By Sophia Hofbauer
Imagine you want to enjoy a fun day with your friends at Oktoberfest. All of you put on your most beautiful Dirndls, feeling your best. Because you are not only there for the food and the beer, you decide to go on the Teufelsrad. But before you even get on it, there is someone handing out free cycling shorts for women to protect them from someone filming up their Dirndl while they are on the ride.
Now imagine another scenario: You are enjoying your time at university, living the student lifestyle just like everyone else. You are not always sitting in the library; you also go out, party and drink alcohol. Because why not? Everyone else does it. Then you reach the point where you no longer have control over your body, either because you drank a little too much or because someone else was at fault. Then, seven men decide to take advantage of you. The first one posts on Snapchat that you are “free pussy upstairs”. But instead of justice, the case gets closed because of insufficient evidence.
What do these two scenarios have in common?
In both cases, women are expected to protect themselves from sexual violence. At Oktoberfest, women are given cycling shorts so that men cannot secretly film under their Dirndls. At Cornell, a young woman was failed not only by the men involved, but also by the institutions that were supposed to protect her and investigate what happened.
The problem is not that women wear Dirndls, drink alcohol or go to parties. The problem is that sexual violence is still too often treated as something women have to prevent, manage or prove, instead of something perpetrators, institutions and platforms have to prevent.
At Oktoberfest, the danger does not end when the ride is over. Videos can be filmed, uploaded and shared within seconds. Suddenly, a moment that was supposed to be fun becomes content for strangers online. The women affected often do not even know they were filmed until the video is already circulating. While the person filming may face consequences, the platforms hosting and spreading these videos often remain largely untouched.
In the Cornell case, the alleged violence did not only take place inside a fraternity house. It continued through messages, rumours and the way the university and prosecutors handled the allegations. When a case is closed because of “insufficient evidence”, it can send a devastating message to survivors: your experience is not enough, your voice is not enough, and the system may not believe you.
Of course, every case is different. The Cornell allegations have not been legally proven, and the accused men deny them. But the case still raises an important question: why does it so often take a civil lawsuit, public pressure and a reopened investigation for institutions to take sexual violence seriously?
This is not only an American problem, as can be seen in the Oktoberfest case. Across Europe, women are also told to be careful: do not walk home alone, hold your keys between your fingers, do not drink too much, do not wear that outfit, do not post that picture. The list of rules women are expected to follow seems endless. Meanwhile, the people who actually cause harm are often not the ones who have to change their behaviour.
Digital platforms make this even more complicated. A video filmed without consent can travel across borders within minutes. This is why protection cannot stop at national borders. Platforms, governments and the EU need to take digital sexual violence as seriously as physical violence.
At Oktoberfest, handing out cycling shorts may help in the moment. But it also shows how far we still are from real prevention. Instead of asking why men feel entitled to film women without their consent, society hands women shorts and tells them to cover up.
At universities, the same logic appears in another form. Survivors are asked whether they drank, what they wore, why they went to that party or why they did not leave earlier. These questions shift responsibility away from the people who committed violence and onto the people who survived it.
Whether it is a woman being handed cycling shorts at Oktoberfest or a student waiting years for her allegations to be properly investigated, the message is often the same: protect yourself, because no one else will fully protect you. But safety should not be a woman's responsibility. It should be a basic standard. At festivals, at universities, online, at night when walking home and everywhere else. Real protection means believing survivors, investigating allegations properly and holding perpetrators, institutions and platforms accountable. It means asking why sexual violence happens. Not why women were there when it did.
