‘I am Jane Doe’, say thousands of women after Cornell University rape case

A rape at a fraternity house at Cornell University has sparked outrage. Thousands of women are sharing stories of sexual violence on campus.

A Cornell University student was raped by members of a fraternity in 2024. It happened while she was under the influence of alcohol and drugs. Last month, she filed a complaint, bringing the case back into the spotlight.

After the rape, she had already gone to the police, but the police, prosecutor and university are alleged to have responded too weakly to her account. This has sparked anger far beyond the university.

The prosecutor at the time, for example, closed the case without speaking to the victim. The university is said to have suspended or expelled some of the perpetrators, while others only had to write an essay. The university denies the latter and points out that the fraternity in question had to close.

There have also been many political reactions to the issue in the US. A heavyweight has now been appointed to take up the case again: a prosecutor who previously went after Donald Trump.

Jane Doe

The student’s name is being kept secret, so, as is customary in the US, she is called Jane Doe. (Men in such cases are called John Doe.) Someone who did not believe her called for this woman’s identity to be revealed.

This was followed by a wave of responses from women, and sometimes men, all saying: “I am Jane Doe.” The idea was to protect the victim from doxing – the publication of her name and personal details – by flooding the internet with Jane Does.

But this is also about the wider problem of sexual violence on campus. It brings to mind the start of the #MeToo movement in 2017, when women shared their experiences of sexual violence on a massive scale, to show other victims that they were not alone and to highlight how widespread the problem was.

The Netherlands

In 2025, it emerged that around half of all female students in the Netherlands had experienced sexually inappropriate behaviour in the space of a year. This includes not only unsolicited nude photos or being shouted at in the street: around one in six students at universities of applied sciences and one in four university students also experience sexual violence.

The culture at student fraternities has come under particular scrutiny, following, for example, the circulation of a ‘girls list’ in Utrecht and the vile language used by board members in Amsterdam. In 2025, a member of a Utrecht fraternity was sentenced to prison for rape.

Here, there is also criticism that educational institutions sometimes respond too casually. The Utrecht fraternity received funding again soon afterwards, much to the frustration of the victims and their parents.

But sexual violence is certainly not limited to student societies. Shortly before the summer, a former student and guest lecturer at an Amsterdam fashion school was sentenced to prison. Here, too, there has been criticism that the educational institution did not respond adequately to the problems.