The impossible arithmetic of staying safe, and the places women thought we could stop calculating.
I live on the ground floor, which means that every night before I go to bed after not leaving the apartment all day, there is a small part of my brain assigned to security. Sometimes the doorbell rings unexpectedly and I hear myself gasp, actually hear the sound leave my mouth without even thinking whether or not there is actually anything to be frightened of. I look towards the door, wonder whether whoever is outside has already peeped through my window, try to remember whether I ordered something, whether someone said they were coming by, whether I should answer. Usually it is a delivery driver or someone at the wrong flat and, within thirty seconds, life returns to normal. My body has already done the work.
Leaving home gives it more to do. My homegirl and I sometimes play rock, paper, scissors to decide who is going to do the supermarket run after tennis because the journey involves the usual gauntlet of men outside, the incessant catcalling and comments on our tennis skirts, occasionally accompanied by someone deciding that our skirts are short enough to greenlight his move into our physical space. Neither of us is frightened of buying groceries; sometimes neither of us feels like managing men on the way there. So two grown women sit in the car forming the shape of rocks, papers, and scissors to determine who can endure being harassed today.
I love a solo beach flex. I love the particular indulgence of arriving with my new favourite book and having nobody else’s hunger, boredom or desire to leave determine how long I can float aimlessly in the water. More often than not, a woman sitting by herself seems to acquire a different meaning once somebody notices the absence of a male presence. The last time I went alone, a man came over and asked whether I was by myself and then whether I wanted company. I said no politely, because saying no has its own strange etiquette when you have no idea how a man will respond: friendly enough that he does not feel humiliated, without smiling so much that friendliness becomes interest; firm enough that he understands, without becoming rude enough to provoke him. I stayed for a while after he walked away because immediately packing my things would let him know he had frightened me, and eventually, when I did decide to leave, my brain began its familiar sprint—where did he go, did he come alone, can he see me packing, how far away did I leave the car, get the keys out now because rummaging through a handbag makes you slow, is somebody behind me, don’t suddenly start walking faster, don’t keep turning around, you checked five seconds ago, keep moving, get to the car, open the door, get inside.
The entire calculation took place during a short walk across a beach on a day when, technically, nothing happened to me. I got home safely. My body still spent those minutes preparing for violence, pumping out the little instructions required to avoid it. I had performed them so automatically that I probably would not have remembered any of it by the following week.
That is what vigilance becomes after enough years. It settles into the body until fear begins to feel more like competence. Watch your drink, check the licence plate, text when you get there, share your location, keep your phone charged, know where the exits are, don’t leave your girlfriend behind. Then come the calculations that cannot fit neatly within any one equation: the sort of sliding scale of how drunk is he, how drunk am I, how many people are left in the room, was that comment a joke, did his hand stay there slightly too long, am I imagining the change in his tone, how firmly can I say no, how politely should I say it, how much friendliness is safe, how much friendliness will be misunderstood? With decades of practice, I have become very good at this.
Growing up in Jamaica, my male friends gave me some relief from having to be quite so good at it. Going out with them meant I could drink a little more, stay out a little later, loosen my grip on the evening because somebody I trusted was paying attention. Two of my closest male friends used to drive behind me after nights out and sit outside until they saw me get through my front door, and I remember the physical ease of knowing that, for those few minutes, I did not have to watch because somebody who loved me was watching for me. I do the same thing now when I drop my girlfriends home, day or night, sitting outside until the door opens and they disappear inside before I drive away. It is an ordinary ritual of friendship, so ordinary that I had never really interrogated what we were promising one another. I am here. Get inside. I won’t leave until I know you’re okay.
This is what I thought of when I read the allegations made by a former Cornell University student who says that, at twenty years old, she went to the Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2024 to spend time with a man she considered a friend. According to the civil lawsuit she filed this month, she had been drinking before she arrived. She alleges that the men gave her more alcohol, pressured her to take what they told her was ketamine, and that seven fraternity members sexually assaulted her over several hours. These remain allegations being litigated in civil court; at least one defendant has denied the allegations against him, and prosecutors have since reopened the criminal investigation.
She knew the man she had gone there to see. Whatever informal risk assessment we perform when deciding whether to be alone with someone had presumably already happened, accumulated through all the ordinary encounters from which trust is built. I know him. He is my friend. I have been around him before.
For most of my life, those were the things I counted as evidence that I was safe with someone.
According to the lawsuit, during the alleged assault a message was sent to a fraternity Snapchat group describing her as “free pussy” upstairs. Her lawyer says 57 men were in that group chat, and CBS subsequently obtained video of the conversation, including a later message asking whether the “shop” was still open and receiving an affirmative response. Seven men are accused of physically assaulting her, while dozens were reportedly present in the digital space into which her body had been advertised, creating a much wider set of questions about who saw the message, who understood what was being offered, who responded, who went upstairs and who knew enough about what was happening to recognise that somebody needed to intervene.
The language itself is almost brutally efficient. She did not require a name or a photograph because the person attached to the body had become irrelevant to the transaction being proposed. Free pussy: a vagina upstairs, apparently available for whoever wanted some. Contained nowhere in those two words is the human being who would still inhabit that body the next morning, carrying the possibility of pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections, medical examinations, psychological trauma, PTSD, fear, memory and whatever it takes to return to a body that seven men are accused of raping, knowing it had allegedly been offered to 57.
Every man who received the message and understood that “free” meant he could come upstairs too.
I am wary of the comfort offered by imagining men who commit sexual violence as recognisably monstrous. The evidence has repeatedly demonstrated that a man can be funny, clever, educated and well liked; he can have a girlfriend, female friends and women who would swear they have always felt safe around him. He may have driven one of them home from a party the week before. Those qualities often become part of what makes harm possible: charm creates trust, popularity provides social cover, and a history of being “a good guy” gives everyone, including the woman who knows him, reason to believe she is safe.
American college campuses provide plenty of evidence of how ordinary the risk has become. The Association of American Universities’ 2019 campus-climate survey included more than 181,000 students across 33 universities and found that 13% of respondents reported nonconsensual sexual contact by physical force or inability to consent since enrolling. More recent research using nationally representative National Crime Victimization Survey data found that, during 2015–2022, the six-month prevalence of sexual violence among college-enrolled women aged 18–24 was 74% higher than among women of the same age who were not enrolled, with women living on campus experiencing approximately three times the rate reported by commuter students.
Cornell has been collecting its own evidence. Its 2025 Survey of Sexual Assault and Related Misconduct found that 35% of undergraduate women who responded reported experiencing sexual assault during their time at Cornell, although the university cautions that the undergraduate response rate was only 13%, which limits how confidently that estimate can be generalised. Among Greek-affiliated undergraduate women who responded, the figure was 52%, compared with 29% among women who were not Greek-affiliated, and among women who reported experiencing sexual assault, 86% said the perpetrator was another Cornell student.
That 86% makes campus a particularly complicated place in which to recover because the person who harmed you does not disappear when the assault ends. He may still eat in the cafeteria, take classes in the same building, attend the same parties, know the same people and walk the same routes home. A university is simultaneously school, workplace, social life and, for many students, home, compressing almost every part of daily life into a few square miles shared with the person you have accused.
The woman in this case reported the alleged assault to Cornell University Police in November 2024, after which Cornell temporarily suspended Chi Phi and the seven students named in her complaint while disciplinary proceedings followed. Her lawyer says two were ultimately expelled and that other sanctions included suspensions, workshops and essays; Cornell has disputed the suggestion that essays were used as the sole punishment for involvement and says federal privacy law prevents it from disclosing individual disciplinary outcomes.
Consistent with the account of the Cornell student, she wanted to return home to recover, her parents sought reimbursement from Cornell and, when it was not provided, she remained on campus for at least a semester alongside the men she had accused. If substantiated, the practical implications are grim. Reporting an assault would still leave her needing breakfast the next morning, still needing to attend class and use the library, still moving through a campus populated by the seven men she says assaulted her and by some of the men who were allegedly members of the 57-person group chat in which her body had been advertised.
Cornell’s own Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault had already spent months examining the environment in which all of this allegedly occurred. Its March 2026 report describes rates of sexual assault at Cornell as “unacceptably high and persistent” and recommends interventions across prevention, consent education, fraternity and sorority life, reporting, accountability and the physical environment of campus. The report also uses the concept of “sexual geographies”, recognising that sexual experiences and safety are shaped by the spaces in which they occur.
There is a geography after sexual violence as well: the bedroom where it happened folded into the corridor outside it, the fraternity house into the dining hall where you might see him, the classroom where his friend sits three rows ahead, the path back to your dorm and every ordinary piece of campus that acquires a new piece of information your body now has to process. Cornell’s survey found that only 24% of women and 10% of men who experienced sexual assault contacted at least one programme or resource, with students who did not seek help citing, among other reasons, a belief that nothing would be done. Reporting therefore enters the same mental arithmetic as everything that came before it: what will happen, who will know, who will believe me, will my friends choose sides, will I have to keep telling the story, will I see him tomorrow, can I continue studying here, can I afford to leave?
Women are so often told that safety follows from good decision-making. If that is true, then there should be some combination of variables that gets us there. Start with location, time of day, alcohol consumption, distance from home, phone battery, transport, clothing, number of people present and whether somebody knows where you are; add how long you have known him, whether your friends know him, whether other women trust him, whether he has ever frightened you, whether he has protected you, whether he has driven you home safely, whether you have been drunk around him before, whether you have slept beside him without incident. Years of friendship become data, previous kindness becomes data, every uneventful night together becomes another data point suggesting that this person is safe.
The Cornell student says she went to see her friend, which means friendship now has to be recalibrated alongside everything else. The alleged 57-person group chat adds the probability that, if the person you trusted becomes dangerous, somebody around him will recognise what is happening and intervene. The institutional response adds another set of probabilities around reporting, being believed, disciplinary action, criminal investigation and whether you can continue to live or study in the same place afterwards.
Put all of it into the equation if you like:
Risk = location + alcohol + time + isolation + familiarity + previous behaviour + years of friendship + number of men present + probability of bystander intervention + probability of institutional action.
Give every variable a value and weight it according to the evidence. Add my ground-floor flat, the supermarket, the beach, the Uber, the bar, the walk to the car, the stranger, the acquaintance, the man who has been my friend for twenty years. Add the charged phone and shared location, the watched drink, the licence plate, the keys already in my hand, the carefully calibrated no, the friend waiting until I am through my front door. Keep adding until we have accounted for every instruction women have absorbed about how to prevent our own rape, as though perfect knowledge of our own behaviour could somehow predict another person’s choices. No calculation can give us that answer.
Women have spent generations being taught how to predict male violence, often by institutions built and run by men. Somehow, the impossible calculation became ours to solv
