Entitlement and Impunity, Not Alcohol, Drive Campus Sexual Assault and Its Lack of Consequences
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/emmabrockes. "Here’s what connects the Cornell alleged rape case to those before: accused men not being held to serious account | Emma Brockes | The Guardian." October 8, 2026. www.theguardian.com
The Gist
The author argues that despite a decade of supposed progress since #MeToo, men accused of sexual assault—from the 2015 Stanford case to the 2026 Cornell case—still largely escape serious punishment. She says this isn't because alcohol clouds judgment, but because society lets entitled men assume they won't face real consequences.
Conclusion
The common thread linking the Cornell alleged gang-rape case to earlier cases like the Stanford swimmer case is that accused men are not held to serious account, reflecting persistent entitlement and misogyny rather than progress since #MeToo or the Obama-era 'liberal overreach' narrative.
Premises
- In the Stanford case, Brock Turner was found guilty of felony sexual assault but served only three months, while his victim Chanel Miller was publicly scrutinized and blamed
- In the Cornell case, of the seven accused men, only two were expelled, two suspended, one given persona non grata status, and two barred from campus, despite the severity of the alleged crime
- Title IX processes, introduced to handle campus sexual assault, have proven inadequate for addressing serious felonies
- Popular cultural narratives (e.g., Malcolm Gladwell's account) attribute these assaults primarily to alcohol-driven misunderstandings, ignoring gendered patterns of entitlement and systemic failure
- Two-thirds of rapes and sexual assaults in the US go unreported, and the conviction rate for reported cases is only about 8%, indicating systemic failure to hold perpetrators accountable
- The 2015 'liberal overreach' narrative, which worried about over-punishing men, has been proven false by subsequent cases showing continued leniency toward accused men
- Public scrutiny of the Cornell victim appears to have been somewhat less harsh than that faced by Chanel Miller, suggesting marginal but insufficient progress since #MeToo
Assumptions
- Institutional and legal responses to sexual assault reflect underlying societal attitudes about gender and entitlement rather than merely procedural or evidentiary challenges
- A pattern across multiple high-profile cases over a decade is sufficient to establish a systemic rather than anecdotal problem
- Alcohol's presence in assault cases is a secondary or enabling factor rather than a root cause of the underlying crime
- Reduced public hostility toward one assault victim compared to another is meaningful evidence of cultural change, even if institutional outcomes remain similarly weak
- The low reporting and conviction rates cited are representative of campus sexual assault specifically, not just sexual assault broadly