Jane Doe
A few weeks ago, my roommates and I sat together, buried under blankets, pillows, and an eerie quiet. A few moments prior, we had spoken for the first time about the events that had unfolded at Cornell University in 2024. We spoke about the case against the seven young men belonging to the Chi Phi chapter, about the event that had every woman’s stomach in knots for days, and about the horrific things that Jane Doe experienced at the hands of these seven men. Universities owe their female students more; female students demand more. It is undisputedly shameful and disturbing that young women’s bodies, education, and futures are at the mercy of systems and councils that can so easily tarnish and strip away our right to a future. Universities are places where collaboration, discourse, belonging, diversity, and higher intellect are meant to flourish. Places where empathy and reason can converse, where respect and debate intersect. Women’s safety and prevention of sexual violence should not only be a conversation within these institutions, but a top priority: beacons to help young students navigate and weather these brutal storms.
All who consider themselves intellectuals should treat these cases with the utmost seriousness; all who have mothers, wives, sisters, or girlfriends in their lives should think of them, because they are Jane Doe. As I sat there, grappling with what to make of this situation, how women’s autonomy seems to backslide with every passing year, I felt a set of warm arms wrap around me from behind as one of my roommates hugged me tightly. The other slept peacefully with her head in my lap. We are all Jane Doe.