A Wesleyan University fraternity being sued by a former student who alleges she was raped at a party there in 2010 filed a motion last week to force the woman to reveal her name or drop the lawsuit.

The Hartford Courant reports that the Wesleyan-based Mu Epsilon chapter of Beta Theta Pi filed a motion Tuesday in U.S. District Court, arguing that the plaintiff’s use of a pseudonym “allows her to make defamatory statements against” both Wesleyan and the fraternity “behind a cloak of anonymity”:

The motion seeks to vacate a judge’s previous order permitting the woman to remain anonymous. It charges that the woman failed to meet “the standard governing the use of pseudonyms in civil litigation” in the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. That court — in deciding Sealed Plaintiff v. Sealed Defendant in 2008 — recently outlined standards for a trial court to consider when asked to allow a case to proceed with the plaintiff’s name sealed.

In her argument to continue using a pseudonym, the woman said she needed “to preserve the privacy and emotional and physical well-being of this survivor of sexual assault and rape in a sensitive and highly personal matter.”

The lawsuit, filed last October, alleges the school violated Title IX by “to supervise, discipline, warn or take other corrective action” against the fraternity, which lost official recognition in 2005 but maintained an off-campus presence and reportedly gained a reputation at Wesleyan as a “Rape Factory.” According to “Jane Doe,” she was raped at the fraternity’s off-campus house at a 2010 party, which led to a university-wide email warning students about safety risks at the house. When the woman’s name surfaced, she became the subject of protests against the university’s recommendation that students avoid the fraternity.

Doe’s case underscores the difficulties faced by the victims of sexual assault when they come forward with their stories — and the importance of allowing them to remain anonymous if they wish. Just last week, reports surfaced that a 14-year-old Elwood, Indiana girl was facing harassment in her neighborhood for being pregnant, even though the pregnancy was the result of a sexual assault. Last fall, a 15-year-old California girl committed suicide after being raped and humiliated by three fellow students. She later sent, in a Facebook message before her death, “I have a reputation for a night I don’t even remember and the whole school knows.”

The case is also just the latest example of students struggling to expose rape culture on college campuses. In April, protesters against sexual assault policies at Dartmouth University received rape and death threats. The next month, the school sent disciplinary letters to many of the students who protested.

Joseph Diebold is an intern at ThinkProgress.

As anti-rape protests have erupted over the past week in the Indian state of West Bengal, police arrested 13 members of a women’s rights group on Thursday. The protests were sparked by the gang rape and murder of a college student, and follow two other high-profile cases of rape in the state.

Anti-rape protests began last December and have been sustained since then. Protests have occurred across West Bengal and particularly in Kolkata, the state’s capital and the country’s third largest metropolitan area, and have been focused against the state government for not doing enough to crack down on violence against women. According to local media, residents’ concerns of insecurity for women have been routinely ignored by the government. In a sign of protest, many students stopped attending school or college and joined the demonstrations instead.

Thirteen of the protesters were arrested as they made their way towards the home of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, where they intended to give her a letter expressing concern over violence against women. They were stopped when they were still several hundred meters away from the Chief Minister’s home and detained for over eight hours. Police also cited the disruption of traffic as a reason for breaking up the protest.

“It is the beginning of our movement. We won’t give up so easily,” said Anuradha Kapoor, an activist in the civil rights group Maitree and one of those arrested. She told local newspaper Firstpost, “The state of women’s security in terrible. It has been like that for a long time now and we elected a new government for a reason. However, they are in complete denial of the situation and when you protest, this is what you get.”

On June 8, a 20-year-old college student’s body was found lying near a river near the outskirts of Kolkata after she had been gang-raped and murdered. The woman was on her way back home from taking an exam when she was apparently abducted, raped, and killed by a group of men. Six arrests have been made in connection to the incident. Three days later, a 14-year-old girl was raped and killed in the town of Gede, 90 miles away.

The state government has also come under fire after the National Crime Records Bureau released its annual report on crime statistics, pegging West Bengal as the state with the highest incidence of crimes against women, accounting for over 12 percent of the nation’s whole. Chief Minister Banerjee contested the Bureau’s statistics, a reaction which activists have called “callous,” and a reason for increased protests against Banerjee’s government.

Tourism in India has suffered in 2013 as multiple cases of rape have dominated headlines.

When activists at Dartmouth University disrupted an event for prospective students in April, they said they wanted to pressure their university to take racism, sexism, and sexual assault more seriously — and they wanted their administrators to start punishing serial rapists. After the university administration cracked down on the protesters, one of the participants told ThinkProgress, “The fact is that Dartmouth is punishing protesters who are very visible, but won’t punish students who commit assaults.”

Although the campus protesters received some serious backlash from some of their peers — including rape and death threats — for pointing out some of the shortcomings in their university’s sexual assault policy, their statements weren’t hyperbolic. Some of the participants in the protest were survivors of sexual assault, and some of their assailants haven’t faced adequate punishment. According to sexual assault prevention experts, those rapists are very likely to go on to commit crimes against other students on campus.

The U.S. Department of Justice has found that about one in four women experience sexual assault during their time in college. And, according to David Lisak — a former clinical psychologist who now consults the U.S. military and college administrations on issues of sexual assault — those sexual crimes are perpetrated by a relatively small number of men. Lisak says that most college rapists are repeat offenders.

“College presidents don’t like to hear this, but these are sex offenders,” Lisak explained during a recent rape prevention event at Harvard University. “Every report should be viewed and treated as an opportunity to identify a serial rapist.”

That claim is backed up by Lisak’s research. When Lisak surveyed 1,882 college men about their nonconsensual sexual experiences, 120 participants said that they had either sexually assaulted or attempted to sexually assault a fellow student. Those men admitted to 483 assaults in total — which averages out to be about four assaults each.

But colleges across the country still aren’t doing a good job of identifying and punishing those serial rapists. Survivors of sexual assault often have to navigate a complicated judicial system that dissuades them from reporting their assailants, suggests they may be at fault for the crimes perpetrated against them, and sometimes even threatens to punish them for speaking out. An investigation by the Center for Public Integrity found that even when students are found to be guilty of sexual assault, they tend to face extremely light punishment — like social probation and academic penalties — instead of being suspended or expelled. A recent national survey conducted by the group Students Active For Ending Rape asked college students to grade their school’s sexual assault policies, and half of the respondents gave them a C or lower. A mere 9.8 percent of students gave their university an A for handling rape cases well.

Students at prestigious universities like Swarthmore, Yale, Amherst, and Princeton allege their campuses are creating a “hostile environment” by failing to adequately address sexual assault cases — largely because administrators would rather “keep up appearances” than bring negative attention to their school by making national headlines for arresting rapists. That reality has sparked a national movement to push administrators to do better in this area, as students have filed a wave of federal complaints with the U.S. Department of Education.

Over the past year, a growing number of prestigious colleges have made national headlines over their administrations’ failure to effectively handle issues of sexual assault on campus. That’s not necessarily because rape culture on college campuses has recently gotten much worse than it used to be. More likely, it’s because a coordinated network of students activists are joining forces to fight for real change, perhaps partially spurred by the national conversation about sexual assault that followed the high-profile Steubenville rape case.

Much of that movement was sparked by one activist in particular: Andrea Pino, who filled a federal complaint against the University of North Carolina after feeling “let down by the people and policies that were supposed to protect her” when she was raped at an off-campus party.

But Pino knew the deeper issues of victim-blaming and rape culture were bigger that her university, and she didn’t want to stop at reforming UNC’s sexual assault policy. After she and some of her classmates took action against UNC, they joined forces with students on other campuses to help them file their own complaints. Pino and her classmate, Annie Clark, became somewhat of informal advisers for other college activists across the country who were interested in pushing back on their own administrations.

The UNC student explained that the real change started occurring once students began to connect the dots between campuses. “It was always an individual case. That’s what kept this from becoming a movement,” Pino told Inside Higher Ed. Before forming a network, it was easy for students to think about every on-campus rape, or every violation of university sexual assault policy, as an isolated incident. And many students didn’t feel comfortable coming forward with their stories because they assumed they wouldn’t have any support from their peers, and they would be accused of lying — one of the most common consequences of universities’ pervasive victim-blaming atmospheres.

But after campus activists joined together, they started gaining strength in numbers. Insider Higher Ed describes the recent momentum around sexual assault policy as “an unprecedented wave of student activism and federal complaints at campuses.”

And that increased activism has paid off. Thanks to the continued pressure that students are putting on their administrators, colleges are beginning to take small steps to reform their sexual assault policies. Some universities are agreeing to incorporate more resources about sexual health, domestic violence prevention, and consent into their campus communities. Others have formed task forces to overhaul their current judicial policies for handling rape cases among students.

Members of the higher education community suspect this is just the beginning, and anticipate another round of formal complaints as even more students get connected with the movement and become aware of their rights under federal law. “I think all of the attention that has been brought to this subject over the last two years has created much more awareness, and perhaps emboldened students who otherwise would have felt more isolated in coming forward,” Ada Meloy, the general counsel of the American Council on Education, explained. “I think there’s no question that this topic is one that is not going away.”

Facebook has announced an update to its policy on images related to breast cancer, after 20,000 people signed a Change.org petition pressuring the social media giant to stop removing photos of mastectomies. Breast cancer advocates argue that Facebook’s policy has previously been too vague — allowing images depicting breast cancer scars to be frequently categorized as “pornography” — and see the company’s updated announcement as an important victory.

“We agree that undergoing a mastectomy is a life-changing experience, and that it’s important to share photos to raise awareness of breast cancer and support the men and women who are facing diagnosis, undergoing treatment, or living with the scars of cancer,” Facebook’s new policy on mastectomy photos states. “The vast majority of these kinds of photos are compliant with our policies. However, photos with fully exposed breasts, particularly if they’re unaffected by surgery, do violate Facebook’s Terms.”

Activists hope that explicit policy will prevent Facebook from continuing to remove photos from the SCAR Project, which shares images of breast cancer scars in order to “raise public consciousness of early-onset breast cancer, and to help young survivors see their scars, faces, figures and experiences through a new, honest and ultimately empowering lens.” Under the company’s previously vague content guidelines, the SCAR Project’s photos were repeatedly removed from its Facebook page — and its founder, photographer David Jay, was banned from the site for 30 days. Advocates pointed out that, since Facebook has a policy differentiating breastfeeding from nudity, it should do the same for breast cancer images.

In its press statement about its mastectomy policy, Facebook explained it has “long allowed mastectomy photos to be shared on Facebook, as well as educational and scientific photos of the human body and photos of women breastfeeding,” although the company acknowledged that “on occasion, we may remove a photo showing mastectomy scarring either by mistake, as our teams review millions of pieces of content daily.”

Facebook’s content guidelines have come under fire over the past several weeks as advocates have criticized the social media site for consistently censoring women’s health images rather than images that endorse or celebrate domestic violence. Michelle Kinsey Bruns, the online manager of the Women’s Media Center, recently submitted a Facebook ad refuting the scientifically disputed link between abortion and breast cancer — but Facebook rejected it for violating its ban on “adult products,” the same reason that similar breast cancer-related ads created by Kinsey Bruns have been rejected in the past. Taken together with Facebook’s past resistance to remove content that jokes about raping and beating women, Kinsey Bruns pointed out that the disparate policies illustrate “the absolute inconsistency that Facebook is willing to apply to a woman’s body as an object of violence, but a woman’s body as a medical object is too scandalous to be approved.”

But successful online activism continues to influence Facebook to update its policies — or at least promise to do so. After advocates successfully pressured over a dozen companies to stop advertising with Facebook to protest its domestic violent content, the company announced that it will strengthen its policy to ensure that content promoting violence against women will not be tolerated. “We need to do better — and we will,” a statement from Facebook said.

Despite Republican strategists’ efforts to keep GOP politicians from making insensitive comments about rape victims, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) channeled former Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-MO) infamous “legitimate rape” comment during a committee hearing on Wednesday. Defending his proposal to ban all abortions after 20 weeks with no exceptions for rape and incest, Franks claimed, “The incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low.”

As the Washington Post reports, Franks went on to nonsensically argue, “But when you make that exception [allowing rape victims to get abortions], there’s usually a requirement to report the rape within 48 hours. And in this case that’s impossible because this is in the sixth month of gestation. And that’s what completely negates and vitiates the purpose of such an amendment.”

Franks is the latest male Republican lawmaker to opine on the validity of rape victims’ needs. In 2012, several GOP candidates lost the election after letting slip their ignorant and offensive beliefs about rape victims and what rights they deserve. Akin set off a media firestorm when he claimed that a woman could not get pregnant from “legitimate rape” because her body “has ways of shutting that whole thing down.” Franks stood by Akin at the time, declaring, “I definitely believe that he should still be a member of Congress.” Soon after, Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock told rape victims to embrace pregnancy as “a gift from God.”

These claims quickly collapse under cursory scientific scrutiny. By claiming rape-related pregnancies are “rare,” Franks is dismissing an estimated 32,101 women who get pregnant from rape per year. One study found that about 32.4 percent of victims did not find out they were pregnant until their second trimester — beyond the strict 20 week limit Franks is seeking to impose on American women seeking abortions. Half of those victims chose to undergo an abortion rather than keep the fetus or put it up for adoption. Some research suggests that rape victims are actually more likely to get pregnant, putting the number of women who became pregnant from rape in one year around 83,000.