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[upbeat music] This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current podcast. This next conversation deals with sexual assault. An alleged gang rape at Cornell University has ignited widespread outrage in the United States and beyond. Prosecutors have reopened the case of a woman who says she was sexually assaulted in 2024 at a fraternity house. The alleged victim, identified as Jane Doe, filed a lawsuit two weeks ago saying she was drugged and raped by seven members of a fraternity. She was 20 years old at the time, and in a screenshot included in her lawsuit, one of the men purportedly sends a message to the fraternity Snapchat group inviting others to join in. At the time, no charges were laid, and the men allegedly involved were allowed to write essays as part of their punishment. Two of those men were expelled from the school. The case has now ignited an international conversation about sexual assault, complicity, institutional accountability, and justice. Farah Khan is the CEO of Possibility Seeds, an organization dedicated to ending sexual harassment and assault in schools and the workplace. She also led the federally funded project Courage to Act, which began developing the first national framework to address and prevent gender-based violence at post-secondary institutions, and she's with me in our Toronto studio. Good morning.
Good morning.
When you first heard about this case, what went through your mind?
Anger, rage, and then grief. You know, there's a TikTok trend that, you know, 2016 was the best time-
Mm.
-right now, and 2016 was when Chanel Miller gave her Jane Doe statement after the sexual assault that Brock Turner committed against her. And here we are a decade later talking about another Ivy League school where these men committed... Sorry, I can't say that because we don't know, right? Um, these, this survivor named that men sexually assaulted her and made that report.
How do you understand the rage that has broadly followed this story? And it builds and builds and builds, right? And it's not just in the United States, and it's not just at Cornell, um, and it's not just among... H- how do you understand that?
I think right now we're in a time where we have been asking as women, as survivors, as organizations, for sexual violence to end, but instead what we see is it continuing to happen. And in this particular case, the way in which the events have been described-
Mm.
-is really concerning. It's concerning because we just went through a whole conversation about this in Canada around Hockey Canada, about gang rape, about sexual assault. And so when we're in this moment, many of us can
Episode notes
An alleged gang rape case at Cornell University is drawing international attention after a woman known as Jane Doe filed a civil lawsuit earlier this month against seven men accused of sexually assaulting her at a fraternity party in 2024. She is also suing Cornell, claiming the university failed to protect her. The case is bringing a spotlight to how pervasive rape culture is on university campuses. We hear from Farrah Khan, an award-winning gender justice advocate who works on sexual assault prevention in Canadian schools, about how something like this could have happened — and how we can change our education system to better protect students from sexual violence.