually assaulted at a frat party at Stanford University in what would become known as the “Stanford swimmer case”. As with the Jane Doe at the centre of the Cornell rape allegations, Emily Doe had been drunk when the sexual assault occurred and much of the debate would centre on her ability to consent.
Brock Turner case and its aftermath
Brockes says the conversation around Emily Doe’s own culpability was a stark reminder that the Obama era had ushered in neither a brave new dawn of understanding around consent, nor a period in which innocent male students were at risk of persecution. Instead, the details of the case ran along age-old lines in which a man, Brock Turner, after being discovered assaulting an unconscious Emily Doe by the bins at the back of the fraternity house, was found guilty of felony sexual assault and sentenced to six months in jail, of which he served three.
While the assailant was spoken of glowingly by the judge as a champion swimmer, his victim was dragged through the mud, a narrative that only changed when Chanel Miller, who would later dispense with her anonymity, read out her victim impact statement in court. “You don’t know me,” she said, addressing Turner directly, “but you’ve been inside me, and that’s why we’re here today.”
Title IX’s limits and lingering fallacies
Brockes notes that the Jane Doe in the Cornell case has been subject to considerably less public scepticism than Miller was a decade ago. The problem remains the utter pointlessness of Title IX as a mechanism for punishing serious sexual assault – two of Jane Doe’s alleged assailants were expelled from Cornell, two were suspended, one defendant was issued a persona non grata, and two were barred from campus – and some lingering fallacies about the role played by alcohol.
Espousing a popular view, in his 2019 book Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell, over an entire chapter, presented the crime against Miller as a tragic misunderstanding between two people – a “transparency failure on steroids” – which wouldn’t have happened had alcohol not been present. Brockes says this is true, but omitted from Gladwell’s analysis is that it wouldn’t have happened if Brock Turner hadn’t been male; if parents didn’t raise their darling boys differently to how they raise their girls; if the criminal justice system prosecuted sexual assault with the enthusiasm it brings to, say, motoring offences; if “campus rape” was taken seriously as a category of crime; if two-thirds of the rapes and sexual assaults that occur in the US didn’t go unreported; if the conviction rate for those that are reported was higher than about 8%.
She concludes that the pivotal disinhibiting agent in the sexual assault of Chanel Miller, and in the alleged assault of the latest Jane Doe, wasn’t drugs or alcohol, but entitlement, misogyny and a well-founded assumption on the part of the men accused that they would never be held to serious account.
