With the statistics on student rape and sexual assaults, the problem is we don’t have good numbers, for a variety of reasons, much as we don’t on rape. For one thing, rape and sexual assault, despite all the work that has been done to help the victims not feel like it is shameful, that they did nothing wong, a lot of victims refuse to come forward to this day, they feel dirty, and don’t want people to know, plus many of them might feel afraid of the consequences of coming forward, like the perp and/or his friends making life miserable. You think if a girl reports a case of sexual assault or rape against a member of a frat his brothers won’t go on the warpath against the girl, spreading ‘the truth’ that she was fully consenting, and was doing this because the brother who did it dumped her, etc…I went to NYU, which in the early 80’s didn’t exactly have a huge Greek culture, but I was involved as head of a large student activities group with a disciplinary board, and I saw this happen more than a few times, where a victim was brave enough to report sexual assault and the brothers went into full on shaming mode…against the girl.
So we don’t know the stats, but I would bet good money that they are significantly larger than the reported facts…not to mention that it is only recently that schools now have to report such incidents, the campus police and the administration can’t ‘make it go away’ as easily as they once did (just take a look at Florida State with their football players to see how much the cover up still goes on, albeit with things beyond sexual assault), so over time I expect we will see better stats, since the schools can get in serious trouble if they are found to be covering up. Also, they are finally making it easier for victims to report, not just outright rape, but where they were drunk were out of it and had sex, they are making it more anonymous and safe to report, plus administrations are afraid enough of lawsuits like the Catholic Church has faced and continues to face if there is any inkling they didn’t do what they should have.
I also saw fraternities pretty close up, I wasn’t a member of any of the houses, but had contact with its members (I used to be a ref for the intramural sports programs), and saw what went on. Most of the guys were decent, and to be honest I don’t think that for many of them the parties were chances to get laid (then again, this was a large school, in NYC, with a lot of young women around the city, where you didn’t need to go to a frat party to try and find a girl), but there was very much a rule of ‘what goes on here, stays here’, and the problem was that small minority who would behave atrociously was covered by that. Again, it is much like the Catholic Church and its culture, where there are a lot of good, decent people trying to do God’s work, but there also was and is a culture that protecting the church (and its leaders) of utmost important, and it allowed the abuse scandal to play out over decades. With frats, most of the guys would find it sickening that a guy would need to get a girl drunk to have sex with her, but also would not report him or give him a good swift kick in the a** or the door if he got out of line, the whole ‘frat brother uber alles’ is no myth, it is the truth in many places.
I also don’t think that the frats have parties directly tied to getting laid, I think they have the parties and unconsciously there is the expectation of getting laid, and that is a problem. Something that is an automatic or unconscious expectation is not thought about, what happens is the guy is at a party, having a good time, he sees a girl he finds attractive, talks to her, is drinking with her, then finds himself taking her someplace and ends up going over the line, not because he is thinking “gee, I am going to have sex with her”, but unconsciously, he is feeling “I have a right to have sex with her”…and I think if there is going to be a solution that at the frats, that unconcious feeling of ‘right to have sex’ needs to be examined, I think a lot of it has to be in drilling home that the party is to have fun and that there are lines that cannot be gone over…but somehow, I don’t think it will work, unless the frats acknowledge that there is a problem.
I never knew that sororities were still run like that, it sounds like an all female dorm from the 1950s or something. Frats are a major part of the social life at many schools, and it is kind of idiotic that sororities are run as if this is 1955 or something, I think there is validity to the idea that if sorrorities ran their own parties and didn’t treat life like their job was to deliver their members to the altar as virgins or something, it might work out better. There is an old expression in street fighting, it says never fight a battle on someone else’s turf, because you are likely to get a board split across your head by your opponents ‘friends’…if sororities had parties, they would be in control, and the boys who attended would know that they wouldn’t get away with the crap they would at their own houses…and more importantly, I suspect that if a sorrority threw parties, that a lot of girls from outside the greeks would rather go there than a frat, which would in turn I suspect force the frats to compete. As the guy points out, on many campuses the frats are an oligopoly, huge parts of the social life around campus, if not almost the only one, and without competition why would they want to change? Competition is a good thing, as when Robert Morgenthau, the DA, broke the monopoly the mob had on garbage collection in NYC, he brought in Browning/Ferris industries (now WMX), that was known, shall we say , for less than stellar behavior themselves, and the mob was soon out of business, they couldn’t shake down Browning Ferris and their muscle found out there were people tougher than them. To be honest, when I was in college I would have rather gone to a sorrority house for a party, would rather be at a place run by the women there, probably a lot less obnoxious drunks:)
