I am heartbroken. And I am angry, very angry.
To the survivor at the center of the Cornell case: I believe you. You are brave. You are not alone.
This story is horrifying and is keeping me up at night. But anger is not enough about the Cornell 7 lawsuit making its rounds on social media and the news about a student who says she was drugged and raped over and over by men of the Chi Pi fraternity at Cornell University, with messages that included “free pu**y”.
Read those words again.
A young woman — a human being — is reduced to something being offered around.
But what has stayed with me, is what happened afterward.
For almost two years, there were no criminal charges, until the public outrage, on September 28, after this survivor filed a civil lawsuit the Tompkins County District Attorney announced that the criminal investigation would be reopened.
There will be a legal process, and there should be. This must be investigated. But there is another question we should ask ourselves.
Why do we keep waiting until after a woman or girl has been raped to decide if this matters? Why are we treating sexual violence as something to respond to, once a lawsuit is filled rather than something we have a responsibility to prevent?
I have spent more than two decades working in relationship education and violence prevention. I founded “what is lOVE” because I believe young people deserve to be taught how to build healthy, safe, abuse-free relationships before they are expected to navigate sex, consent, boundaries, and conflict on their own.
It was what I needed, yet too often, we wait until college.
We hand an 18-year-old a laptop, require a short online consent training, check a compliance box, and tell ourselves we have educated them. Clearly, this is not enough.
Consent should not be a 45-minute lesson someone clicks through during freshman orientation. It should be a conversation we have early and often at home, in school, and in our community.
Young people need opportunities to learn about boundaries, recognize coercion, communicate clearly, seek an enthusiastic yes, respect when someone changes their mind, understand that drinking or drugs can affect the ability to consent, challenge degrading attitudes about girls and women, intervene when a friend crosses a line, and know what healthy relationships look and feel like.
And this is not wishful thinking. It’s been proven over and over.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identifies teaching healthy relationship skills to adolescents as one of its evidence-informed strategies for preventing sexual violence.
Education does not prevent every act of violence. No responsible prevention professional would make that claim. But we know enough to stop pretending there is nothing we can do until someone gets hurt.
And this cannot become another conversation about teaching girls how to protect themselves. Girls have been carrying that burden for generations:
Watch your drink.
Don’t walk alone.
Text when you get home.
Don’t get too drunk.
Stay with your friends.
Hold your keys between your fingers.
Be careful what you wear.
Be careful who you trust.
What if we prioritized teaching young people not to abuse, exploit, coerce or violate another person? What if we taught boys and young men that “being a man” isn’t about dominance or violating another person’s body? What if we taught every young person that watching out for each other matters more than social standing, fraternity, reputation, or staying enrolled at a university?
Nearly every woman I know has a story. Sometimes it is her own. Sometimes it belongs to a sister, roommate, daughter or friend. And I have one too.
That should stop us in our tracks.
We must stop accepting violence against women and girls. We must not look away. Parents need to talk about consent way before their kids leave for college. Schools need comprehensive, developmentally appropriate relationship education. Universities need more than compliance videos. Men and boys must be part of prevention. Community leaders need to prioritize and invest in programs that teach the skills needed for abuse-free relationships.
Here in Santa Barbara County, we have the opportunity to decide what kind of community we want to be. Do we continue responding after a young person has already experienced violence? Or do we invest earlier?
Enough cannot be something we say when another horrific story reaches the news. Enough has to mean educating our children differently. Enough has to mean expecting more from our institutions. Enough has to mean teaching consent early and often.
And it has to mean investing in prevention with the same sense of urgency we bring to responding after violence has happened.
Because our kids deserve more than our outrage after the fact. They deserve our promise to prevent it.
Christy Stillwell, M.A. Psy., is the founder and executive director of what is lOVE, a Santa Barbara County organization dedicated to ending violence against women and girls through relationship education and helping young people build healthy, safe, abuse-free relationships.
