I Am Jane Doe

Content warning: This article discusses sexual assault, sexual violence and a personal experience of childhood sexual assault.

Safety in Numbers

I am forever telling my daughters there is safety in numbers.

Stay together.

Stick together.

Look after each other.

If one of you goes somewhere, the other one goes too.

Don’t leave your sister.

Safety in numbers.

I’ve said it so many times that I imagine it has become part of the soundtrack of their childhood.

But this week, those words have started to bother me.

Because this week my social media has been absolutely flooded with Jane Doe.

Jane Doe.

The Cornell Seven.

Another video.

Another article.

Another woman talking about it.

Another detail.

Another fucking reason to be angry.

And yes, I know exactly how algorithms work.

I click.

I read.

I watch.

I search.

I share.

And the algorithm says, Oh, you want more of this?

So it gives me more.

And I consume that too.

At this point, I’m sure some of my Facebook friends are thoroughly sick of me.

Their feeds must contain a seemingly endless stream of things I’ve shared about Jane Doe, rape, sexual assault, violence against women and bodily autonomy.

Perhaps some people scroll straight past now.

Fran’s shared another one.

Fucking good! 

I’ll probably share another nine tomorrow.

Because I don’t think we are shouting loudly enough.

More accurately, I don’t think people understand how fucking angry women already are.

Not irritated.

Not offended.

Not having a little disagreement about feminism.

Angry

Fucking furious.

Furious about sexual violence.

Furious about harassment.

Furious about what happens to women and girls and then the questions they are asked afterwards.

Furious about the endless list of things girls are taught to do to avoid becoming victims.

Furious about watching women’s bodily autonomy debated, regulated and legislated.

Furious that consent — something so fundamentally simple — can apparently become incredibly complicated when somebody wants access to another person’s body.

Furious that so many women can hear another woman’s story and immediately recognise something from their own.

And furious that when women express that rage, there so often seems to be an expectation that we should make it more palatable.

Use better language.

Don’t generalise.

Don’t swear.

Don’t make people uncomfortable.

Don’t be aggressive.

Don’t be too angry.

No.

Perhaps people need to start understanding how angry we already are.

Because underneath the videos and the hashtags and the women saying I am Jane Doe, there are millions of individual histories.

Things that happened in bedrooms.

At parties.

Inside relationships.

At work.

At university.

On nights out.

On public transport.

Inside families.

And, in my case, at thirteen year old inside a school. 

I Was Thirteen

I know something about the moment a girl suddenly discovers that the body she has been innocently walking around in can mean something entirely different to somebody else.

I was thirteen.

I was at school.

An adult in a position of authority sexually assaulted me and took sexual gratification from my body without my consent.

And I froze.

Completely.

I didn’t scream.

I didn’t fight.

I didn’t run.

I didn’t do any of the things we imagine we would do when we picture something terrible happening to us.

My body simply stopped.

I was frozen to the spot.

For years, that bothered me enormously.

Why hadn’t I screamed?

Why hadn’t I pushed him away?

Why hadn’t I done something?

I couldn’t understand my own reaction.

But I was thirteen years old, standing inside my school, confronted with something my brain had never expected to have to process.

And when he left, my friend came around the corner.

And I told her.

Immediately.

There was no carefully constructed story.

No period of contemplation.

No time to invent anything.

Something enormous had just happened to me and I told my friend because I didn’t know what else to do.

And she believed me.

Straight away.

That matters to me even now.

She was another child.

She didn’t ask me why I had been there.

She didn’t ask whether I might have misunderstood.

She saw her friend falling apart in front of her.

And she believed her.

That night, I told my mum.

Initially, I thought everything was going to be dealt with.

My parents were going into school.

They would speak to the head teacher.

The adults were taking over.

Good.

Because that’s what adults are there for when you’re thirteen.

Something terrible happens and you take it to the grown-ups.

They sort it out.

Except that isn’t quite what happened.

I went back into school.

Nobody seemed to have considered what it might feel like for me to walk around that building knowing I could come face-to-face with the man I had just accused of sexually assaulting me.

I went to lessons.

Walked the corridors.

Did school.

And waited.

Then came the questions.

Why had I been in that particular part of school?

Apparently, I shouldn’t have been there.

And I remember being completely unable to understand what the fuck that had to do with anything.

Yes.

Had I not been standing there, perhaps that particular incident would not have happened to me in that particular place at that particular moment.

But I hadn’t caused an adult to sexually assault me by standing in the wrong fucking part of my school.

I was thirteen.

I was at school.

Why were we talking about where I had been standing?

Then came something else.

He said he hadn’t been there.

According to what I was told, he said he had been somewhere else entirely.

Outside.

In the playground.

And suddenly it became:

His word against yours.

I couldn’t make sense of that either.

His word against mine?

Why did his denial somehow seem to cancel out my disclosure?

As far as I knew, there wasn’t some magical piece of evidence proving where either of us had been.

There was an adult saying one thing.

And a thirteen-year-old girl saying another.

But somehow I began to understand that his version carried a particular kind of weight.

I remember thinking:

But I’m a good student.

I don’t lie.

Why would I lie about this?

Why would I collapse crying into my friend’s arms?

Why would I go home and tell my mother?

Why would I invent something that had instantly changed the way I understood my own body?

I couldn’t make it logical.

I still can’t.

What About My Life?

The police became involved.

A plain-clothed police officer came to our house.

I sat downstairs with my parents while three adults discussed what might happen next.

And somehow the conversation became enormously concerned with what pursuing this might do to me.

I remember being told there could be newspapers.

That people might discover who I was.

That I might need to move schools.

That people would ask questions.

That things could become difficult.

I know something now that thirteen-year-old me didn’t: legal protections providing anonymity to complainants in specified sexual-offence cases were already in force in Britain at that time.

But I was thirteen.

I didn’t know anything about legislation.

I simply sat there listening while adults described a future in which reporting what somebody had done to me apparently had the potential to make my life considerably worse.

And then my mum said something to me that I have never forgotten.

I can’t claim to reproduce every word exactly after almost thirty years, but the meaning has stayed perfectly intact.

I needed to be absolutely certain.

Because this man had a life.

He had children.

And I wouldn’t want to ruin his life with an allegation that wasn’t completely true.

I remember being stunned.

Because I was somebody’s child too.

What about my life?

What about what had happened to my body?

What about the fact that I had gone into school understanding myself as a child and come home suddenly aware that an adult man could look at that child’s body and want something sexual from it?

Something disappeared that day.

I don’t mean my innocence in some romanticised, virginal sense.

It was something much more fundamental.

Until then, my body had simply been where I lived.

And suddenly I understood that somebody else might decide it was for them.

That is a fucking enormous thing for a thirteen-year-old girl to learn.

There was another part I couldn’t get past.

Hundreds of children attended that school.

Hundreds of girls.

Some younger than me.

Some older.

And even at thirteen, I remember thinking:

Surely I can’t be the only one.

Maybe I was.

I will never know.

But I couldn’t understand how everybody could simply carry on.

I wanted somebody to investigate.

I wanted somebody to find out.

If there were other girls, I wanted him stopped.

I wanted justice.

Instead, as I remember it, the adults around me decided that things would go no further.

I sat in conversations about my body without having any meaningful control over what happened next.

Nobody asked what thirteen-year-old me wanted.

And thirteen-year-old me wanted to nail the fucker.

I wanted somebody to say:

This matters.

You matter.

We’re going to find out what happened.

That isn’t the same as saying an allegation should automatically become a conviction.

It isn’t saying evidence doesn’t matter.

It isn’t saying due process doesn’t matter.

I understand now, as an adult, that allegations have to be investigated and criminal guilt has to be proved.

But there is an enormous difference between:

We may struggle to prove what happened.

and making somebody feel:

We don’t believe you.

A child should never have to discover that difference alone.

Believe Her

Perhaps this is why the words believe women land so deeply with me.

Believe her.

Believe her enough to listen before looking for the loophole.

Believe her enough not to begin with:

Why were you there?

Believe her enough not to search immediately for the thing she might have done differently.

Believe her enough not to make your first concern the future of the person she has accused.

Believe her enough to keep her safe while you establish what happened.

Believe her enough to investigate.

Taking a woman seriously does not require abandoning evidence.

Taking her seriously is where looking for the evidence should begin.

The Woman I Became

Years later, I ended up working with women.

I trained in domestic abuse awareness.

I delivered Pat Craven’s Freedom Programme to women who were living with domestic abuse or trying to understand relationships they had survived.

Many of the women I worked with had experienced sexual violence too.

Different women.

Different experiences.

Different ways of surviving them.

Once, one of my clients called me while she was being attacked.

I could hear what was happening.

I kept her talking.

I contacted the police.

And I stayed there, on that line, listening to another human being being harmed and trying to get help to her.

I remember that too.

Perhaps none of this is accidental.

I have an enormous sense of justice.

Sometimes probably an inconvenient one.

But I know where at least some of it came from.

It came from being thirteen years old and desperately wanting an adult to say:

This isn’t right, and I’m going to do something.

Then I Became Their Mum

Now I have daughters.

And that changes everything again.

Because I know too much to be completely relaxed about the world they’re walking into.

But I refuse to make them frightened of it.

That is the balance I am constantly trying to find.

How do I teach my daughters to be safe without teaching them to be scared?

I trained as a Sexological Bodyworker, so bodies aren’t mysterious things in our house.

We use the correct words.

Vulva.

Vagina.

Penis.

We use playful family words too because bodies can be funny and ordinary and human.

But my girls know the actual names for the parts of their bodies.

I am a stickler for it.

They know bodily autonomy.

They know their bodies belong to them.

We talk about consent in ways appropriate for their ages.

And we will keep talking.

It isn’t one excruciating conversation when they turn thirteen.

It is an ongoing commitment.

The conversations started when they were little and they will change as they change.

My husband and I talk to them about bodies.

Sex.

Relationships.

Marriage.

Friendships.

Boundaries.

What good people feel like.

What a good friendship looks like.

What it means to be a good friend.

What it means to be a good sister.

And what it means when somebody repeatedly treats you badly.

They have watched me end friendships when people have hurt me or continually failed to treat me with the respect I expect.

I’ve been honest with them about why.

Because I want my daughters to understand something women sometimes learn far too late:

Nobody is entitled to access to you forever.

Not because you’ve known them for years.

Not because they love you.

Not because they apologise.

Not because leaving might hurt their feelings.

You can leave.

You can change your mind.

You can decide somebody doesn’t get to be close to you anymore.

And then there is physical safety.

When I discovered I was having daughters, I was determined they would learn something that could help them protect themselves.

Hallie does jujitsu.

She is bloody brilliant at it.

She flies through her belts, regularly comes home having been best in class, and her instructor has even talked about her potentially teaching one day.

Nell hated jujitsu.

Fair enough.

We will find her something else.

Another martial art. Another discipline. Something she enjoys that helps her feel strong, grounded and capable inside her own body.

I want both of my daughters to have that.

But here’s the bit I hate admitting.

Hallie could earn every belt available to her.

Nell could become astonishing at whatever she eventually chooses.

They could know every correct word for every part of their anatomy.

They could understand consent perfectly.

They could have brilliant friends.

They could stay together.

They could never leave one another.

They could follow every piece of advice I have ever given them.

And somebody could still hurt them.

That is the part that makes me fucking furious.

Because look at how much work we put into preparing girls.

Cover your drink.

Stay with your friends.

Don’t walk home alone.

Text me when you get there.

Text me when you’re leaving.

Share your location.

Watch your sister.

Watch your friend.

Trust your instincts.

Learn self-defence.

Don’t get too drunk.

Don’t go somewhere alone.

Don’t leave your friend behind.

Don’t get in that car.

Don’t go upstairs.

Don’t trust the wrong person.

Safety in numbers.

We give girls an entire fucking curriculum on how not to be assaulted.

And I keep wondering:

Where is the equivalent curriculum for everybody else?

Jane Doe

According to a civil lawsuit filed in September 2026, a former Cornell University student identified publicly as Jane Doe alleges that seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity sexually assaulted her while she was incapacitated during an hours-long incident at the fraternity house in October 2024. The allegations are being contested: attorneys for accused men have denied wrongdoing. A criminal investigation that had previously been closed has now been reopened by the Tompkins County District Attorney, who has said the case will be presented to a grand jury. (The Washington Post)

And then there is the group chat.

The civil complaint describes a Snapchat group called “Chi Phi Actives.” Reporting on the lawsuit describes messages allegedly sent during the incident, including one advertising a woman upstairs to other fraternity members. (The Cornell Daily Sun)

And that is where I keep returning to numbers.

I have seen the figure 57 reported in connection with that group chat.

I don’t know how many people saw every message as it arrived.

I don’t know what every individual knew.

I don’t know how many understood what was allegedly happening upstairs.

Those distinctions matter.

But something about that number has lodged itself inside me.

Because I keep wondering:

Where was the person prepared to break ranks?

Where Are the Men?

There is something else bothering me about everything I’ve watched this week.

Where are the men?

I want to be fair here.

I have seen men talking about Jane Doe.

I have seen men expressing anger and disgust.

There are men speaking.

But from where I am standing — from what has reached me, from what I have watched and read and scrolled through — I haven’t seen anything approaching the male uproar I want to see.

And perhaps that’s what I’m waiting for.

Male uproar.

I want to see men fucking furious about this too.

I want to see men sharing the videos.

I want to see men talking to other men.

I want fathers talking to sons.

Men talking to their friends.

Men challenging other men.

And I could say I want fathers to imagine their daughters.

Brothers to imagine their sisters.

Husbands to imagine their wives.

But actually, fuck that.

A woman should not have to belong to a man before her humanity becomes relevant.

Jane Doe doesn’t have to be your daughter.

She doesn’t have to be your sister.

She doesn’t have to be your wife.

She’s a human being.

That should be enough.

I want men to understand that sexual violence isn’t a women’s issue that women should discuss amongst ourselves.

Women already talk to each other.

We know.

We tell each other which streets we don’t walk down.

We tell each other which men made us uncomfortable.

We send the I’m home text.

We share our locations.

We watch each other’s drinks.

We accompany each other to toilets.

We quietly ask:

Are you okay?

We know.

I want to hear the conversation happening somewhere else.

Between men.

In pubs.

At work.

At universities.

In changing rooms.

In group chats.

Between fathers and sons.

Between friends.

I want the man who hears his mate say something disgusting about a woman to make the atmosphere awkward.

Ruin the fucking joke.

Be the boring bastard who says:

That’s not funny.

I want him to notice the woman who is too intoxicated to protect herself.

I want him to ask where her friends are.

I want him to understand that none of my business stops being an adequate response when another human being might be in danger.

I want men to understand that challenging another man isn’t a betrayal of men.

Sometimes it is the most decent thing a man can do.

Because this cannot continually be women talking to women about what men must not do to us.

Women cannot dismantle this culture by talking only to each other.

I Want Change

But actually, I want more than male uproar.

I want change.

Because outrage that lasts for the length of a news cycle isn’t enough.

Sharing Jane Doe’s story isn’t enough.

Sharing this article isn’t enough.

Writing I am Jane Doe isn’t enough.

Me filling my Facebook feed with another fifty fucking videos isn’t enough.

I want something to be different the next time.

I don’t want to look at a number like 57 and wonder how many opportunities there might have been for somebody to realise something was wrong.

I want the next group chat to be different.

I want somebody to say:

What the fuck do you mean?

Where is she?

Is she okay?

I want somebody to get up.

I want somebody to go looking.

I want somebody to call for help.

I want somebody to take the phone out of his mate’s hand and say:

What the FUCK are you doing?

I want the social consequence of challenging your friends to become smaller than the moral consequence of abandoning another human being.

I want legislation that protects people from sexual violence rather than protecting those who perpetrate it.

I want boys to grow up knowing that loyalty does not mean protecting your mates from the consequences of hurting somebody.

I want institutions to understand that safeguarding does not mean managing the person who speaks.

It means acting.

Because I have already lived the alternative.

I know what happens when a girl speaks and the adults around her become paralysed by consequences.

What will happen to her?

What will happen to him?

Can we prove it?

What will people say?

What if everybody finds out?

Meanwhile, somewhere underneath all those questions is a human being screaming:

Will somebody please just fucking do something?

And One More Woman

Before I come back to my daughters, there is somebody else I want to acknowledge.

Cereese Qusba.

A student journalist at The Cornell Daily Sun who reportedly spent almost two years pursuing Jane Doe’s story.

Twenty-three months.

She kept asking questions.

She built a relationship with Jane Doe and her lawyer.

She kept reporting.

And when Jane Doe filed her lawsuit, Qusba and her student newspaper were there to tell the story.

There is something about that I find incredibly moving.

Because this entire article is about what happens when somebody says something has happened to them — and what the people around them choose to do next.

Some people look away.

Some people decide it isn’t their business.

Some people worry about consequences.

Some people move on.

And some people keep asking questions.

So thank you, Cereese Qusba.

And thank you to the student journalists at The Cornell Daily Sun who kept reporting when this story could so easily have disappeared.

Journalism matters.

Listening matters.

Refusing to let somebody’s story quietly vanish matters.

Sometimes change begins because one person is prepared to keep saying:

No. We’re not finished with this yet.

I don’t know Jane Doe.

I don’t know what happened inside that fraternity house beyond what she alleges and what is now being investigated.

I don’t know what she remembers.

I don’t know what she has forgotten.

I don’t know what her body remembers when her mind doesn’t want to.

And I will not insult her by pretending that because something happened to me at thirteen, I therefore understand her experience.

I don’t.

Our stories are not the same.

But I know something about disclosing something that happened to your body and then watching other people decide what happens next.

I know something about questions.

I know something about wondering why another person’s denial appears to weigh more heavily than your disclosure.

I know something about wanting people to stop looking at you as the problem that needs managing.

And when I see people saying:

I am Jane Doe

I understand what I think many of them mean.

Not:

Her experience happened to me exactly.

But:

I recognise something here.

The fear.

The questions.

The anger.

The systems.

The calculation of how much speaking might cost you.

The knowledge that sometimes what happened isn’t even the end of it.

Sometimes what happens afterwards becomes another thing you have to survive.

Safety in Numbers

And so I come back to my daughters.

Stay together.

Stick together.

Look after each other.

Don’t leave your sister.

Safety in numbers.

I’m not going to stop saying it.

There is value in staying with people you trust.

There is value in friends watching out for one another.

But I understand the phrase differently now.

Because numbers alone don’t protect anybody.

A room full of people can still be dangerous.

A friendship group can still be dangerous.

A school can still be dangerous.

A university can still be dangerous.

A workplace can still be dangerous.

A family can still be dangerous.

What creates safety isn’t simply the number of human beings standing nearby.

It is the kind of human beings they are.

Safety is in character.

The friend who believes you.

The person who notices something isn’t right.

The boy who tells his mates to stop.

The man who refuses to participate.

The woman who comes looking for her friend.

The stranger who calls for help.

The person prepared to be called boring, dramatic, difficult, a grass, a snitch, oversensitive or whatever other pathetic little word gets thrown at somebody who disrupts the group.

The person who breaks ranks.

Those are the people I want surrounding my daughters.

And those are the people I want my daughters to become.

I will teach them bodily autonomy.

I will teach them consent.

I will teach them the correct names for their bodies.

I will teach them to trust themselves.

I will teach them that they can leave.

I will find them ways to feel strong inside their bodies.

I will tell them they can phone me at three o’clock in the morning from anywhere on this planet and I will come.

I will teach them to stay together.

I will do everything within my power to give them the tools to protect themselves.

But everybody else has a fucking job to do too.

Raise boys who understand consent.

Challenge your friends.

Believe disclosures enough to take them seriously.

Intervene.

Ask the uncomfortable question.

Ruin the joke.

Break ranks.

Get help.

Do something.

Because I don’t want my daughters growing up in a world that simply gives girls increasingly sophisticated instructions for surviving the same fucking problem.

I don’t want another generation of women to become experts in protecting drinks, sharing locations, spotting exits, reading rooms, managing men’s behaviour and getting each other home safely.

I want change.

I want the problem itself to change.

So perhaps I have been getting one thing wrong all these years.

There isn’t safety simply in numbers.

There is safety in the people within them.

And when something is wrong, I want more of those people willing to step out of the crowd.

To speak.

To believe.

To act.

And to fucking do something.