Sexual assault on campus is a problem. Can laws help address it?

0:00It's Consider This where every day we go deep on one big news story. Today, keeping students safe from sexual assault on college campuses. In New York, prosecutors have reopened an investigation into allegations that a student was gang raped by seven fraternity members at Cornell University in 2024. The culture of rape, sexual assault, and pedophilia is protected in elite institutions across the United States, and including Cornell University in this instance. It has got to stop. That's New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaking to students at Cornell Sunday night. The development raises new questions about how the internet was handled two years ago.

0:48Cornell University says they take sexual violence seriously and stand by their investigation, but the incident has sent shockwaves across the country. If you are a young woman who attends college today, you are more likely to be sexually assaulted than those who don't. New York Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has long been a part of a bipartisan push to curb rates of sexual assaults on campuses. Here she is announcing the Campus Accountability and Safety Act back in 2014. It doesn't matter where you go to school. It doesn't matter if your college is a big school or a small school, urban, rural, public, private.

1:26If you are young women and you attend school, the odds jump that you will be sexually assaulted at school, probably by someone you know from your class, from your team, from a party. That bill has been repeatedly reintroduced in Congress over the years, most recently in 2025, but it's never been passed into law. Our students deserve better than this. The price of a college education should not be that one in five women will be sexually assaulted. Consider this. Sexual assault on campus is a long-standing problem. What, if anything, can lawmakers do to fix it?

2:14From NPR, I'm Juana Summers.

2:34Communicate with clarity. Trusted by 96 of the Amlaw 100, IMS helps leading law firms navigate complex litigation from start to finish. IMS Legal Strategies, your partner in litigation. Every case, every stage. Before Bernie Sanders or AOC, a man named Michael Harrington tried to market socialism to the American public. Tens of millions of Americans are poor, miserable, in body and in spirit. On NPR's ThruLine, how the founder of the DSA created a modern political movement. Listen to ThruLine in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

3:17It's Consider This from NPR. New York Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has long pushed for federal legislation changing the way campus sexual assault crimes are handled. And I started by asking her for her reaction to these allegations, as well as the decision to reopen the case.

3:33Kirsten Gillibrand:Well, I'm certainly grateful that the DA is reopening the investigation. I've just seen the public reports, and obviously these allegations are extremely serious and horrific. And as a parent with a kid in college, this is probably something that every parent in America wants addressed. Matthew Van Houten, who's the Tompkins County District Attorney, said on Monday that Jane Doe's original statement two years ago, and I'm going to quote him here, did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang raped. Now, in light of the new details provided in that civil suit, he says he would now let a grand jury decide.

4:07Her lawyer told CNN that the new report was not materially different from what was contained in the original complaint. What questions would you want answered about how investigators handled that initial report?

4:19Kirsten Gillibrand:So one of the things that I found over the years of working in this space is that the people who do the interviews initially or ask questions initially have to be highly trained. They have to be experts in this kind of trauma. They have to be experts on what happens when someone has lived through this kind of trauma. You need a trauma-informed counselor to do that first interview. And a lot of our lawyers, a lot of our district attorneys, a lot of law enforcement are not trained in that way. We studied cases where law enforcement groups were trained appropriately, and it exponentially increased the number of people who reported rapes.

5:01Kirsten Gillibrand:It increased the number of people whose cases actually went to adjudication, and it increased the number of convictions. I mean, you have been working on these issues for such a long time. I think it was more than a decade ago that I was talking to you covering the bipartisan push that you and other lawmakers made to address this issue, to curb the rates of sexual assaults on campuses. You've come back to this legislation over and over again. And yet I have to say, Senator, it doesn't feel like much has changed. Is that your view? No, I think very little has changed. I do imagine that many campuses have put in place much better policies than they had a decade ago.

5:38Kirsten Gillibrand:but Congress hasn't done its part. And we just spent two weeks talking about college sports. Congress should spend at least that time talking about how to make campuses safe for all students. What would you like to see Congress do? What's an appropriate step here? Well, I'd like to have hearings on the piece of legislation that Senator Grassley and I have authored, CASA. And then we should be able to get a vote, just simply get a vote so that we can hold campuses and communities of responsibility, hold them accountable for whether they are protecting all students or not. And that is literally not happening today on many, many college campuses.

6:20Senator Gillibrand, I've covered you for a long time on and off the Hill. So I want to ask you a question, not as a senator, but just as a mom. And I understand that you have at least one son who's college age. How do you talk to your sons? How do we talk to young men about situations and allegations like these? Because these instances, they keep happening. year after year from college campus to college campus?

6:40Kirsten Gillibrand:Well, as a mom, I, of course, worry about the safety and well-being of my children. And I try to make sure that they understand the risks they have every day. I also read the story about a bunch of kids who died on campus because they did some drug that's not fentanyl, but worse than fentanyl. So when I hear stories like this, I just talk to my children about what happened on these campuses, what happened to these children and ask them, like, do you ever see yourself in this situation? What would you do in this situation? Who would you ask for help? You know, would you save someone? Would you stick up for someone?

7:19Kirsten Gillibrand:Would you prevent someone from taking a risk that's very scary, like taking drugs? I think a lot of campuses have some sexual assault prevention training. I don't know if all campuses have them, but I know that my sons have had those trainings on their campuses. So it's very hard, and you just want your children and their friends and their whole community to be safe. I mean, just taking a step away from the specifics of these allegations at Cornell University, I just know so many women, myself included, who have had stories of experiencing unwanted sexual contact, assault, or rape on their campuses who then seek help from systems that were ostensibly built to keep them safe and yet feel let down or betrayed, and it keeps happening.

8:05So I guess the question I have is, what makes it stop? What's the tipping point?

8:10Kirsten Gillibrand:What you've heard from many survivors, and this is the through line, is that when they felt they could report what happened, they were not received openly. They were received with disbelief. They were received with blame. They received, well, that's what you were wearing, or you were drinking that, or you were doing drugs. What do you expect? Like sometimes the first person they talk to is so uninformed and so poorly trained. They say all the wrong things. And the things that they say in those instances often will leave a survivor to drop the case or to blame him or herself and unwilling to tell his or her story.

8:53Kirsten Gillibrand:That does not set a campus up for safety or for success. You need to have a system that works, that works for everyone, that is 100 percent transparent. We've been speaking with Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. Thank you so much. Thank you. This episode was produced by Vincent Acovino and Karen Zamora with audio engineering by Ted Meebane. Our director is Jonas Adams. It was edited by Christopher Intagliata and Tenbeat Ermias. Our interim executive producer is Courtney Dornig.

9:28It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Juana Summers. A message from our sponsor, IMS Legal Strategies. From pre-suit to final verdict, every stage of litigation requires coordination. IMS brings together expert witness, consulting, and trial support services to help legal teams evaluate cases before filing, develop strategy, and communicate with clarity. Trusted by 96 of the AMLAW 100, IMS helps leading law firms navigate complex litigation from start to finish. IMS Legal Strategies, your partner in litigation. Every case, every stage. Want to hear this podcast without sponsor breaks? Amazon Prime members can listen to consider this sponsor-free through Amazon Music.

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