Summary: This essay explores the moral ambiguities of the alleged Cornell rape case, questioning whether bystanders could reasonably have recognised a crime was occurring. It challenges the BBC’s AntiSocial podcast for judging youthful behaviour by mature moral standards while overlooking the complexities of sexual freedom, personal responsibility, and risk awareness. It also questions the consistency of contemporary moral judgments, contrasting the scrutiny of individual men with what the author sees as insufficient accountability in European grooming-gang scandals.
The ‘Cornell 7’ alleged rape case is raising moral criticism of fellow students receiving messages about joining the assault on Jane Doe but doing nothing to halt it. This involves the ‘bystander effect’, that is, diffusion of responsibility, pluralistic ignorance, and evaluation apprehension that arose out of the 1964 Kitty Genovese murder case.
Two issues arise out of the BBC’s AntiSocial podcast about the subject. Firstly, it ignored the instinctual nature of youth where wisdom, sympathy and control are secondary to desire and participation. It raises issues of the is–ought problem. What “is”, as far as those contacted knew, was that a woman was having sex with a number of men and that she was available for others to join in.
The moral perspective that the podcast draws, the “ought”, is that the men invited to join in should have countenanced against them having sex with Doe. The conundrum is that the assumption that Doe was or was not an active and willing participant was unknown to the invitees, so they could not make a moral judgment. If they knew it was rape, the chances are that these men would have taken action to counter it, but they didn’t know, so didn’t act. In more general terms, men wish for inconsequential sex, and the offer made by the Cornell 7 messenger granted this wish, whether or not it was acted upon.
Subsequent evidence clouds the “rape” status of the allegations and of Doe’s personal responsibility. She pursued drunkenness even though underage and happily engaged in drug-taking. Messages and evidence from her and the seven accused weaken her case. I would imagine, however, that this would not affect the outcome of the prosecution.
The second issue is that little or no blame was placed on Doe for her personal responsibility to avoid situations where entrapment can occur. She was voluntarily drunk, drugged, and an active and willing participant in the evening’s events. Young people make mistakes and have to live with the results. Blaming others for the consequences is irresponsible and supporting Doe in her blame-shifting infantilises her. The risks she took reflect an effect of the peace dividend, 80 years without war imbuing women with a sense of power and security, and men with a less certain role and reduced responsibilities. Women have the opportunity to adopt men’s sexual freedom as of right, and female safety is ill-considered in times of lesser threat. At the same time, there appears to be pressure on males to conform to female expectations, but not the obverse, of females to be fully aware of male expectations.
The civilised response of those invited to join, such as expected by armchair moralists, is learned through individuation, parenthood, and the social expectations of maturity. None of this responsibility was applied to the hundreds of Europe’s Muslim rape gangs with their hundreds of thousands of victims.
The essay’s title is from Richard Le Gallienne’s translation of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, about a young woman’s indifference to the effect she has on men.
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