When I was 17, my boyfriend raped me. He drugged me. I woke up during the assault and told him no. His response was: “Just let me finish.” There are things about that night I will never forget. How violently sick I was the next day. The realization of what had happened to me. But almost as enduring is what came afterward. I had slept with him before. I willingly went to see him. I drank with him. What did I expect? Those questions taught 17-year-old me something profoundly damaging: that somehow, somewhere in the choices I had made before he raped me, I had contributed to what he chose to do to me. I wish I could say the conversation around sexual assault had fundamentally changed in the 28 years since that night. Then I look at what is happening around the allegations at Cornell University. A young woman has alleged in a civil lawsuit that she was drugged and sexually assaulted by seven men at a fraternity house. The allegations are being investigated, and the men are entitled to the legal protections afforded to anyone accused of a crime. But that is not what much of the online conversation is about. Instead, I have watched people call this young woman a “whore.” I have watched people dissect her sexual history, what she initially consented to, what substances she consumed and what she did afterward. I have watched a narrative emerge in which the men accused of assaulting her are recast as the real victims — victims of a woman supposedly trying to destroy their lives. I have heard versions of this story my entire life. And I need people to understand something about coming forward after sexual violence: It is not easy. It can mean telling strangers about the most intimate and traumatic moments of your life. It can mean having your sexual history examined, your behaviour scrutinized, your memory questioned and your character put on trial. And now, in the age of social media, it can mean thousands of strangers doing it too. We have seen repeatedly how much cultural sympathy can remain available to men who have committed sexual violence. Mike Tyson was convicted of rape and nevertheless returned to enormous celebrity. Brock Turner was convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman, and the judge who sentenced him cited the potentially severe impact of imprisonment on him when imposing a six-month jail sentence. Canada has its own shameful history. In 2017, a federal inquiry examined the conduct of a judge who, while presiding over a sexual-assault trial, asked the complainant why she could not simply keep her knees together. Different decades. Different countries. Same question underneath it all: What did she do? That is the question we have to stop asking. If someone stole your car, nobody would ask how many people you had slept with. Nobody would ask whether your skirt was too short. Nobody would ask how much you drank. Nobody would comb through everything you did before and afterward searching for evidence that perhaps, somewhere along the way, you had communicated that you wanted your car stolen. Yet sexual-assault complainants are routinely subjected to precisely this kind of scrutiny. And there is one principle that should not be remotely controversial: Consent to one sexual act is not consent to every sexual act that follows. Consent can be withdrawn. Consent to one person is not consent to another. Consent at 10 p.m. is not irrevocable consent for the rest of the night. Having had sex before does not create an obligation to have sex again. Being sexually adventurous does not surrender your right to bodily autonomy. And saying yes to something does not take away your right to say no to what happens next. At 17, I needed someone to tell me that. I needed someone to tell me that I could have willingly walked into his home, willingly drank with him and willingly slept with him a hundred times before that night, and none of those things gave him the right to drug me. None of those things gave him the right to continue when I said no. The responsibility for my rape belonged to the person who chose to rape me. Full stop. Instead, I carried questions that never should have belonged to me. What could I have done differently? Why did I go there? Why did I drink? Why didn't I somehow prevent it? I deserved better than what the world gave that 17-year-old girl after she was raped. Every survivor does. And whatever ultimately happens in the Cornell investigation and litigation, the young woman at its centre deserves something very basic from the rest of us: not to have her humanity reduced to her sexual history. We can believe in due process for accused people without putting an alleged victim's entire life on trial in the court of public opinion. We can acknowledge that allegations must be investigated without pretending that consent once given is consent forever. And we can stop teaching girls and women that the price of being believed is having lived a perfectly cautious, perfectly sober, perfectly chaste life. Because bodily autonomy does not belong only to “good” women. It belongs to all of us. Twenty-eight years after my own assault, I wish I didn't still have to say that. But I will keep saying it. Because if we cannot protect people from sexual violence, stand beside people who have been harmed, and insist that their humanity does not disappear because of the choices they made before someone hurt them, then we need to ask ourselves what kind of society we are choosing to be.