This story was originally published by Reasons to be Cheerful
9 min read
This story was originally published by The Understory.
When I was a student at Cornell University, I read the book “Fraternity Gang Rape” by Peggy Reeves Sanday for one of my classes. That book was written in 1990, which was a long time ago. But then again, was it?
I took the book off my shelf today. Paging through it, I noticed a sickening pattern. Parts of it felt ripped from the allegations coming out of the Cornell investigation today: Long nights saturated in alcohol. Women who spend days tunneling through layers of self-blame and shame before concluding they’ve been raped. Prosecutors who do not pursue charges. One example: a 19-year-old woman at a small Midwestern college drank alcohol, had sex with her boyfriend, “fell asleep and the next thing she knew she awoke with a man she didn’t know on top of her.” The more things change, apparently, the less any goddamn thing changes.
But wait. At moments of despair like this, I have learned to stop and ask myself: Is it actually true that nothing has changed?
There has been some extraordinary reporting done about the Cornell case, including by The Cornell Daily Sun, the student-run newspaper that gave me my first reporting job many years ago. But as usually happens with terrifying news stories, it’s very hard to figure out how to assess the threat — and find proven solutions.
How typical was this case? Is sexual assault happening more or less over time? In other words, what is the denominator for whatever fresh horror we are worried about? Most importantly, what actually works to make sexual assault more rare?
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To answer these questions, I’m going to uncomfortably set aside many other important questions — about accountability, humanity, legality, fairness and barbarity. Those are questions being interrogated in many other places. Here at The Understory, we’re trying to fill gaps that we see in traditional journalism. And one of those gaps is almost always context: How often are horrible things happening, and what can be done to make them more rare?
These are the kinds of questions that we know humans need answered, in order to stay sane and take meaningful action in a time of relentless news battering us from near and far. So in that spirit, here is what I have learned so far:
- Rape reports have been declining in the U.S. since 2021.
For 2025, the FBI estimates that 36 rape offenses were reported for every 100,000 people. The number of rapes that get reported to law enforcement each year has been gradually declining every year since 2021, based on FBI data.
This data comes with giant caveats, though. First, the number of actual sexual assaults is far higher than the number that get reported. (Only about 24 percent of sexual assaults were reported to authorities in 2024, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey.)
Second, the FBI broadened its definition of rape in 2013, so it is hard to compare statistics going back any further than that. (The current definition includes “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”) In general, definitions of rape and sexual assault vary from place to place, making it harder than it should be to track changes over time and to find which cities, states or countries have unusually low (or high) rates.
- Sexual assault remains appallingly common on college campuses.
In 2019, 13 percent of college students reported that they’d experienced some form of sexual assault since they’d arrived on campus. This category is broader than the FBI definition of rape; it includes nonconsensual penetration, attempted penetration, sexual touching by force or inability to consent. This data comes from the 181,752 students who responded to the 2019 Campus Climate Survey (conducted by the Association of American Universities).
Importantly, the odds vary tremendously depending on who you are. The rate of sexual assault for women and transgender or nonbinary students was 20 percent — or four times the rate for men.
- The Cornell case is typical in some ways.
In most campus sexual assaults, both the victim and the offender have consumed alcohol or drugs. Typically, rape victims are girls and very young women, and the vast majority of perpetrators are male. Victims usually know their perpetrators. At colleges, assaults primarily happen in residences or fraternity houses, according to the Campus Climate Survey (and Cornell’s own 2025 survey on sexual assault). And if a victim reports the offense, official responses are slow and unsatisfying, generally speaking. In all these ways, the Cornell case seems fairly typical.
- The Cornell case is atypical in other ways.
Most sexual assault cases involve just one perpetrator, not multiple, making the Cornell allegations unusual. The other rarity is that the woman in this case reported the incident. And she has continued to push for a reckoning in a civil suit filed this year. To date, none of the accused men has been charged with a crime, and all have denied wrongdoing.
- Something can be done. And is being done.
There is a lot of speculation happening right now about what leads to rape. Can we blame always-accessible, violent porn? Or campus hookup culture and frat-boy privilege? I have hunches about this, like everyone else. But I’m more interested in evidence of change. What actually works to reduce the number of rapes?
And guess what? We now have some answers — answers we did not have when I was a student at Cornell.
A 2014 study led by Laura Salazar at Georgia State University randomly assigned 743 college men to receive something called the RealConsent online training or a generic online health program. RealConsent featured six 30-minute modules about informed consent, intimate communication skills, the role of alcohol and male socialization in sexual violence, empathy for rape victims and bystander education.
Six months later, the men who had received the special training reported intervening more often to stop a peer from engaging in sexually violent or inappropriate behavior. And, most importantly, they reported engaging in less sexual aggression themselves. “The odds for perpetrating among RealConsent participants were 73 percent lower than participants in the comparison condition,” according to the study. The attitudes of these men changed, too. They had greater empathy for rape victims, less hostility toward women and less comfort with other men’s inappropriate behaviors.
Another program, which has been studied even more extensively, first appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2015. The researchers, led by Charlene Senn at the University of Windsor, randomly assigned a group of first-year female students at three Canadian universities to receive a special training program for resisting sexual assault. The control group got general brochures on sexual assault instead. The training program, known as EAAA (for Enhanced Assess, Acknowledge, Act) featured four three-hour sessions. Students were taught how to assess risk, overcome emotional barriers in acknowledging danger and engage in effective verbal and physical self-defense.
In all, 451 women received the EAAA training, and 442 women got the brochures. One year later, the researchers checked in on the women. Get this: women in the training group were 46 percent less likely to report having been raped than women in the control group. They were also 63 percent less likely to report attempted rapes.
A subsequent study found that the benefits continued, even two years later. “The program significantly reduced the risk of completed and attempted rape, attempted coercion, and nonconsensual sexual contact over the entire follow-up period,” the study concluded, “yielding reductions between 30 percent and 64 percent at 2 years.” Women who still became victims of sexual violence, despite the training, were less likely to blame themselves than women in the control group.
The U.S. Air Force Academy has adopted the program for first-year female cadets. So have many colleges, including Stanford University. Interestingly, Cornell University has tried out this program, too. Cornell facilitators piloted the EAAA program in 2019 and 2020. Then the pandemic came along and on-campus training stopped. Which means it’s unlikely that the students involved in the 2024 case got this training. Last year, Cornell revived the EAAA program with sorority members, as well as a parallel program for fraternity members.
You might wonder: Why isn’t every high school student getting proven training like this? There are many reasons, but one reason is that too few people know about these options. When rapes get covered in the media, the reporting almost never includes research like this. It can feel like this kind of violence is inevitable — or the fault of some inherent flaw in the perpetrators. But violence is never inevitable.
We, as a society, tend to focus on holding perpetrators accountable after the fact. And this is important, but tragically late. It would be great if laws were clearer, data collection was consistent and police and prosecutors had excellent, trauma-informed training. But it would be infinitely better to prevent more rapes from happening at all.
“Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in Hope in the Dark. “Authentic hope requires clarity — seeing the troubles in this world — and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.”
The post There Are Ways to Reduce Campus Sexual Assaults. Will More Colleges Use Them? appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
