I am a sexual assault nurse examiner in Philadelphia. For the past 10 years, I have also studied how people heal after sexual harm, and I answer anonymous questions from survivors on Our Wave, a free online healing platform for people who have experienced violence. In both places, the question I hear most often is “Does this count?”
Cornell University’s Jane Doe spent three weeks asking herself that question.
Title IX records obtained by the New York Times show the sophomore, who says she was assaulted by multiple men at a fraternity house in October 2024, texting with some of the men she would later accuse.
According to the Times, two days after the party, she reassured one of them that none of the sexual stuff was illegal. Two days after that, she wrote that her reputation was destroyed and that all she could do was sleep and cry. She later told investigators that things shifted when she read an anonymous post online. She said it was the first time she had heard anyone say “that I wasn’t a whore and that I was assaulted.”
Those texts are now being used against her.
The Tompkins County, N.Y., district attorney declined to bring charges in 2024. He has since said his office never saw the transcript of her police interview, in which she reportedly said she was certain she had been raped, and he has reopened the case. The New York attorney general is also reviewing how Cornell handled it.
The legal process will decide what happened that night. As a nurse, I recognize the weeks that followed.
Healing after sexual harm rarely starts with the word rape. My research has followed the healing journeys of survivors across the globe, including hundreds here in Philadelphia. Survivors have taught us that there are multiple pathways people may move through as they heal. Two of the earliest are normalizing, when violence feels like just what happens, and minimizing, when a survivor knows something was wrong but insists it wasn’t that bad.
On campus, survivors often normalize and minimize because of what hookup culture has taught students to accept, so pressure, coercion, and sex with someone too drunk to consent can feel like just part of a night out.
People move back and forth between these pathways for months or years, and each one helps them get through the day. But our systems tend to treat whatever a survivor says during them as the whole story.
I first saw this as a student working at the University of Michigan’s sexual assault center. Women who came in late at night almost never started with the word rape. They usually started with “I’m probably being dramatic but …”
Jane Doe’s texts read like the normalizing and minimizing I have seen again and again in my research. Many survivors tell us they didn’t realize they had been sexually assaulted until after they had time to process. What helped survivors move forward was connection, and sometimes one supportive person was enough. For Jane Doe, it was a stranger online who finally called it assault. The way we respond to survivors really does matter.
At Our Wave, where I direct research and survivor support, survivors share their stories so others can see themselves in them and make sense of their own experiences.
The questions survivors send us show how often doubt comes first. When my team searched the nearly 1,000 questions submitted to our Q&A for the language of doubt, phrases like “does this count,” “am I being dramatic,” “it was my fault,” and “I froze,” we found it in about one in four.
Survivors are everywhere, but we do not always recognize their experience as survival, and survivors do not always recognize it in themselves. Perhaps that is why so many people have been posting “I am Jane Doe” this week. They see themselves in her story.
We ask survivors to make one big decision — whether to report — at the moment many are least able to make it. A survivor who is still minimizing what happened is not going to file a police report. She might read another survivor’s story at 2 a.m., ask an anonymous question, or come in for medical care and an exam, which she can have without going to the police.
Survivors need a menu of options that meets them where they are in their healing journey. Some need anonymous support first, like a hotline or an online Q&A. Some need medical care and evidence collection now, with the decision about reporting saved for later.
Some need a confidential campus advocate who won’t automatically open an investigation. Those who are ready need formal Title IX and criminal processes. And some want restorative options, in which the person who caused harm must take responsibility and face consequences outside the criminal legal system, such as losing campus housing or leadership roles.
More options can also mean more accountability. In the Cornell case, with no criminal charges, the university’s process was the only accountability available. One woman in my research said she wished her school had “more teeth.” In my experience, survivors who know they have options are more likely to come back when they are ready.
Philadelphia can lead on this.
We have dozens of colleges and universities, including Temple, Penn, Drexel, and La Salle, and our city’s rape crisis center, WOAR, already offers a restorative justice program, although recent funding cuts have threatened its sustainability. As faculty adviser to Students Activists Against Sexual Assault at Temple, I know students here are ready for this conversation. Our campuses should build the full menu, and every student should hear that they don’t have to be sure it counts before they ask for help.
Healing isn’t linear, and in my experience, naming isn’t, either. Jane Doe needed three weeks to find the word. That is common. To survivors who are still asking whether it counts, your story matters, and healing is possible.
Together, we can create a more supportive healing world for survivors, one where people are still listening, and options are still open when they get there.
Laura Sinko is an associate professor of nursing at Temple University’s College of Public Health, faculty adviser to Temple’s Students Activists Against Sexual Assault, a sexual assault nurse examiner in Philadelphia, and the director of research and survivor support at Our Wave.
