The sexual-assault allegations against seven fraternity members at Cornell University have revived a decades-old debate about whether college campuses face a rape crisis. A former Cornell student, identified by the pseudonym Jane Doe, says the men sexually assaulted her during a night of heavy drinking and drug use in 2024.
Though the allegations remain contested, journalists, activists, and Democratic politicians have already treated them as fact, citing the case as evidence of a larger problem at American colleges and universities. Vox says that there is “[a] crisis that goes far beyond Cornell.” The Atlantic asks whether college is becoming less safe for women. The Guardian declares that we live in a “rape-prone society.” Tens of thousands of women on TikTok have posted #IAmJaneDoe in solidarity with the Cornell accuser, drawing comparisons to the #MeToo movement. New York Governor Kathy Hochul is using the case to push for changing state law, arguing for closing the “voluntary intoxication loophole,” and has appointed Attorney General Letitia James to reinvestigate the allegations.
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Conventional crime measures do not support the claim that America is experiencing a rape epidemic. The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, which includes crimes never reported to police, estimates that the rape and sexual-assault rate fell from 4.3 victimizations per 1,000 people age 12 or older in 1993 to 2.0 in 2024.
What has increased in recent years is the range of experiences now described as nonconsensual. Spearheaded by activists, these expanded definitions—and the subsequent encouragement of women to reinterpret past experiences through them—has created serious consequences for individuals, society, and now potentially also the legal meanings of rape and sexual assault.
Psychologist Nick Haslam coined the term “concept creep” to describe how harm-related terms have expanded “horizontally” to encompass qualitatively different experiences and “vertically” to include less severe forms. Applying this framework to concepts like trauma, bullying, racism, and abuse, he found that heightened sensitivity to perceived harm was most commonly associated with a liberal worldview.
The definition of sexual nonconsent has similarly expanded. Once understood in terms of force and incapacity, it began to change with the rise of “affirmative consent.” Still a fringe and widely mocked idea when it appeared on college campuses in the 1990s, affirmative consent replaced the familiar “no means no” standard with a requirement for explicit, ongoing agreement to sexual activity.
Many regard this change as positive, but it has opened the door to broader interpretations of consent—and nonconsent. Today, nonconsent can cover silence, insufficient enthusiasm, any level of intoxication, or feeling pressured, deceived, or influenced to engage in sexual activity.
It took another two decades for affirmative consent to move into the mainstream. By the early 2010s, campus sexual-assault activists had gained a powerful federal foothold through the Obama administration’s expansion of Title IX enforcement. In 2014, the administration created the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault and made campus sexual assault a national priority.
Policymakers largely framed the emerging affirmative-consent guidance as prevention: establishing clearer rules for future sexual encounters. But some activists saw another use for it. A broader definition of nonconsent could identify more women as victims, including those who had not previously understood their experiences as rape or sexual assault.
Laura Dunn, founder of SurvJustice, a national nonprofit that provides legal services and advocacy for victims of sexual violence, and Harvard graduate student Rory Gerberg made that argument in comments to the Task Force. They wrote that “survivors frequently fail to identify rape and sexual assault” because society misunderstands consent. Their proposed remedy was “[i]nstitutionalizing an affirmative definition of consent,” with the explicit goal of producing “a legal shift in our societal understanding of consent.”
The nationwide pivot to the affirmative consent standard happened around 2015. That year, Planned Parenthood called for a national “culture of consent” and, the following year, introduced its FRIES model, which says consent must be “freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, and specific.” Earlier Planned Parenthood guidance warned that alcohol lowered inhibitions and made people “less picky” about sexual partners, potentially leading to regret. Its current guidance says a person cannot give consent if he or she is drunk or high.
Similarly, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network says consent must be given “clearly, freely, and enthusiastically,” and that capacity includes being “sober and alert.” Many organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, identify additional categories of “sexual violence,” such as “sexual coercion,” which can include persistent requests for sex or being “worn down” into consenting.
The momentum behind these changes came from claims that colleges were experiencing an epidemic of sexual assault hidden from ordinary crime statistics. The Task Force’s April 2014 report opened by declaring that “[o]ne in five women is sexually assaulted in college” but later acknowledged that many women whom researchers classified as victims of acquaintance rape “don’t call what happened to them rape.” The Obama administration treated that gap as evidence that assaults were going unrecognized. Ordinary reports could not reveal “what’s really happening on campus,” it argued, so colleges should administer behavioral surveys capable of identifying assaults that women themselves had not regarded as such.
The “one in five” statistic went on to become one of the most commonly cited estimates of campus sexual assault and continues to be repeated today. Yet it did not come from a national study of campus rape. It originated in a 2007 survey of students at just two universities, and only 42 percent of the women asked to participate responded.
By 2014, two of the study’s researchers, Christopher Krebs and Christine Lindquist, were concerned enough about the statistic’s use that they wrote a Time article to set the record straight. They acknowledged that the figure was “not a nationally representative estimate,” cautioned against using it as a national baseline for campus sexual assault, and warned that the low response rate could have biased their results. They also emphasized that “one in five” did not mean that one in five women had been raped, since their figure included unwanted kissing and touching.
Other research in this area suffers from many of the same methodological flaws that Heather Mac Donald raised concerns about in City Journal nearly two decades ago. These can include broad definitions that conflate rape with less serious forms of unwanted physical contact, subjective self-reports, and low response rates that can produce biased samples. Cornell University’s 2025 survey, for example, reported that 35 percent of undergraduate women had experienced “sexual assault.” Its response rate was just 13 percent, and it relied on a broad measure that grouped very different experiences under the same label.
There’s nothing wrong with telling young people to communicate more clearly and avoid sexual activity with severely impaired partners, but there can be issues with encouraging them to apply a new standard of consent to past experiences. When the #MeToo hashtag exploded in October 2017, millions of women began publicly doing just that. These online disclosures typically receive sympathy and validation, can attract hundreds of thousands of views, and offer entry into a “survivor” community built around a positive social identity.
Retrospective reclassification of sexual encounters became a recognizable genre of writing. In a 2018 essay, for example, Laura Amy reinterpreted a sexual encounter to which she had explicitly agreed. “I did say yes,” she wrote, and for years she had regarded such experiences as simply bad sex. But after reading #MeToo accounts from women who had felt pressured or obligated to agree, she reconsidered what had happened and concluded, “that is not consensual sex.” A woman writing in the Guardian in 2021 likewise reconsidered an encounter she had long regarded as “bad sex” or a “grey-area” experience. After #MeToo, she saw it differently: “That was sexual assault.”
Researchers have documented the same phenomenon. A 2021 study followed 2,566 college students before and after #MeToo. Of the 596 whose experiences fit the researchers’ broad definition of sexual assault, participants were more likely over time to label encounters as sexual assault that they hadn’t originally described in those terms. The authors linked the participants’ changed perceptions to #MeToo. Similarly, a 2023 study found that five of ten participants said #MeToo led them to reclassify earlier experiences as sexual abuse or assault. The researchers described the process as “reinterpreting, or relabeling experiences as sexual assault.”
In a 2025 study of 380 college students whose experiences met the researchers’ broad criteria for sexual assault, 36 percent were more likely to call the encounter sexual assault than they remembered it being shortly after it happened. Among that group, 43 percent said other people had played a role in changing how they understood it.
Women aren’t necessarily fabricating false allegations consciously. A woman may sincerely come to view past encounters in a different light after adopting a new framework for understanding them. Autobiographical memory is reconstructive rather than a literal recording of the past and is highly open to influence and suggestion, which can lead to false memories. In two experiments published in 2026, psychologists Lawrence Patihis and Harry Carter randomly prompted some participants to think more negatively about a former first-date partner, then asked them to recall how they had felt during the date. Those given the negative prompt recalled feeling less safe and more coerced than other participants.
Whether intentional or not, false accusations carry serious consequences. Exposure to false or dubious accusations may make people less willing to believe genuine ones. In one experiment, men who read a news report about a false rape allegation were more skeptical of a separate sexual-abuse complainant and viewed her experience as less harmful.
Supporters of the “believe women” approach often say that false accusations are rare, but a recent Aporia analysis contends that the low rates commonly cited are misleading. Such estimates count only accusations proven false while including unresolved, withdrawn, and “unfounded/baseless” cases in the denominator—which can undercount false accusations and make the rate appear artificially low. Moreover, studies of false reports typically rely on police records, making them a poor basis for assessing #MeToo-style accusations that never reach the police but can still carry serious social and reputational consequences for the accused.
Broadening the definitions of sexual assault affects not just individuals but society, too. That includes making ordinary dating and sexual interactions tougher to navigate. In 2020, Pew found that 65 percent of Americans (69 percent of men and 61 percent of women) believed the heightened focus on sexual harassment and assault had made it harder for men to know how to interact with someone on a date. Nearly half of Americans said dating itself was more difficult than it was a decade earlier.
A sexual ethic based on a clear “no” asks men to respect women’s choices. The expanding definition of nonconsent imposes a newer standard, asking men to judge whether a woman is sober enough, enthusiastic enough, sufficiently free from pressure, and unlikely to feel differently about the encounter later. It can also encourage women to reinterpret regretted sexual experiences as evidence that someone wronged them. We should be cautious about teaching women to second-guess their choices after the fact—and even more cautious about writing that uncertainty into law.