The Inheritance of Disbelief: Cornell – Epistemic Betrayal & Our Collective Responsibility to Keeping Each Other Safe
A woman gathers the courage to describe something that confused, diminished, or harmed her, perhaps after months or years of turning the experience over in her mind, consulting the people she trusts, and searching for language precise enough to hold what happened without enlarging or excusing it. When she finally speaks, the conversation, with an efficiency that would be impressive were it not so exhausting, sometimes pivots from the conduct she is describing to the apparent deficiencies of the woman describing it.
Is she certain? Has she considered another explanation? Is her account being framed through a lens of presumed emotionality before its evidence has been examined? Is she insufficiently detached, overly sensitive, or interpreting events in a manner that conflicts with what an institution, professional, or trusted authority has already concluded?
Careful questions belong in any responsible inquiry. But when skepticism is reflexively directed toward one speaker rather than applied consistently to competing accounts, it produces a remarkable inversion: the person reporting harm must first establish that she is competent to report it.
I wholeheartedly believe in reflective inquiry and the discipline of questioning our assumptions, including my own. Neither compassion nor trauma-informed practice requires us to accept every inference or mistake conviction for fact. They do, however, ask us to distribute skepticism more intelligently—to investigate circumstances without automatically treating the distress of the person describing them as evidence against her.
We have become fluent in the vocabulary of resilience, nervous-system regulation, boundaries, mindfulness, and self-compassion. These practices can offer meaningful support. Yet an uncomfortable question remains beneath our growing sophistication in the language of healing:
What becomes of self-trust when the social world to which a survivor returns continues to reproduce the conditions that made trusting herself so difficult?
If recovery involves rebuilding autonomy, discernment, and the capacity to trust meaningfully in the capacity to reclaim one's own life, our concern must extend beyond the strength of survivors to the trustworthiness of the environments in which they are attempting to heal.
Cornell and the Social Burden of Becoming Believable
The allegations involving a former Cornell University student, publicly identified as Jane Doe, and members of the Chi Phi fraternity have brought renewed attention to institutional responses to sexual violence.
Doe alleges that she was sexually assaulted in October 2024. On October 1, 2026, New York Governor Kathy Hochul appointed the Office of Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor to investigate the alleged assault. Cornell reports that its disciplinary proceedings resulted in sanctions including suspensions and expulsions, and that the Xi chapter of Chi Phi remains barred from campus. [1–2]
A special committee of Cornell's Board of Trustees has retained Sally Yates to lead an independent review of the university's sexual-misconduct practices, including its response to Doe's allegations. On October 13, Cornell announced additional safety measures, including an immediate suspension of Interfraternity Council social events. [1]
The criminal investigation, civil litigation, university disciplinary decisions, and institutional review are distinct processes with different responsibilities and evidentiary standards. None should be collapsed into a convenient declaration about what every other process has established.
Due process matters, as does the presumption of innocence in criminal proceedings. Serious allegations require careful evaluation and respect for the rights and dignity of everyone involved. Psychological
support and humane treatment need not await the resolution of every disputed fact.
A person navigating these proceedings may have to revisit distressing experiences, organize records, respond to competing accounts, and withstand public scrutiny while continuing to attend class or work, maintain relationships, pay bills, and preserve enough psychological space for the ordinary business of living.
Cornell offers an occasion to examine these responsibilities without pretending that public commentary can adjudicate the case. The broader question reaches well beyond one university:
How do institutions investigate reported harm while taking responsibility for the harm their own responses can create?
Epistemic Injustice and the Ethics of Recognition
In Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, philosopher Miranda Fricker describes testimonial injustice: a speaker receives less credibility because of identity-based prejudice. She also describes hermeneutical injustice, in which unequal participation in developing shared interpretive resources leaves some people at a disadvantage in understanding or communicating their experiences. [3]
These concepts give philosophical precision to a familiar problem: credibility is not always distributed according to evidence. Sometimes the authority to explain an experience rests more comfortably with those observing it than with the person required to endure it.
The consequences concern more than whether a particular account is accepted. They concern whether someone is permitted to participate meaningfully in understanding her own life—whether her observations receive fair consideration and whether disagreement invites examination or becomes an occasion to question her competence.
These burdens do not fall upon all women equally. Race, disability, economic position, age, immigration history, and access to institutional resources can shape whose distress is treated as understandable and who is afforded the luxury of being complicated without becoming suspect.
Disagreement alone does not establish epistemic injustice. The ethical question is whether scrutiny is consistent, evidence remains central, and a person's identity or another person's authority is being allowed to decide credibility in advance.
This question becomes especially important when psychological terminology enters the conversation.
Words such as projection, attachment, dissociation, cognitive distortion, and trauma response can support thoughtful clinical understanding. Offered before sufficient attention has been paid to reported conduct, however, they may become elegantly upholstered ways of changing the subject.
A formulation can sound sophisticated while narrowing the inquiry it was meant to deepen. Emotional states and trauma histories may be relevant to perception, but their relevance does not relieve us of the responsibility to examine what occurred.
A person can be emotionally activated and observant, which is often the case for a surivivor living inside a nervous system that has been overloaded with expectation, while surviving in fight or flight as a healthy adaptation to the circumstances. She can experience post-traumatic symptoms and accurately describe another person's conduct. She can misunderstand one dimension of an interaction without becoming an unreliable narrator of her entire life.
Psychological distress and reliable observation are not mutually exclusive; neither are vulnerability and intellectual competence.
For someone whose judgment has repeatedly been undermined, later encounters with reflexive dismissal may carry a particular weight. The difficulty lies partly in what is disputed and partly in the familiar message beneath the dispute: someone else will determine whether she is qualified to know what she knows.
Epistemic betrayal is the intersection of credibility and violated trust: the undermining of a person's standing as a participant in understanding her experience within relationships or systems from which she reasonably expected fairness, care, and intellectual responsibility. This is an ethical framing, rather than a clinical diagnosis or a claim that every contested account constitutes betrayal.
The distinction asks us to hold two responsibilities together: examining an account carefully and recognizing the humanity of the person offering it.
When Women Inherit the Hierarchy
Internalized misogyny deserves attention precisely because misogyny is easier to recognize in an overtly hostile voice than in the language of concern, professional discernment, or female solidarity.
Women can absorb cultural expectations that reward accommodation while treating autonomy as a provocation. We may reproduce standards that once constrained us, particularly when our own security or advancement depended upon learning to survive within them.
Internalized misogyny can operate through learned assumptions about which women deserve approval, whose authority feels legitimate, and how much independence remains acceptable before it unsettles a familiar arrangement of power.
But gender bias, professional insecurity, competition, institutional conformity, and deliberate discrimination are different processes. Similar behavior can arise from different motives, and one woman's disagreement with another is not sufficient evidence of any of them. A responsible analysis examines patterns and standards rather than claiming privileged access to someone's inner life.
Research by psychologists Laurie Rudman and Peter Glick illustrates one such pattern. In an experiment involving hiring judgments, an agentic female applicant—one presented as assertive and achievement-oriented—was disadvantaged in a managerial role emphasizing interpersonal qualities because she was perceived as insufficiently nice. The finding demonstrated how expectations of feminine agreeableness can influence evaluations of female authority. It does not establish the motives behind any particular interpersonal disagreement. [4]
The broader contradiction is recognizable: institutions may celebrate leadership while attaching different social penalties to its exercise. A direct recommendation can be admired as decisive from one employee and criticized as abrasive from another. The same meeting can somehow require both greater participation from women and considerably fewer of their actual opinions.
We have become rather accomplished at celebrating women's voices in principle while developing increasingly sophisticated methods of regulating their framing.
One possible way these expectations persist is through a scarcity-based understanding of recognition: the learned belief that authority, belonging, or legitimacy is available in limited quantities, so another woman's expansion must diminish one's own position. This is an interpretive possibility, not a universal explanation for competition among women.
Where recognition has been conditional, someone else's refusal to accommodate may unsettle the rules through which we learned to secure our own place. The question becomes whether we can examine that discomfort without turning it into a verdict on her character.
A woman may be invited to lead, provided that leadership remains sufficiently agreeable; encouraged to advocate, provided that advocacy does not unsettle the existing order; or praised for resilience, provided that she does not become inconveniently articulate about what made such resilience necessary.
The useful questions are concrete. Are comparable contributions evaluated by comparable standards? Does a complaint prompt examination of the reported conduct or disproportionate scrutiny of the complainant's manner? Can women disagree without having their independence interpreted as disloyalty, instability, or ingratitude?
And can we recognize another woman's autonomy without requiring that it resemble our own?
Consider the contradictory expectations surrounding emotional expression. A distressed woman may be described as overwhelmed; a detailed account may be dismissed as overthinking; a request for clarification may be treated as fixation. Composure can be taken to mean that little harm occurred, while visible suffering can become a reason to doubt her judgment.
The resulting standard is impossible: she must demonstrate injury while appearing sufficiently uninjured to be believed.
Internalized misogyny does not make women the origin of unequal social systems. It reminds us that inherited patterns can survive through the very people those systems have constrained.
Our work of dismantling misogyny becomes more credible when it includes the forms we have internalized, alongside those we readily recognize in others.
What the Research Says About Responses to Disclosure
The consequences of unsupportive responses extend beyond philosophical questions about recognition.
A 2019 systematic review and meta-analysis by Emily Dworkin, Charlotte Brill, and Sarah Ullman examined 1,871 correlations across 51 studies. Negative reactions to disclosures of interpersonal violence, particularly controlling responses, distraction, and treating survivors differently, were associated with worse psychological symptoms. Positive reactions did not show a corresponding protective association in that synthesis, although perceiving others' reactions more positively was associated with less severe symptoms. These findings do not establish causation or imply that supportive care is unimportant. [5]
A 2025 cross-sectional study by Siri Thoresen and colleagues examined 173 women who had experienced sexual assault within the preceding six months. Unsupportive acknowledgment was associated with greater post-traumatic stress reactions, while perceived social support was associated with fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression. Again, the study identified associations rather than demonstrating that particular responses caused particular outcomes. [6]
Together, these findings invite closer attention to the quality of a response. Acknowledging a disclosure does not necessarily mean responding helpfully.
A survivor may receive sympathetic language without accessible resources, encouragement without practical assistance, or praise for resilience without relief from the demands that require it. Someone may care deeply and still respond in ways that leave the person disclosing harm feeling managed, isolated, or responsible for reassuring the listener.
Intent matters, but it cannot be our only measure of care. Responsiveness matters too: whether we ask what would help, respect the answer, explain our limitations honestly, and follow through on what we offer.
Support may be as ordinary as helping someone locate an appropriate service, accompanying them to an appointment if invited, or checking in without requiring another detailed account. It also involves respecting their choices rather than taking control in the name of concern.
We do not need certainty about every aspect of an experience to respond with dignity. We need enough humility to listen without assuming we already know what the person needs.
From Institutional Betrayal to Institutional Courage
Psychologist Jennifer Freyd's work on institutional betrayal examines wrongdoing by organizations upon which people depend, including failures to prevent mistreatment or respond supportively when it occurs. Such failures can carry psychological and practical consequences, especially when people must continue relying on the institution. [7]
An unwelcome decision is not, by itself, evidence of institutional betrayal. A fair investigation can reach painful or disputed conclusions. The concept instead directs attention to failures of responsibility and the obligations institutions have toward those who depend on them.
Freyd's corresponding concept of institutional courage emphasizes pursuing truth and ethical action despite organizational risk or cost. [7]
For institutions, that commitment must become visible in accessible reporting, protection against retaliation, consistent standards, candid communication, and meaningful ways to identify and correct errors. Independent review matters when internal loyalties or conflicts could compromise accountability.
These are responsibilities to be practiced, not simply values to be announced. An institution may describe itself as trauma-informed while maintaining procedures that make participation unnecessarily difficult. It may celebrate accountability in its mission statement while responding to criticism as though accountability were an unexpected administrative inconvenience.
Courage begins when such contradictions become subjects of inquiry rather than matters to be explained away.
For mental health professionals, this includes examining how our own systems handle access, confidentiality, disagreement, and unequal authority. The warmth of an individual clinician cannot compensate for every barrier surrounding the care they provide.
A trustworthy system makes room for people to ask questions, identify mistakes, and express needs without having those actions automatically interpreted as evidence of pathology or noncompliance.
Women's Authorship and the Practice of Care
By women's authorship, I mean the right to participate meaningfully in describing and shaping the conditions of one's own life: to offer an account, identify needs, contest inaccurate descriptions, and contribute to decisions that affect one's future.
That right includes accountability. It also requires scrutiny that is proportionate, reciprocal, and grounded in evidence rather than a presumed credibility deficit.
A survivor was a person before she was harmed and continues to be one afterward, with knowledge, responsibilities, relationships, ambitions, and capacities that no diagnosis or disclosure can comprehensively define. Trauma may affect aspects of memory, perception, and emotional experience; it does not make every subsequent observation an expression of injury.
Professional competence and the need for assistance can coexist. Intellectual sophistication does not eliminate vulnerability, just as vulnerability does not negate sophisticated thought.
The work of bell hooks offers an important ethical companion to this understanding. In All About Love: New Visions, she describes love through care, knowledge, respect, trust, commitment, and responsibility—an ethic expressed through how we live and treat one another. [8]
Read alongside the questions in this essay, that ethic asks something demanding of us. Kind intentions do not exempt us from examining assumptions. Expertise does not eliminate the responsibility to remain curious. Claiming to empower women means little if we become unsettled when they exercise that empowerment without our permission.
We should be able to offer a woman compassion without appointing ourselves the final interpreter of her consciousness. We should be able to disagree while continuing to recognize her as a participant in the disagreement. And we should be able to support growth without requiring that someone else's understanding of her life remain subordinate to our own.
Self-authorship is not infallibility. It is the right to remain an active participant in the meaning and direction of one's life, rather than merely the object of other people's explanations.
What We Owe One Another
We have invested considerable energy in helping people recognize unhealthy relationships, establish boundaries, regulate distress, and develop psychological flexibility. These capacities matter. So do the conditions under which people are expected to exercise them.
What happens when a woman begins trusting her judgment and finds that confidence is interpreted as defiance? When she practices clear communication and clarity is received as aggression? When she establishes boundaries and discovers that her discomfort remains more negotiable than someone else's convenience?
Encouraging survivors to reclaim their voices carries a responsibility to examine how we receive those voices once they return.
The work of recovery cannot belong exclusively to those who have experienced trauma. It also asks something of those who listen, investigate, provide care, hold authority, and make the everyday decisions that determine whether a community is trustworthy.
We cannot promise a world without conflict, uncertainty, or imperfect judgment. We can build relationships and institutions in which accounts receive fair consideration, boundaries carry meaning, errors can be acknowledged, and commitments to care remain visible in conduct.
Perhaps we have spent too much time asking survivors to become more resilient and not enough time asking whether our communities have become trustworthy enough.
A deeper commitment to healing requires intellectual humility, emotional maturity, and the willingness to change practices that our good intentions have not made harmless. It asks us to notice whose credibility we instinctively protect, whose discomfort we expect to absorb the cost of keeping things familiar, and whether we remain accountable when our understanding proves incomplete.
Keeping one another safe is an ongoing practice of becoming worthy of one another's trust.
That is where healing becomes a collective responsibility—and where our language of care begins to become a way of living.
Wishing you gentleness, strength, and safety,
Delia Berinde, MS, LPC
Looking Forward Counseling
References
[1] Cornell University. (2026). Addressing Sexual Violence: Updates and FAQ Regarding 2024 Chi Phi Sexual Assault Allegations. Institutional information reviewed October 16, 2026.University updates · University FAQ
[2] New York State Office of the Attorney General. (2026, October 1). Attorney General James Releases Statement on Appointment as Special Prosecutor.Read the statement
[3] Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198237907.001.0001
[4] Rudman, L. A., & Glick, P. (2001). Prescriptive gender stereotypes and backlash toward agentic women. Journal of Social Issues, 57(4), 743–762.https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-4537.00239
[5] Dworkin, E. R., Brill, C. D., & Ullman, S. E. (2019). Social reactions to disclosure of interpersonal violence and psychopathology: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review, 72, 101750.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2019.101750
[6] Thoresen, S., Blix, I., Johnsen, G. E., Wentzel-Larsen, T., & Ullman, S. E. (2025). Social reactions to disclosure and perceived social support are each uniquely associated with mental health in the first 6 months following sexual assault. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1648804.https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1648804
[7] Freyd, J. J. (n.d.). Institutional Betrayal and Institutional Courage. University of Oregon.Institutional Betrayal Research
[8] hooks, b. (2000). All About Love: New Visions. William Morrow.
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