Sexual Violence, Accountability, and the Lessons We Teach

I have spent more than thirty years sitting with people whose lives have been altered by trauma.

Some experiences leave wounds that gradually become integrated into the story of a life. Others divide life into a before and an after. Sexual violence can do that.

I have seen how its effects can move far beyond the event itself. A person may struggle with trust, intimacy, sleep, shame, fear, dissociation, relationships, sexuality, and the basic experience of feeling safe inside their own body. Sometimes the person knows exactly why they are struggling.

Sometimes the effects surface years later, woven into anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use, difficulty with relationships, or a persistent feeling that the world is no longer a safe place.

This is part of why I have been thinking so much about the allegations that have emerged from Cornell University.

A former Cornell student, identified publicly as Jane Doe, filed a civil lawsuit in September alleging that she was drugged and gang raped by seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity in October 2024. The allegations are disturbing. They are also allegations contained in an ongoing civil case, and the Tompkins County District Attorney has now reopened the criminal investigation. No decision has yet been made about whether criminal charges will be brought.

That distinction matters. Due process matters. We should be capable of taking allegations of sexual violence seriously without abandoning the principle that allegations must be investigated fairly. But something else matters here: accountability.

What Happens After Harm?

So what do we know about how Cornell seems to have handled the allegations? The university conducted its own Title IX investigation, and according to the civil complaint, students found responsible for violations received disciplinary sanctions, with some reportedly permitted to submit reflective essays as mitigating evidence. It is the latter detail that has stayed with me. 

I am a psychologist, so perhaps it’s  not surprising that I believe deeply in reflection. I ask people to write about their past, to reflect on EMDR sessions and psychedelic journeys. I ask them to examine their behavior. I believe people can change. I have spent my career believing that human beings are more complicated than the worst thing they have ever done.

But reflection is not a substitute for consequences.

In fact, meaningful reflection often becomes possible precisely because we have been required to confront the consequences of our actions.

There is a version of compassion that becomes confused with protecting people from discomfort.

Clinically, I don't think that is compassion at all. Growth sometimes requires sitting with painful truths about ourselves – so called-shadow material: I caused harm. I crossed a boundary. Someone else suffered because of something I did. I cannot undo it. What am I going to do with that knowledge now?

If we rush too quickly to soften those truths, we may deprive someone of an essential opportunity for moral development.

Accountability Is Not the Opposite of Compassion

This is where conversations about sexual violence sometimes become strangely polarized. We are asked, implicitly or explicitly, to choose between compassion and punishment, rehabilitation and accountability, believing survivors and preserving due process.

I don't think those choices are always necessary. Accountability does not have to mean vengeance. Consequences do not have to mean that a human being is irredeemable. And believing in the possibility of rehabilitation does not require minimizing the seriousness of harm.

When a young adult causes serious harm, one of the most important things the adults and institutions around that person can do is refuse to make the harm smaller than it was. That is not cruelty. It may be one of the more important forms of care we can offer.

Because what does someone learn when an institution repeatedly cushions them from the consequences of their behavior? What happens when preserving a future becomes more important than reckoning with what happened to another person's future?

Universities are not only places where young adults learn chemistry, literature, engineering, psychology, or economics. They are places where people are still developing identities, values, relationships, and an understanding of what it means to live in community with other human beings.

Consequences teach too.

And Survivors Are Watching

Institutional responses to sexual violence never affect only the people directly involved. Other survivors are watching. Students who have never experienced sexual assault are watching. Young men are watching. Young women are watching.

They are learning what their community considers serious. They are learning whether reporting harm is likely to lead to meaningful action. They are learning whether institutional language about safety and respect is reflected in institutional behavior.

Cornell's own data make this particularly difficult to dismiss as an isolated concern. In its 2025 survey, 35 percent of undergraduate women who responded reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact during their time at Cornell, compared with 23 percent in 2023.

Among Greek-affiliated undergraduate women who responded, the figure was 52 percent.

Cornell's task force appropriately cautioned that the 2025 undergraduate response rate was only 13 percent, which limits how confidently those percentages can be generalized to the entire student population.

Even with that important limitation, Cornell itself has described sexual assault as a serious and persistent campus problem.

Those numbers should stop us. They tell us something about the environment in which an individual case occurs.

Trauma Has a Long Memory

One of the hardest things for people who have not experienced significant trauma to understand is how long an event can continue to live in the nervous system.

The rest of the world moves on. Semesters end. Students graduate. News stories disappear from the front page. Institutions announce new committees and initiatives.

The body may not move on nearly so quickly. A smell, a room, a sexual encounter, an intoxicated feeling, a particular kind of touch, even the sensation of losing control can suddenly bring the past into the present. Survivors sometimes spend years learning that they can inhabit their bodies again without constantly anticipating danger.

That does not mean recovery is impossible. Far from it. I have witnessed extraordinary healing. But healing should never be used as an excuse to underestimate the original harm. And when an institution responds inadequately to a traumatic event, there can be another layer of injury: the experience of discovering that the people or systems expected to protect you do not seem to understand the magnitude of what happened.

We Can Hold More Than One Truth

I believe deeply in people's capacity to change. My entire profession rests, in some sense, on that belief.

I also believe in compassion. But compassion without accountability can become avoidance. We can care about a survivor's healing and still believe in due process. We can insist upon meaningful consequences while refusing to define another human being forever by the worst thing they have done. We can believe in rehabilitation while recognizing that rehabilitation begins with an honest encounter with harm.

And we can ask universities to do more than protect themselves institutionally. We can ask them to help young people learn what it means to be accountable to one another.

Cornell has created a Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault and has begun implementing recommendations addressing prevention, education, communication, physical safety and campus culture. But programs and policies cannot substitute for what happens when an actual human being says, This happened to me.

Those are the moments when institutional values stop being words on a website. They become choices.

As you consider these questions of harm and accountability, you might pause with two questions:

What do we teach survivors—and those who cause harm—when consequences do not reflect the seriousness of what occurred?

How can we hold both compassion and accountability without using one to diminish the other?

As a psychologist, I know something about what can happen after terrible things occur. People can heal. People who have caused harm can change. Lives can take directions we could not have imagined in the immediate aftermath.

But real healing rarely begins by pretending that something serious was not serious. It begins by telling the truth about harm, allowing it to matter, and accepting that actions have consequences.

Sometimes accountability is not the opposite of compassion. Sometimes it is where compassion begins.

Heidi J. Dalzell, PsyD, is a licensed clinical psychologist with more than 30 years of experience working with trauma, eating disorders, grief, and other complex psychological concerns. She is an EMDR Certified Therapist and EMDR Consultant and the author of Midlife Eating Disorders: Body Image, Trauma, and Recovery. Dr. Dalzell practices through Sedona Integrative Therapy and Lambertville New Hope Integrative Therapy, where her work integrates evidence-based psychotherapy with attention to the deeper emotional, relational, and psychospiritual dimensions of healing.