The conversation around how U.S. colleges and law enforcement agencies respond to reports of sexual assault on campus has been thrown back into the national spotlight, after a former Cornell University student brought a high-profile civil lawsuit alleging she was drugged and gang-raped by multiple fraternity members during a 2024 campus event.
Only identified as Jane Doe to protect her privacy, the former student alleges that Cornell failed to adequately protect her from harm and failed to issue appropriate punishment to the accused men. After she first reported the assault to campus police, who passed the case along to the Tompkins County District Attorney’s office, prosecutors initially declined to bring criminal charges. Earlier this week, however, District Attorney Matthew Van Houten announced he would reopen the investigation into the alleged assault.
Both Cornell and Van Houten have publicly defended their handling of the 2024 case. In an official statement, the Ivy League institution said it had carried out a months-long, thorough investigation and adjudication into the incident, issuing unique sanctions to each student involved based on investigation findings, and had since developed a new campus framework to address sexual assault reports. The university confirmed it followed all protocols laid out in Title IX, the federal civil rights law that sets mandatory standards for how U.S. colleges investigate reports of campus sexual misconduct. Per Cornell, the investigation resulted in the implicated fraternity being permanently banned from campus, and the involved students receiving suspension or expulsion.
But the case has sparked widespread outcry from Cornell students, who have criticized the university’s lack of transparency around disciplinary outcomes. The student-run newspaper *Cornell Daily Sun* made headlines when it published the full names of the accused students under the provocative headline “Cornell won’t, we will.” Cornell has countered that federal privacy laws prohibit the institution from releasing any personally identifiable information about individual student disciplinary proceedings, so it cannot disclose further details to the public.
While the Cornell case has drawn national attention, sexual assault survivors and advocacy experts say it is just one example of systemic, long-standing challenges that survivors face when reporting assaults across U.S. college campuses.
Take Mary, a first-generation college student whose name has been changed to protect her identity, who experienced a similar assault during her first year at a separate institution. After waking up from a fraternity party with extensive bruising and bite marks across her body, it took Mary days to piece together that she had been sexually assaulted while she was blacked out from alcohol. She eventually reported the incident, but while the man she accused was ultimately expelled through the university’s Title IX process, local police declined to bring any criminal charges, citing a lack of sufficient physical evidence.
Mary described the entire process of pursuing any form of justice as deeply confusing, emotionally draining, and ultimately disappointing. “Even though it was a positive outcome, it was still so emotionally exhausting and draining, because I had to do all of this in tandem with getting used to being a college student for the first time,” she said. “In many ways, I had to be my own advocate, gathering all my evidence.” Her experience with local law enforcement, she added, left her with profound disillusionment in the justice system. “I was left with this taste that because they knew that the college was ‘handling’ my investigation, that they could wipe their hands clean of it.”
Though Mary’s case is unconnected to Cornell, survivor advocates say it illustrates the core, widespread barrier that keeps the vast majority of campus sexual assaults unreported, per national research: a confusing, overlapping web of policies and procedures that varies dramatically from institution to institution, requiring survivors to navigate two parallel systems—the university disciplinary process and the traditional criminal justice system—with little clear guidance.
“These processes are hard to navigate if you aren’t in trauma,” explained Nancy Chi Cantalupo, an associate law professor at Wayne State University with years of experience representing campus sexual assault survivors. “If you are in trauma, they’re virtually impossible to navigate.”
Zoey Scheinblum-Brewer, policy coordinator at the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), the nation’s largest anti-sexual assault nonprofit, broke down why this dual system creates so many barriers. “[The two systems] serve different purposes, operate under different rules and timelines, and lead to different outcomes,” she said. “Unclear guidance about the options available through these parallel processes can create so much confusion and uncertainty that some students ultimately decide not to report.”
For Mary, that lack of clarity was palpable when she first reported her assault. She recalled that university officials seemed as unfamiliar with the process as she was, leaving her to navigate every step alone. Unlike Cornell, which maintains an information-sharing agreement with local law enforcement, Mary was required to file a separate report with police independently—a process she described as physically and emotionally exhausting. Though Mary’s legal team obtained surveillance footage showing the accused carrying her unconscious, slumped body, along with photographic evidence of her injuries, police said they lacked probable cause for an arrest, and the district attorney deferred the case entirely to the university. When reached for comment by the BBC, the local police department said it did not retain records of the specific case, and the local district attorney’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Another point of ongoing debate is the inherent secrecy of campus Title IX investigations, which are conducted entirely behind closed doors. Helene Weiss, an attorney who has represented dozens of campus sexual assault survivors, argues the secrecy is primarily designed to protect the institutional reputation of colleges, rather than the interests of survivors. “The secrecy of the process, it prevents other students from knowing about it. It prevents witnesses from coming forward,” she said.
But Michael Diamondstein, a Pennsylvania attorney who represents people accused of campus sexual misconduct, countered that the confidentiality protects all parties involved. “I think when you compare it to what they would face in a courtroom, it’s much easier for students and much safer for students. Their name isn’t put out there. The news media doesn’t get them,” he said.
Despite the many systemic flaws, many survivor advocates and survivors themselves argue that maintaining the dual pathway of campus investigations and criminal prosecutions serves a critical purpose. Criminal prosecution of sexual assault is notoriously difficult: a recent systematic review of national cases found that fewer than 10% of reported sexual assault cases result in a criminal conviction. Criminal courts require prosecutors to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, a far higher burden of proof than the lower standard applied in campus disciplinary tribunals. Additionally, Title IX requires colleges to provide adaptive accommodations that law enforcement cannot, such as reassigning class schedules to separate survivors and the accused during an investigation and granting extensions for academic work.
For Mary, that dual pathway was the only avenue to any form of justice. After criminal prosecutors dropped her case, the Title IX process resulted in her attacker’s expulsion. “This was my only avenue to achieve any sort of justice,” she said.