My 13-year-old asked me about the Cornell rape case – this is what I told her

Earlier this week, my social media feed was awash with the horrifying allegations about seven male Cornell University students drugging and raping a student at a party in 2024. The investigation was reopened recently after the female student filed a lawsuit against Cornell, an Ivy League university in New York State. All of the men named in the lawsuit deny the allegations made against them. Of course, none of what is alleged has been tested in court, but nonetheless the story has kindled a fire of debate. We all know how social media works: the more of the story I absorbed, the more detail was put in front of me. The WhatsApp group with 57 men who took no action to help; the offer of “free pussy”. Each post revealed more terrifying details. I felt angry. Sad. Then angry again. As I lingered, I was shown yet more posts about a man who allegedly masturbated on a plane next to a woman. My algorithm had decided that today would be all about male violence. Shorts I talked to my partner Paul about it. He was angry, but I always think men are never triggered in quite the same way as women. Women have lived through these situations and felt the danger. One report estimates that 3.2 million women in England and Wales experienced domestic abuse, sexual assault or stalking in the year ending March 2025. It’s not that uncommon. Given all this, by the time my eldest daughter, 13-year-old Rae, returned from school I felt hopeless. How did I talk about this to her? I knew she’d have heard about it already via her phone or friend’s phones. How did I help her make sense of it? I wanted to tell her to hide in a cave with no Wi-Fi but I also want her, and my seven-year-old daughter Greta, to feel confident, empowered and know the risks. I don’t want them to make the same mistakes I did in terms of not being able to say no or feeling like I owed a boy something just because he’d been nice to me. I have previously talked about sex with Rae, not in detail, but I’ve always asked her to come to me if she has questions. A lot of chats happen between her and her mates, just as they did when I was younger. And of course she gets embarrassed and squirms when it’s me telling her about it. With my younger daughter it’s easier as we haven’t reached that stage (when you have two kids you experiment with the first one to see what works, and hopefully learn how to do better next time). So, later that evening, I decided to talk to Rae about Cornell. She said she’d heard most of the details already but I held back from oversharing too much. We talked about consent, of never feeling under pressure, how you might change your mind and feel differently from one moment to the next, clear boundaries and of how we needed to “trust our guts” if we had a bad feeling. I told her a few of the things that happened with boys in my teens, mainly driven by sexual aggression on the boys’ side, and me being too drunk to judge the situation I was in. Rae is often aghast when I tell her about how things used to be. There was a lot of misinformation back then too (I joked that I thought you could get STDs by sitting on a public toilet seat). She’s much more mature than I was at the same age. I know that I can be guilty of sharing too much in an effort to give her the information she needs. But we also need to be having these conversations. Both daughters have grown up in a time where negative news about men is everywhere. Toxic masculinity and the manosphere has become a key reference point (we watched the Louis Theroux documentary together a few months ago). Rae doesn’t have a negative perception of boys in general, but she definitely knows about Andrew Tate. She joined a feminist club at school last year which I thought was really good as there were older girls she could talk to. My girls are lucky to have positive male role models in their life too so they can see that it’s definitely not all men (their Dad, Grandad, teachers, activity leaders and friends). But I want my girls to trust their instincts, and know that not everyone has their best interests at heart. People might think it’s too young to be having these conversations, that “sexual violence didn’t happen in our day” but in the 80s I was happily sending letters to “Jim’ll Fix It”. The violence was happening, we just didn’t talk about it. It was left unchecked. Yes, you don’t want your kid to be scared to death but they need to be wary of what happens in the world. I was relatively green when I was growing up. I didn’t realise that some boys and men were to be actively avoided. I couldn’t see the signs. I felt like I had to be pleasing even to men who creeped me out. At school, we had teachers who were creepy and we never reported them. Instead, we joked about ways to escape. For example, one teacher gave me a lift home and then took me to a local bar – I was 14 and he was in his late forties. We got one rudimentary self-defence class at school where we were told to “hit potential assailants with a rolled-up newspaper in the Adam’s apple”. I carried a newspaper with me for weeks and then decided that Impulse body spray would provide better protection. Many women who grew up in that era still tend to carry their keys with one poking between their fingers. After my chat with Rae, I spoke to psychotherapist and author Jennifer Cox about the best advice to give parents who are trying to navigate talking to their kids about Cornell. In particular, I asked about how to define consent – simply. She told me to say: “Consent means that everyone gets to choose what happens to their own body. We need to be able to say yes or no, or to change our mind at any point. An unconscious person cannot give consent.” Cox emphasises that it is not the fault of the person who has taken drugs or got drunk. “Drugs or alcohol can make clear decision-making more difficult.” This is something that I have told Rae because I want her to be aware that you don’t always have the capability to stay true to what you want if you’re under the influence. Cox didn’t have a strong point of view on what is age-appropriate in terms of conversations, and for parents to make that call, but I feel that if children are already talking about it at school (and they are, certainly in secondary school) then you need to start that talk and not just pretend it’s not happening. I’d rather that my kids talked about it with me than got misguided advice from their peers who also don’t know much. I know my friends with sons are also having these conversations this week. One friend who has two boys told me: “I’m using Cornell as an opportunity to talk about consent, and how clear they need to be when they’re with a partner. I have also said that this [case] is exceptional, even though it doesn’t feel that way because we’re bombarded by these stories. I don’t want them to carry the shame of those boys. It wouldn’t be fair. They have to see that there are choices when they get older.” Some parents may think that it’s too early to have these kind of conversations but when our news and social media feeds are swamped with stories of male sexual violence, we need to ensure we can talk about it. Unfortunately, that’s something we have to keep doing until it stops happening.