I don’t see how “the system” is creating rapes. I went to fraternity parties on many weekends throughout my college career without being affected by this so-called system. Maybe I unwittingly “beat the system.”
“If men are still trying, that’s the problem. No sexual assault problems will ever be solved if people focus on self defense instead of targeting the perpetrator.”
Sure. Please tell us what your proposals to change male behavior are? And then we can all consider how much likely those things are to work as a practical matter. No sexual assault problems will be solved if your ideas about culture etc. don’t actually change behavior. I’m pretty skeptical that you are going to be able to make much of a dent. I’m fine with trying that out, but not at the expense of the lower hanging fruit.
I just think the ROI for my daughter is going to be highest for (i) teaching them how to protect themselves and (ii) dialing back the binge drinking.
I think some allowance has to be made for differences in the Greek system at different colleges. As a sophomore at a very large school I had a roommate who was a graduate student from a smaller LAC where he was very active in the Greek system. During Fall quarter, he would often invite me to drop by a Greek party with him. He ended up rather horrified at some of the things we saw there; things very much like what is being discussed in this thread and eventually, he stopped going himself because of it.
The Indiana system described in the article seems particularly egregious. The freshman women who are inclined to party live in segregated dorms away from older students, from students not interested in partying who might have exercised a moderating influence, and from male classmates. They are unable to gain knowledge about safer partying from older students who will eventually be their sorority sisters, because of well-meaning no-contact rules. The fraternity members pick the young women up en masse in cars and transport them to the fraternity parties, but rides back home may not be so easy to find. In the first few weeks of their college careers, the freshman women end up thrown into a potentially dangerous situation with no guidance. Some get sexually assaulted, inevitably.
It makes me think about an imaginary school where male students and female students are separated by a river. Every year, new male students see the female students across the river, and they impetuously cross over to meet them. But no one has told them about the crocodiles.
At the beginning of the year, a few students get attacked by crocodiles. Later on in the year, not so many. But if you ask the guys, the ones that are left, they’ll say that they’ve learned to avoid crocodiles, and really it was the other guys’ fault; they should have been more careful. And parents say piously, I tell my son about water safety. I tell him to stay out of the river. And the same charade goes on every year.
Shouldn’t we just build a bridge instead of blaming the boys who get eaten by crocodiles?
Calicash, you’re a senior in hs, right? How do you “know so much” about Greek life?
Yes I am a senior in high school. I wouldn’t say I “know so much” about Greek Life. I never said that I “know so much” about Greek life so I’m not sure why the quotation marks are there. But as a future college student, I have considered rushing and so, I’ve done a lot of research into Greek life. And you would have to live in a hole to not know about the federal governments investigation into all of those colleges and the amount of sexual assault that gets swept under the rug to save face.
@northwesty No, I do not have a comprehensive plan to stop sexual assault on campuses. If I did, wouldn’t be here discussing it. I’d be a millionaire.
But I do know that there are sober girls who have been raped. I do know that there are girls who were fully clothed before they were raped. And I do know that there are girls who walked in pairs who were raped. So it doesn’t matter what you teach your daughters. Teaching your daughters how to “prevent” rape doesn’t stop people from trying to rape them.
Sexual assault reform needs to be aimed in the direction of the perpetrators. Let’s go back to the driving analogy. If someone chooses to run a red light and hits someone, do we go to the person who had the green light and tell them to be more careful? Or do we go to the person who ran the red light and find a way to punish them and stop them from running more red lights?
If you’ve done a lot of research you surely know that social scenes are different campus to campus and houses differ from one another, so blanket statements about “frat guys throw parties just to get laid” aren’t helpful.
Pizza I think that is why I can’t engage in this thread. These types of threads dissolve into too broad of strokes that read like “everybody does this” and “everybody does that.” Frankly on a campus with 30,000 or more undergraduates it is in actuality more like “a small percentage of people do this” and a “small percentage of people do that.” With roughly 40,000 undergrads at my son’s Big 10 uni around 10% are involved in Greek life male and female. While those 1500 girls and 1500 males (if evenly split I have no idea) might be engaging in consensual hook-up behavior, it’s pretty sane and easy to grasp that not all 1500 males are sexually abusing those women.
@Pizzagirl
Remember to keep my words in context.
Someone had said that no frat guys ever throw parties just to get laid.
I responded by calling BS on that.
But I never said that every frat throws parties with the intent to get laid and I never said that every party is thrown with the intention of getting laid.
I never made any blanket statement.
No, TransferGopher didn’t say that ^. Go back and check your work.
@Bay
Post #201
Post #280
That quote is definitive.
Right, and what he wrote was not: “No frat guys ever throw parties just to get laid” Which is what you accused him of writing.
You also called him a liar, because the last reported sexual assault was three years ago (2012), rather than 4-5. If you are going to call him a liar for that mis-statement, then can we call you one for yours?
@Bay Really? Stop pettifogging. Let’s not lose sight of this discussion by getting into semantics. It’s immature.
Now, now Cali. Grow up and apologize for your mistakes.
Actually @Bay, it was less than two years ago.
http://www.mndaily.com/news/metro-state/2013/05/02/u-responds-alleged-rape
But you would rather get into mindless discussions about semantics, so I can understand why you overlooked the link I posted at #331.
This is why we have a sexual assault problem on college campuses. Because some people refuse to take the issue head on and would rather beat around the bush than tackle the root cause of the conflict.
People who aren’t sexually assaulting others, or who aren’t standing by and not-reporting sexual assaults that they are aware of, aren’t the problem on campus, you know. I’m a little tired of this “collective guilt” thing. TransferGopher is no more responsible for any of the “bad guys” on his campus who have done bad things, than I was for the girl in my dorm who snuck into other people’s rooms and stole things.