A few weeks ago, I was presented with a surprising visual of what Dartmouth's campus dialogue on sexual assault could look like. I was talking on the phone with my sister, Rachel, a Colby College '13, the night after the Sexual Abuse Awareness Program held its annual "Take Back the Night" rally. Rachel had been a key organizer of her campus's own rally, held the same week as ours. Over 200 people attended, many of them male athletes. Although only a handful of students had prepared speeches for the event, Rachel said that several more felt comfortable enough to come forward with their own stories. She told me, "I have never been more proud of my school."
When I recalled that our own rally attracted a crowd approximately a third of the size of Colby's, though Dartmouth has over twice as many undergraduates, I started to investigate why that might be. There is nothing remarkable about Colby's campus culture that would seem to foster positive discourse about sexual assault. Much of Colby's social scene is centered on male athletic teams (about one third of Colby's students are varsity athletes) and "underground" frats. On the first warm day of April this year, unofficially dubbed "skirt day," members of one of these frats allegedly held up cards that "scored" women's outfits, including one that read "go change" if they did not approve (one of them publicly apologized at Colby's Take Back the Night event).
Colby's dialogue on sexual assault has been accelerated not by administrative changes, but rather by the efforts of individual students that have expanded the discussion to the broader campus population. One student founded a group called "Male Athletes Against Violence," whose members have contributed to the circulation of an anti-violence pledge across athletic teams and encouraged their peers to engage in campus discourse about the issue. The "Colby College needs a gender and sexuality diversity resource center" Facebook group gained 500 members within just four hours of its creation, according to the school's student-run newspaper, The Colby Echo. The group has since continued to grow.
Looking at Colby's experience, there seems to be no reason why discussions about sexual assault cannot be extended to the broader Dartmouth community, rather than those groups that are already vocal about the issue. The impressive attendance and reactions to the "Sides of Sex" event at Alpha Delta fraternity earlier this month demonstrated that the involvement of people and groups with diverse interests including Greek houses, a capella groups, dance troupes and slam poetry groups has the power to encourage a more inclusive discussion on Dartmouth's "hook-up culture." The leadership role taken by the Panhellenic Council and the Inter-Fraternity Council in establishing policies to address assault in Greek houses indicates that students are capable of holding their peers accountable for their actions. Student-initiated efforts like these have the potential to shift campus discourse on sexual assault from antagonism to meaningful change.
I understand that discussions about sexual assault can be uncomfortable for all parties involved. My male friends tell me that they feel unfairly targeted for violations they do not commit, by simple virtue of their Greek affiliation or gender. The vague language surrounding what constitutes "consent," especially when further blurred by alcohol, fuels the common misperception that students report cases of sexual abuse in order to justify bad decisions. Both of these concerns miss the heart of the issue and reflect a pressing need for both male and female students to become better informed of the facts.
Although national statistics show that one in four female students will experience sexual assault at some point during their college careers, this does not translate to one in four male students being perpetrators of the offense. A survey of university students conducted by researchers from the University of Massachusetts and Brown University School of Medicine found that the majority of unreported rapists are repeat offenders, with an average of six rapes each, and that their crimes are generally calculated decisions rather than spur-of-the moment failures in judgment.
It is unfair to blame fraternity brothers or male students in general for crimes that a small minority of them commit. Nevertheless, it is unacceptable to foster a social dynamic in which the actions of perpetrators go unnoticed, or are dismissed as "drunken mistakes." Including diverse interests in the discussion about how best to address sexual assault on campus is not meant to imply an assumption of any party's guilt, but rather to recognize that representatives of these groups are particularly disposed to make meaningful changes. Moving forward, it is crucial that both male and female students understand this distinction.
