Contributing Voices

The Education of Impunity

Growing up, I was what people used to call a guy’s girl, whatever the hell that meant. Depending on who was doing the labeling, I was also a tomboy. I have four brothers and ten male cousins, and I spent most of my childhood in the company of boys. In high school, I played on the dominoes team and held my own at the table. Can you tell I’m a Caribbean girl? In college, I was often one of the only women in a group of guys, and I never felt my presence needed an explanation.

Looking back, there is something remarkable about those years that I never thought to appreciate at the time. I cannot recall a single moment, among my brothers and cousins or the men I spent college with, when being the only young woman in the room made me feel unsafe. I never had to wonder whether a friend was waiting for his chance to harm me. I always felt safe without having to declare the need for safety.

Now, let me say this: nobody in my crowd was a saint, me included. By nineteen, I had discovered freedom and the absence of parental supervision, and I did my share of drinking and smoking. (Sorry, Mom.) There were Jägermeister shots and nights when good judgment was not the guest of honor. Call it Buddha, Jah, or Black Jesus looking out for a sistah, but somehow I made it through those years of questionable decisions and occasional debauchery without ever waking up on somebody’s couch wondering what the hell had happened to me, or worse, what someone had done to me.

For a long time, I assumed that was normal. I believed that a young woman who drank too much around people she trusted would be put to bed somewhere safe, and that being vulnerable in the presence of men did not make you vulnerable to them. Age has shown me how fortunate I was, and how many women were denied that same safety, often in rooms that looked a lot like the ones where I spent my wildest years.

A young woman known publicly as Jane Doe says one of those rooms was a fraternity house in Ithaca. According to the civil lawsuit she filed in September, seven members of Cornell University’s Chi Phi fraternity pressured her into taking ketamine and sexually assaulted her there in October 2024, when she was twenty. She went to campus police that fall and signed a statement, and according to her lawyer, no investigator contacted her again. Today she is a former Cornell student, and her lawyer says they have both faced threats aimed at pushing her to drop the suit. Women across social media have posted videos declaring “I am Jane Doe,” in part to shield her from people trying to expose who she is. By her account, she made some of the same choices I made at her age. The difference, as she tells it, was the men in the room.

The public conversation, meanwhile, keeps turning to the futures of the young men accused. People talk about their promising careers and the doors that might close to them, and we are asked to remember their youth. I have spent much of my professional life making sure young people have futures worth looking forward to, so I recognize the concern. What I struggle to understand is why our collective imagination runs out the moment we turn to the woman.

She had a future too.

Whatever the courts eventually decide, she has already spent two years carrying that night from a campus police station into a lawsuit. I rarely hear anyone ask what it has cost her.

That imbalance is instructive. Accountability is its own kind of education, and refusing it teaches a lesson too. Every response to this case, from a family’s dinner table to a university disciplinary panel, tells young men something about whose body deserves protection and whose wrongdoing can be excused. Those lessons do not disappear when they graduate. They become part of the judgment some of these young men will carry into positions of authority as judges and district attorneys, where their decisions may determine whose complaints are taken seriously and whose wrongdoing is forgiven.

I’ve been listening to what some men have to say about this case, and I’m beginning to notice a pattern in what they choose to hear. They hear one detail and stop. She went to the house on her own. She texted one of the men afterward in a way that sounded, to them, like absolution. That single text circulates as an airtight verdict, while the messages in which she described herself as wrecked with shame never seem to penetrate the conversation. The same goes for what she told campus police, where, according to Governor Kathy Hochul and Jane Doe’s attorney, she said she was certain she had been raped.

I used to assume this kind of selective listening was a comprehension problem. I am less generous now, because in every other corner of their lives, these same men understand transactional boundaries with flawless precision. Any man who has ever bought his boy a drink knows he hasn’t agreed to buy the whole bar a round. Nobody has to explain that etiquette to him; he grasps the limits of an offer instantly. The moment the conversation shifts to a woman’s bodily autonomy, that intuitive clarity vanishes. Suddenly, these same men treat something perfectly simple like a Rubik’s Cube, twisting it every which way until they can pretend the colors will never align. A principle this straightforward is hard to misunderstand by accident. Feigning confusion is simply more convenient than facing the alternative: understanding it would require some of them to revisit their own blurred lines and the stories their friends have bragged about over beers. That is a reckoning they would rather skip.

Let me grant these men the absolute outer limit of their bad-faith debate. Imagine a woman who says yes to seven men and no to the eighth. Any sexual act the eighth man then forces on her is rape.

Consent is given to one specific person for one specific act, and it can be revoked at any point along the way. A woman who said yes in 1998 has every right to say no in 2026, and a woman who said yes at midnight has every right to withdraw it at two in the morning. Somewhere between those two clauses, a certain kind of listener loses the thread, behaving as though an initial yes were a transferable credential, a lifetime hall pass that every man in the building is entitled to share.

That distortion has an architecture. It has a grammar, and grammar happens to be my trade.

As a writer, I ask one question of any sentence first: who is doing what to whom? Listen to how the culture constructs the narrative when a woman is harmed, as in the tired old story about the dark alley. A woman walks down an alley late at night wearing a short skirt. The listener immediately seizes on the skirt and the late hour, fixing their gaze on her choices so completely that they never reach the violence itself. Notice, too, who gets assigned the burden of action. She walks, and she wears, while the man who assaulted her is quietly edited out of the frame before the sentence even finishes. Even when the act must finally be acknowledged, the language contorts to protect him: we hear that a woman was raped, scrubbed clean of any mention of the man who raped her. The passive voice has honest uses, such as when an attacker is unknown or when a survivor chooses to center her own survival. Used to erase responsibility, the passive voice becomes a sanctuary where perpetrators go to hide.

Try the reverse. A young man drinks too much, falls asleep in a house full of women, and wakes to find several of them have assaulted him. Male survivors face their own disbelief and ridicule, and that deserves an essay of its own. Would the public spend weeks debating whether his presence in that house amounted to permission? Would the women be defended as promising students who made a mistake? The answers would tell us a great deal about whose body the culture treats as public property, and whose futures are deemed too precious to interrupt.

That cultural calculus has an address, and it gets written down. Long before a courtroom ever convenes, universities answer these questions on the record. At Cornell, the institution’s disciplinary panel did impose real consequences in this case. Two of the men were expelled, and two were suspended, while one who had already graduated was barred from campus. The panel did not find every man responsible for sexual assault. The two who received the lightest sanctions were given no-contact orders and a series of educational modules, one of them on bystander intervention, that culminated in a reflection paper.

Think about that symmetry for a moment. Cornell sells itself as a crucible for future leaders, an elite training ground whose graduates go on to run boardrooms and statehouses. For many of its students, a personal statement helped unlock the gate in the first place, that polished, curated essay that turns a seventeen-year-old into a narrative of promise. Now, for the two young men facing the lightest disciplinary consequences in a case involving allegations of sexual assault, the institution’s response includes another piece of writing. At the gate of entry and at the threshold of accountability, the currency is the written word. I wonder how much character either page can prove, when the real test is what a young man does while another person’s safety depends on him.

That bystander module, in particular, stays with me because it exposes the scaffolding beneath the silence. Impunity never belongs solely to the person who causes harm. It also depends on the friends who stand in the doorway looking at the floor, and who learn that self-preservation and silence are the price of belonging. Cornell’s own discipline summaries describe a Snapchat message encouraging other fraternity members to enter the bedroom where she lay undressed. I cannot say who opened it or what each of them made of it. I can say what a message like that tells the young men who receive one about what their brothers expect of them. We spend enormous energy teaching young people to lead. I wonder how much time we spend teaching them what to do when leadership means disappointing the people standing beside them.

Zoom out, and the case looks less like an exception and more like an institutional baseline. A USA Today analysis of data Cornell reported to the state counted more than 1,200 reports of sexual and relationship violence, a category that includes stalking, between 2018 and 2024. Cornell brought disciplinary charges in 162 of those cases and found at least one person responsible in 51. Most of the people found responsible received sanctions that let them stay on campus, such as probation or training, and seven cases ended in expulsion or dismissal, about one a year. Across the 26 New York colleges in the analysis, schools suspended or expelled the responsible party in 59 percent of cases. Cornell did so in 41 percent. An institution that develops a young man’s intellect with enormous care can apparently treat the development of his character as an elective.

That institutional evasion is never confined to campus boundaries. Institutions teach through policy the same way families teach through habit: every decision about what counts as serious tells everyone watching what to notice and what to quietly let pass. We saw that exact linguistic laundering late last year, when a Coast Guard policy described swastikas and nooses as “potentially divisive” and dropped the term “hate incident” altogether. Public outrage forced a reversal within hours, and the revised policy banned those symbols outright. I take the reversal as a small mercy, but the original policy still matters because somewhere behind a desk, a person in authority looked at an instrument of lynching and decided it was merely open to interpretation. A noose and a sexual assault are vastly different kinds of harm, but the instinct to soften the language around them is familiar. That is the alley sentence operating at federal scale, hearing “divisive” to skip past “hate.” It reveals how effortlessly bureaucratic authority shrinks the meaning of harm to spare the perpetrator the weight of what he did.

That leniency is rarely distributed by chance. The power to decide what counts as wrongdoing has always been tethered to the power to decide whose mistakes deserve forgiveness, and that grace has never been granted equally.

Who gets to remain a child long enough to make a mistake?

A 2014 study led by Phillip Atiba Goff found that Black boys are seen as older and less innocent than their white peers, and a 2017 Georgetown Law study found that adults view Black girls as less innocent than white girls as early as age five. In my eighteen years in education, I have watched those perceptions harden long before any student steps onto a college quad. In the 2024–25 school year, Black students made up about one in five New York City public school students and received nearly two in five suspensions. The convenient language of “youthful indiscretion” and “promising potential” stretches remarkably far for some young people; for others, the benefit of the doubt never arrives at all. We are conditioned to see some children as inherent threats and others as good kids who simply stumbled.

That double standard is learned long before any disciplinary handbook codifies it. Children absorb it at the kitchen table, watching how the adults around them react when rules are broken, and people are hurt.

That brings me directly to parents, particularly white parents and parents of color who have reshaped their lives to gain proximity to whiteness or cling to it. That proximity brings clear social advantages without making anyone a better human being, and its quietest luxury is the presumption of innocence: the expectation that your child will be comforted and forgiven before he is ever questioned. Some parents have worked so hard to secure those advantages that they have begun to confuse access with entitlement, and opportunity with immunity. Their sons grow up watching that distinction dissolve in real time. In a house where every accusation against a boy is treated as an existential attack on his résumé, and every consequence is treated as an opening bid to be negotiated away by a lawyer, what curriculum are we actually teaching him?

Defending your son’s right to a fair process is part of the job of parenting. Shielding him from accountability once wrongdoing has been established is something else entirely.

Here is a piece of news: your son can be wrong and survive it. A boy raised to believe his future outweighs everyone else’s safety may become a man who expects the world to grant him the same exceptions, and who treats a woman’s boundaries as a suggestion. Parents often tell themselves they lose influence once their children leave for college, but the habits of empathy and entitlement are forged long before the dorm room door ever shuts.

We like to talk about young men accused of this kind of violence as though something went missing from their education, as though someone simply forgot to teach them right from wrong. I suspect we are misreading what they were taught. By the time a young man reaches a university campus, he may have absorbed years of instruction about whose discomfort matters and how far he can push before anyone steps in to stop him. The curriculum is rarely written down, but its lessons are reinforced every single time someone in authority treats the consequence of wrongdoing as a greater tragedy than the violation itself. The tragedy is that some of the very young men we insulate from accountability today will one day sit in the seats where they are tasked with holding the rest of us to it.

That unwritten curriculum survives partly through the stories we tell about wrongdoing, especially in who gets named and who disappears from the sentence. If we want to interrupt what young men are learning, we have to be honest about who is doing what to whom. Each time we talk about this case, at brunch or in the group chat, let us put the right person in the subject position. The lawsuit names seven men and details what each allegedly did. Our sentences should be just as specific.

If men belong in the subject position when we name harm, they also belong there when we talk about what basic decency requires. Lately, I have found myself thinking back to the guys I ran with in college. A few of them would probably be surprised to know their names have crossed my mind. I never thanked them back then because nothing about their conduct felt heroic; they were simply my friends, and they looked out for me when I was too young or too intoxicated to look out for myself. The trust I placed in them is something I never once had to regret.

There is something absurd about thanking men simply for respecting a woman’s body, much as there would be in praising them for allowing her to breathe. I am doing it anyway, because looking at Cornell reminds me just how many women were denied the safety I took for granted.

To the men who have watched a woman drink too much or fall asleep on somebody’s couch and never once seen an opportunity: thank you. To the men who put a pillow beneath her head and a blanket over her shoulders, then leave her the fuck alone: thank you. The men who refuse to laugh along or stand by when their friends start treating an incapacitated woman as an object deserve that same gratitude, because brotherhood never requires complicity in cruelty.

It really is that simple.

To the Jane Does of the world: I wish you had been met with that same ordinary decency. I wish you could look back on your younger years, reckless nights and foolish decisions included, without someone else’s violence casting a permanent shadow over all of it. You deserved people in the room who understood that your vulnerability was never an open door.

I hope there are far more men like the ones who kept me safe, and far fewer women who ever have reason to call themselves Jane Doe.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Nicole Yarde is an author, educator, writing coach, and founder of Black REwrite, a literary platform dedicated to amplifying Black voices and preserving Black stories. With more than 20 years in education, she brings a deep commitment to storytelling, cultural truth, and helping writers find and strengthen their voice. She is the author of Not Just Words: Writing as Liberation and the creator of The REWRITE Method, blending educational practice with the craft of writing.