Bullying people, calling them “liar” and shutting down discourse because you don’t like what they have to say is not an effective problem solving technique.
Do any of the women out there have any idea how orchestrated fraternity parties can be?
Last night I dreamed about being back in college. After my morning classes, I took the bus back to sorority row and walked in the back door of my house into the chapter room. PG and CF were sitting together on a coach and one said, “we already got you a Tab” and so I sat in a chair, put my books at my feet. Just then Young and the Restless came on and we watched it together, drinking our Tabs.
PG: I’ve been thinking about sister care. We had meetings for pledges to explain certain expected rules of behavior. Prohibitions against smoking or eating or drinking on the street stand out in my mind. To this day, when I walk down the street with a cup from starbucks, I think, oops.
I am wondering why there were never meetings that gave rules about safe behavior at fraternity parties. Did you have such meetings in your group? I remember meetings where we were told how to dress and comport ourselves at those parties, but nothing about protecting oneself. Everything I knew about watching my drink, and not going upstairs or to the bathroom without a buddy, came from unofficial conversations and advice from older women. It also came from observation.
I grew up in a university town and started going to fraternity parties while a junior and senior in high school. I only went when invited by a date who came to my house and picked me up and then brought me home at the end of the night. The date met my very intimidating father, in his study with a full gun case and hunting trophies on the wall. The big parties where girls were coming without dates always made me uncomfortable. First week of college, a pledge at the house next door to mine was gang raped, though that isn’t what we called it then. We called it bad choices and being slutty. It was her fault for drinking the punch and getting so drunk. She should have known better. Even then, I wondered exactly how she was supposed to know better. Rape prevention was not discussed openly though protective, preventative behaviors were internalized by observing older women and following rules we were given about not going out alone after dark, watch what you wear, etc.
So why weren’t the sororities on my campus having meetings telling their pledges how to protect themselves? I could also ask why any of us were even going to those parties.
If any active sorority members are reading along, I wonder if your chapter has meetings warning about risk of sexual assault on campus, and at fraternity houses in particular? If not, how do you know to be on guard? Or do you think being on guard isn’t necessary?
I absolutely agree all chapters aren’t the same and geographic differences exist within the greek system. PG and I have been discussing this for some years now. My belief is because there is a National organization for each fraternity and sorority, the groups as a whole are responsible for behavior of each individual chapter. This goes to the discussion we had about National telling the UVA sorority girls what they could and couldn’t do. They have the power, but they should also assume the responsibility for sistercare and keeping pledges and actives safe from a known risk. If rapey fraternities exist on a campus, the sororities know about them. As a group, they could opt out of those parties. Does this ever happen? Of course, then it will just be the non-sorority girls who attend these parties who are at risk. The problem doesn’t go away.
imho.
JustOneDad, if you would like to elaborate and go into some detail, I would be happy to read what you have to say.
TransferGopher probably overstated the purity of the fraternities’ motivations for throwing parties. He’d hardly be the first poster to make such a mistake. And if he was exaggerating, so what? His fraternity is guilty of throwing a party to meet women? That’s not a crime – it’s part of having fun. I don’t see why we can’t all be a little tolerant, particularly when a young person is writing something.
What did stand out to me was that he was convinced that the rate of sexual assault on campus (not just at fraternities) was almost minuscule. And it’s probably a sign of what a lot of people on campus think, so it’s an extremely important fact. But why blast him for it, even if you find it annoying that the statistics he’s writing are wrong? He’s a college student – I’m sure he’s a nice guy who isn’t studying sexual assault statistics and hasn’t seen anything resembling a rape when he’s been in college.
The job should be to teach people and help them understand that it’s a serious problem. We shouldn’t treat him like a monster or call all his friends monsters. Give him some data, let him read and think about it. It’ll make an impression even if he doesn’t change his mind 180 degrees. And people could learn from him too - what’s going on and what people think. Knowing this could help develop solutions or highlight the most effective ways to educate people. And whatever we’ve been doing so far doesn’t seem to be working, so let’s not pretend we have nothing to learn.
If he thinks the people who take this issue seriously are a bunch of spiteful fanatics he’ll just tune them out. And now that’s one more person who could help who won’t be.
What could fraternities do to educate their membership on this issue?
People who wonder about sexual assault at Minnesota can consult the yearly reports put out by the Aurora Center, a place on the Minnesota campus for people dealing with issues of sexual assault and relationship violence.
[2012-2013:](http://www1.umn.edu/aurora/pdf/Annual%20Report%202013.pdf) 6 reported assaults/rapes at fraternities, 211 unknown location, some at other locations
[2011-2012:](http://www1.umn.edu/aurora/pdf/Annual%20Report%202012.pdf) 3 reported assaults/rapes at fraternities, 209 unknown location, some at other locations
[2010-2011:](http://www1.umn.edu/aurora/pdf/Annual%20Report%202011.pdf) 13 reported assaults/rapes at fraternities, 177 unknown location, some at other locations
For some reason, there is no 2013-2014 school year report. In all three reports I looked at, the gender of the clients served by the Aurora Center was about 15% male. About 8% of the alleged perpetrators were women.
@TransferGopher has been helpful (either in this thread or one of the previous ones, can’t remember) answering questions about how his fraternity conducts parties.
One thing that struck me about the Indiana articles was that at Indiana, sorority rush is in the spring, or at least it was at the time of the article. The young women described in the article (mostly) deliberately chose to be in the party dorm, and wanted to meet guys at the fraternity parties. They were going to rush for sororities, most of them. But the sorority women, who would have been the obvious people to help their future sisters navigate the dangers of the party scene, were barred from doing it.
As I understand it, sorority women are barred from contact with future pledges to ensure fairness in recruiting, which makes sense to me. And rush is in the spring to allow freshman women to settle into campus and classes before having to go through a competitive sorority rush, which also makes sense. But it would be nice if there were a way for sorority women to formally or informally educate freshmen about how not to get sexually assaulted.
The partiers at the freshman dorm arrived on campus freshman year on a Wednesday, and went to fraternity parties that Thursday, Friday and Saturday. They were jumping in the deep end.
The first few weeks of freshman year are the most dangerous for sexual assaults. Maybe fraternities shouldn’t be allowed to have parties, or at least, have parties with freshmen, for the first few weeks. Maybe that would be a time for sororities to have some kind of social events that would be safer for freshmen, although the young women I guess want alcohol and the sororities don’t want to serve it. So… not sure what the solution is, but the first part of the solution is admitting there’s a problem.
“I never got the concept of “fraternities control the parties.” What, non-Greek kids are suddenly incapable of throwing parties?”
In practice, at some schools, they can’t. If the school doesn’t permit parties in dorms, and landlords/neighbors closely police what goes on in off-campus housing, then the fraternities are the only place you can have a party with loud music and underage drinking. And for lots of students, that’s what defines a party.
It is quite clearly the university’s responsibility if anyone’s, in this context.
I’m sorry but who doesn’t know that if you go to a party with a bunch of people you don’t know and get drunk to the point where you can’t be responsible for yourself something bad might happen to you? Sure, I guess we could teach this in college but it’s a little like teaching that the sky is blue.
"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? "
We train the good driver to keep their head on a swivel even if they have the right of way. We also tell them to always wear their seatbelt. And we put airbags in their car.
We also tried to train and license the bad driver in an effort to make him a good driver. But bad drivers will always exist no matter what we do. We also punish the bad driver for running the red light. But convicting the bad driver doesn’t undo the car crash – two mangled cars, several injured people.
Pre-crash risk mitigation/avoidance is always better than post-crash adjudication. And we should focus our efforts on the risk mitigation that will have the biggest bang. I think raising awareness among the girls and the overwhelming super majority of good guys has a much better chance of success than hoping to change the mindset of the bad guys.
For the bad guys, the biggest bang imo is keeping them from getting blind drunk (if we could figure out how to do that). The Vandy case is a great example. The two guys who got convicted (rightly so) were rapists at a BAC 3+ times the driving limit. They very likely are not rapists at a BAC of 1.0 or 1.5, which is still drunk but just not blind drunk. And, by the way, they also are not rapists (even if blind drunk) if the victim is not intoxicated to the point of unconsciousness.
First, alh, I’d totally have a Tab with you and CF, though I never watched Young and the Restless :-). We did all watch David Letterman together when he was the hot new thing on late night TV. That’s how old I am!
We didn’t have the “rules of comportment” you did re eating on the street, how to dress / behave at parties, etc. We were not told how to dress, except for rush events in which there were general guidelines on the relevant level of formality (nice pants, skirt, dress, etc.). We were asked to try to polish it up a bit if we wore our letters, but that meant just looking well-groomed as opposed to rolling out of bed. And of course there were rules related to living in the house, but those fell under your obligations with respect to phone duty, cleaning up after yourself, guys having to leave at a certain hour, etc.
As with any group of women, some were wilder and more into partying and others were quieter and more into gatherings with small groups of friends. That was all fine and good.
The safety guidelines we followed I think were just general safety tips - go with a buddy after dark, stay with your friends, don’t leave a drink unattended (though maybe that wasn’t around at the time), always have someone who is sober and in control. Honestly, they talk a LOT more about those safety tips today than we did in our day. But I can’t say they were about fraternities specifically - they were just the safety tips any person would follow when going out at night.
I think it’s because frat parties weren’t the be-all-end-all way to meet boys. They were a way, of course, but if you didn’t like that scene - and plenty didn’t - you could interact with boys in all kinds of other ways. I made guy friends through an organization I was involved in, that type of thing. We had exchanges / mixers on weekday nights that were much more low-key socializing. So there wasn’t this desperation that I smelled in the Indiana story.
As to “status” of houses? I’d be lying if I said there weren’t certain frats that a lot of the girls thought were the “hot” houses and wanted to be with, and consistently planned exchanges with, but if you went out with someone from a different house (as I did) or not-Greek at all, really, it was fine - it wasn’t even worthy of comment.
There was a hazing event at my alma mater a few weeks back, in which girls were involved and acted quite skankily (IMO). This was a frat that was known for being wild, and one that “our girls” never really hung around in the first place. There was no “status” in our minds for being skanky or slutty. Oh, I guess that’s slut-shaming, but whatever.
CF - I took a quick look at the 2012-13 report from the Aurora Center. It’s really hard to understand because they lump a whole bunch of stuff all together - from incest and sex work to stranger sexual assault, and their clients range from students to community members. So I don’t want to rely on this very much at all …
However,, it says that 6 incidents occurred at fraternities / sororities out of almost 400 incidents total. 82 incidents occurred in the victim’s room. There were 4 incidents in classrooms for Pete’s sake. So if I trust these numbers and use them naively (which I shouldn’t), it actually seems that frats in Minnesota might be some of the safest places to be ! Now I really don’t believe this, but I don’t know the Greek culture at Minnesota at all so maybe this means it’s one of the better ones.
Thanks for the data, that is the first time I have seen any assault/rape data that includes how many took place at fraternity houses. That has always been my major beef with these types of discussions, which have been going on for years on this site. Everyone targets the fraternities, even though there was never any data disclosed about rapes taking place there, other than an ambiguous 10% of campus assaults from RAINN. Thanks for that.
If dstark’s source is correct, about 3% of men are in fraternities at UofMN.
According to CF’s source, there were 428 “incidents” in 2012-13, 6 of which took place in a fraternity OR sorority.
For 2011-12, there were similarly 3 out of 464.
And 2010-11, there were 13 out of 402.
So, for the last two years, far fewer than 3% took place at fraternities. And for 2010-11, it was a little over 3%.
Granted, a large portion of the incidents were recorded as “unknown” for location.
I’d totally have a Tab with you and alh, Pizzagirl. Well, maybe not a Tab now, my tastes have moved on, but I guzzled Tab when I was in college.
That was to counter TransferGopher’s claim of zero incidents. Six is bigger than zero.
But notice the vast majority of cases didn’t have a location specified-- some of them might have been at fraternities. If I were to count up the incidents associated with fraternities, I’d count the number of incidents at fraternities. But I’d also include incidents where a fraternity brother takes a drunk woman back to her dorm or apartment and assaults her. So we ought to assume that probably some of the incidents that happened in the accuser’s room would be fraternity associated.
CF: Yes, I’m sure we could come up with a better beverage choice these days.
Marie wrote:
I’ve been thinking about this post since this morning. We now live in a very rural farming community where many of our neighbors never attended college. Most of them are also teetotaling Baptists. I assume the teens drink but also assume they are getting really mixed messages about alcohol and probably no good advice. What expectations are realistic to have of these kids when they get to the big state flagship with a huge greek presence. Can we expect these country girls to know the dangers of alcohol abuse and precautions to take at fraternity parties? I don’t think so. They don’t have savvy dads like northwesty to advise them. I wondered if maybe they were reading all the recent publicity about sexual assault on college campuses but it isn’t in the local paper. I have to drive 20 miles to get a NYTimes. Not everyone in my community has internet or computers. The kids do have internet access at school and it is getting more common to have internet on their phones, so maybe they would see headlines that way? I don’t have tv, so have no idea what is on nightly news. It just isn’t clear to me they have access to the information that would warn them about bad things that can happen at college.
It is my impression many colleges these days do have orientations that talk about sexual assault.