The Cornell 7 are the tip of the iceberg - We must do more to stop rape

Following renewed coverage of the “Cornell 7” case - where seven college fraternity members allegedly drugged and raped a female student in 2024, were not arrested, and faced only minimal disciplinary consequences - I have been thinking about how huge a societal failure it is that this type of thing continues to happen.

Crimes of the type that occurred at Cornell are not rare. In fact, they are disturbingly common. For example, one university in Florida with an undergraduate enrollment of 14,497 reports that 8 sexual assaults (7 rapes, 1 fondling) occurred in student housing in 2025. As far as I can tell, zero of these crimes were covered in the news, and it’s unclear if any of the perpetrators were arrested or expelled. I only know the numbers from reading the annual Campus Safety Report that the university publishes as required by the Clery Act. The stats are in a little table on page 51.

Dormitory at a state university in Florida

The numbers in any university's Clery Act report are almost certainly an undercounting of the actual number of assaults that have occurred. Sociological research indicates that 6.5% of male college students in the US and Canada commit rape, victimizing 24.6% of female and 6.8% of male undergraduate students.

Based on those numbers, which are credible, we can try to estimate the real number of assaults that occur annually at a given university. For our Florida school:

14,497 students x 0.58 proportion female x 0.246 proportion of females assaulted at some point in college ÷ 4.4 years average time each student is in college = 471 women assaulted per year. This is a horrendous number of horrendous crimes causing long-lasting, serious damage to victim's lives and to society as a whole. The numbers imply that 98.4% of these assaults may be going unreported. A US Justice Department report in 2016 conservatively estimated that 80% of sexual assaults go unreported, but it seems the underreporting of campus assaults may be even more drastic than that. Whether it's 20% of the true amount, or only 1.6% of the true amount, it’s clear that the reported assaults are just the tip of the iceberg.

Many have commented previously on why only small proportion of the assaults committed are reported. I’m not going to review all those reasons, but one of the big ones is fear that the police / authorities won't do anything about it, and that the perpetrator will remain at large, potentially retaliating against his victim(s). We MUST do better about following through with investigation, prosecution, and punishment for the perpetrators of these crimes. (Just having to write an apology essay like 5 of the Cornell 7 had to do is ridiculously inadequate as a punishment.) The act of rape must result in serious, life-altering punishment and shame for the rapist if would-be rapists are to be dissuaded. Ensuring that those serious punishments are delivered should also encourage victims to report.

There are a lot of great organizations like https://rainn.org/ that have been working for decades to fight back against this huge problem, addressing both the institutional failures and the sociological dynamics that allow it to be this bad. I would encourage people whom this bothers to speak up however they can, and work with those organizations to make things better.