An Essay on S.A.: An Institution of Genocide’s Punishment for Rape

They were allowed to write essays.

That is the detail I cannot get past.

In October 2024, a Cornell student says she was drugged and gang raped by seven men at a Chi Phi fraternity house.

For those unfamiliar with Greek life in American universities: fraternities and sororities form a powerful and often exclusionary social system offering belonging, status, and lifelong networks, but one repeatedly criticized for elitism, dangerous hazing, excessive partying, and cultures in which abuse can flourish.

Her lawsuit describes men entering and leaving the room in which she was assaulted. It includes a screenshot from a fraternity Snapchat group in which one of the alleged perpetrators announced that there was “free pussy” upstairs.

She reported what happened to Cornell University Police that same week. And somewhere in the institutional response to an allegation this violent, this degrading, this serious, there was room for essays.

Essays.

On S.A.

By the men who perpetrated it.

Think about what an essay means in a university context. An essay is homework. An assignment. A reflection. Something you write to demonstrate that you have thought about an experience and perhaps learned from it.

Consider the extraordinary generosity contained in that response: after a woman says her body was treated as communal property, the institution can still concern itself with whether the men she accused have sufficiently reflected upon their conduct.

This is one of patriarchy’s most enduring tricks.

A woman’s destruction becomes evidence of a man’s “mistake.”

Her trauma is permanent / his future remains precious.

She has to explain what happened / he gets to explain what he learned.

For almost two years, there were no criminal charges. The case had been left largely in the hands of Cornell University Police and the university’s internal disciplinary system; the Tompkins County District Attorney has acknowledged that his office did not conduct its own independent investigation. It took the survivor filing a civil lawsuit in September 2026—and the public scrutiny that followed—for the criminal investigation to be reopened. Even more damning, a newly obtained transcript shows that she told Cornell police in 2024 that she was “100% confident” she had been raped, information the District Attorney claims he never saw. That is why this story belongs in 2026: not because the alleged violence is new, but because nearly two years later, the institutions entrusted with responding to it are finally being forced to account for what they did—and did not do—with what she told them.

Perhaps this would be easier to understand as one university’s failure if Cornell had not already told us something about the boundaries of its concern for human bodies. Months before the assault, Cornell students demanded that their university divest from ten weapons manufacturers that are actively facilitating the Zionist genocide in Palestine, and thus the sexual assault of Palestinian prisoners.

The students did not whisper. They created encampments during which twenty-two students and two staff members were arrested for protesting peacefully, a consequence none of the 7 gang rapists have yet faced. Students forced a vote which resulted in 70% of the student body voting for the divestment from genocide.

Cornell did not divest.

And that matters in an essay on S.A.

Because sexual violence is not peripheral to the violence inflicted upon Palestinians. It exists inside it.

Weapons do not exist separately from the systems of power that wield them. Military power does not end at the moment a bomb is dropped. It creates the conditions in which people with absolute control over vulnerable bodies can act with devastating impunity.

Rape.

Gang rape.

Attempted rape.

Objects used to penetrate prisoners.

Violence against genitals.

Forced nudity.

Strip searches.

Threats of rape.

Sexual humiliation.

Women have been subjected to it.

Men have been subjected to it.

Children have been subjected to it.

And this is where the woman at Cornell and the Palestinian prisoner enter the same essay on S.A. Not because their lives are equivalent; they are not. A fraternity house is not a prison just like a university administration is not an army and Ithaca is not Palestine. But sexual violence does not exist in a vacuum; it exists inside systems of power.

And institutions make choices about those systems.

Cornell made choices.

So I find it increasingly difficult to treat what happened inside that fraternity house, and the administration’s subsequent response, as belonging to an entirely separate moral universe from the institution’s decisions about where its money goes and what kinds of violence that money helps sustain.

What does an institution actually mean when it says violence against women matters?

Does violence matter only when it happens within the geographical boundaries of its campus?

And even there, did it matter enough to warrant more than essays on S.A.?

And what if the institution’s money is directly or indirectly funding that exact kind of violence?

These questions matter because universities like Cornell do not merely educate, if they even do that. They possess enormous economic and institutional power. As UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has argued, universities are among the institutions implicated in what she describes as a transformation from an “economy of occupation” into an “economy of genocide.”

Universities cannot hang posters about consent on a campus and then fund the weapons that create the conditions for rape camps. They cannot teach students about human rights on Monday and treat their military investment portfolio as ethically neutral on Tuesday. They cannot claim sexual violence is intolerable while refusing to interrogate their own material relationship to systems in which sexual violence is rampant. And they cannot tell their student body that they are safe on campus and then ask rapists to write an essay on S.A.

Because there is nothing neutral about allowing the status quo to continue, whether on campus or in Palestine.

That is what Cornell’s students understood. They were asking their institution to do something.

Divest. Refuse complicity. Put a material cost behind the values universities are so comfortable advertising. Cornell, among other institutions, did not. I wonder why we continue pretending institutional ethics can be divided into neat administrative departments.

As though money has no relationship to violence.
As though violence has no relationship to power.
As though power has no relationship to gender.

Cornell, the Ivy League, and an obscene number of American universities market themselves as elite institutions of education and moral leadership. But prestige does not absolve an institution of what it tolerates, protects, or materially enables. Strip away the ivy, the ‘rankings’, and the mythology of excellence, and ask what remains when institutions fail survivors of sexual violence while investing in systems of mass atrocities. Because right now, when violence happens, it is those institutions that decide which body gets to live with the pain of S.A. and which gets to walk away having written an essay on S.A.