I often return to a line from Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: “There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said - no. And somehow, we missed it.” I can’t help but wonder how different our institutions, our society, might look if more people stopped to examine the moments when their own actions (or inaction) allowed something to continue.
In October, much of my social network was abuzz around the“Cornell 7” case. For the uninitiated, the “Cornell 7” refers to seven young men currently accused of sexually assaulting a young Jane Doe. Seven men, seven hours, and fifty-seven total young men in the Snapchat group who, at some point, could have raised concerns or interrupted what was happening. Screenshots of the group have been passed around so often that you can almost recite them from memory. “Free pussy” is not an easily forgettable phrase.
Post after post asks the same question: how could this happen?
While shocking, the answer is actually pretty straightforward. We live in a world that enables it.
Since undergrad, I have studied, questioned, and dissected issues affecting women and girls. My academic work focused on the intersection of gender and power, followed by nonprofit work supporting women tackling real-world problems, graduate research on online exploitation, working with schools to prevent abuse, and nearly a decade in Trust & Safety at big tech companies. Current events show what happens when exploitation, technology, and institutional failure collide.
There are two systems at play we must deconstruct: the social systems and the technological systems.
Let’s start with the unspoken expectations in our society today.
In 2026, we still ask young girls to carry the burden of their own safety. Those girls grow into women who carry the rules they learned in childhood: walk with your keys between your fingers, dress modestly, cover your drink, cross the street, bring a friend, watch your surroundings, never let your guard down. The message is constant, and to stay safe, women must remain on high alert at all times. This is wrong. Instead of treating rape culture, it shifts the danger onto another, less “prepared,” woman. As it happens, the CDC notes that roughly one in two women will experience sexual violence in her lifetime.
Protecting a woman’s dignity is still treated as too costly when it threatens the status quo, a “funny” joke, someone else’s reputation, or the promise of a “bright future.” Institutions know how to tell women to report what happened, document it, and trust the process. They are less reliable when honoring that process requires consequences for the person accused, discomfort for the people around them, or a burden on the institution itself. The victim can end up sacrificing her education instead; survivors of sexual assault are roughly twice as likely to leave school prematurely.
Part of what makes the disbelief surrounding Cornell so revealing is who the accused are. These are educated young men at an elite university, living in a society that considers itself enlightened about sexual violence. Surely they should know better.
But knowing better is not the same as being shaped by a culture that demands better. Education is not an inoculation against entitlement. Loving a mother, sister, girlfriend, or friend does not prevent someone from participating in a culture that treats women as disposable. The question is not simply whether these young men understood that rape was wrong. It is what the culture around them permitted, rewarded, or taught them to overlook.
What makes the Cornell group chat so unsettling is not only the content of the messages, but how easily technology allowed that behavior to become collective. A woman undergoing brutality is reduced to a spectacle, passed around in a group chat like an invitation, her humanity flattened into emojis.
Which brings me to the second system we should probe: technology.
Technology gives culture more speed and reach, and those patterns can start early. In my years working in Trust & Safety, I have studied how women and girls experience abuse online and found that they are disproportionately targeted with gendered and violent threats; I have listened to hours of voice chat in which young boys repeatedly described, in graphic detail, how they would rape girls, either directly to them or while speaking with other boys. What concerned me was not only the severity of the language, but how casually and commonly it became part of everyday interaction. When misogyny becomes ordinary speech in the spaces where young people socialize, it teaches them something about what their peers will tolerate.
A group chat can turn cruelty into consensus, reduce a woman’s body to a joke, and normalize behavior someone should have challenged. The same tools can also help women document abuse, warn one another, and find support that would otherwise be out of reach.
I believe in technology. Private communication, instant connection, and new ways to capture and share our experiences have enormous value. But expanding what people can do does not automatically change what they believe they are entitled to do, whose concerns they take seriously, or whether they choose to intervene.
A platform can provide a way to report abuse. But a reporting button can’t make someone willing to challenge their friends. Removing abusive content, suspending an account, or preserving evidence can matter enormously. But removing a video does not undo what happened to the woman in it. Platform intervention cannot substitute for a friend intervening, an institution following through, or a woman having access to information that could help her make a safer decision.
Useful tools will be misused. That is not an argument against building them. It is an argument for continuing to improve their safeguards while also building technology that gives women greater ability to document what happens to them, share what they know, and support one another.
Because these failures share a common thread. We make harm easier to commit than to confront. The person who interrupts the system can become the problem, while everyone who stays quiet gets to move on.
In the wake of the Cornell case, the demand from women has been consistent and straightforward: men need to stop shielding other men from accountability.
Holding another man accountable should neither earn a medal nor require Herculean courage. It should be an ordinary expectation. There will always be a moment when we can say no. The challenge is not to miss it.
So, for those of us exhausted by “thoughts and prayers”-esque solutions, where do we go from here?
Women cannot afford to wait for every institution to earn their trust before helping one another. There is nuance in how women experience, understand, and survive sexual violence, and we need spaces where we can work through that complexity with other women.
We have already seen what happens when women are given room to speak and realize their experiences are not isolated. When #MeToo spread across social media in 2017, millions of women shared experiences of harassment and sexual violence that many had carried privately for years. Its power came not only from disclosure, but from collective recognition.
I’ve seen what this looks like in practice at Tea. Women have disclosed abuse they experienced as children, including information that helped trigger multiple investigations into alleged child predators. Women corroborate one another’s accounts of assault and rape, giving some the confidence and additional credibility to pursue cases they’d previously been afraid or unable to bring forward. None of this should be necessary to make institutions take women seriously, but it shows what can happen when women are given a way to connect information that would otherwise remain isolated.
That is the kind of power technology can give women when it is built around connection rather than silence. Women should have a heavy hand in deciding what gets built, whose needs it serves, and what success looks like. Tools built by women, for women, deserve the same investment, talent, and ambition as anything else in technology.
None of this relieves anyone else of responsibility. Men must challenge other men. Technology companies must take abuse seriously and invest in safeguards. Universities, employers, and law enforcement must protect people who report harm and follow through, even when accountability carries a cost.
We should keep demanding systems worthy of women’s trust while giving women the power and resources to build what we need now.
Our safety cannot wait.