Welcome Guest [Log In] [Register]
Add Reply
UVA Rape Story Collapses; Duke Lacrosse Redux
Topic Started: Dec 5 2014, 01:45 PM (60,456 Views)
abb
Member Avatar

http://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2015/01/a-comparative-look-at-college-fraternity-party-rules-and-regulations

A comparative look at college fraternity party rules and regulations
University's new requirements equally as strict as peer schools

by Juliana Radovanovich and Kayla Eanes | Jan 26 2015 | 14 hours ago


Last Friday, all 31 of the University’s fraternities signed a new Fraternal Organization Agreement addendum, agreeing to new safety measures for social events. But some students have called into question the stringency of the requirements, which mandate sober brothers at each drink station and at stairs to residential rooms, regulate the types of alcohol present and how it is served, and require guest lists for all social functions. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, James Madison University and Virginia Tech, among others, similar safety measures already exist.

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

The Fraternity and Sorority Life Alcohol Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has required security guards and guest lists, along with other safety measures, since 1997. Aaron Bachenheimer, the Director of the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Life and Community Involvement at UNC, said these policies, when adhered to, make parties safer.

“There’s always challenges with policies,” Bachenheimer said. “You can create the greatest policy in the world, but policy is only as good as enforcement and accountability.”

For this reason, he said, education and training about these policies is necessary on an annual basis.

“Every year we go through a retraining of everyone in our community, to help them understand not only what the policy is but the responsibility for adherence to the policy,” Bachenheimer said.

At UNC, most of the challenges in regard to alcohol policy lie with enforcement and accountability, not with the policy itself.

“Most of our policies are verbatim FIPG [Fraternal Information and Planning Group] national risk management policies, so there wouldn’t be a lot to argue with,” Bachenheimer said. “All of our organizations already have a responsibility to adhere to those policies through their own national organizations.”

Almost all policies at the University of North Carolina are very similar to national risk management policy, which existed at the individual chapter level for all Greek life groups since before 1997, when the Fraternity and Sorority Life Alcohol Policy was first passed.

University of Maryland, College Park

The University of Maryland’s 2012 IFC/PHA Alcohol Management and Social Event Monitoring Policy requires two sober chapter officers at all events, a guest list of five invites per brother, “visible, easily accessible food located in the main guest area” and visibly displayed non-alcoholic beverages. Drinks are received in exchange for tickets from designated bartenders only.

Additionally, chapters of both fraternities and sororities must participate in sexual assault prevention or relationship violence prevention programs and train all new members in alcohol responsibility and risk management.

The university also requires dry recruitment events.

James Madison University

Fraternities at James Madison University are required to have a minimum of six sober brothers at “non-third party vendor events,” with at least one sober member from the organization’s executive board to oversee other designated sober members, according to the University’s Interfraternity and Panhellenic Councils Standards Policy.

Registered Greek events at JMU are required to have non-alcoholic beverages, excluding energy drinks, available and visible at the bar. Liquor and wine are prohibited from these events unless permitted by national policy. Similar to the University’s new addendum, beer must be served in its original container.

This policy also requires each fraternity or sorority president, social chair and risk manager to receive training on proper risk management and to educate other members about university policies before any social event.

Virginia Tech

For Greek events and parties at Virginia Tech, chapters’ main obligation is to register their event with the university.

“If they’re having an event that has alcohol at it, they just simply have to let us know that they’re having the event,” Director of Fraternity and Sorority Life Byron Hughes said. “We will work with the police department to essentially schedule a walkthrough before an event to make certain that they have taken care of all of the risk management guidelines that they are supposed to adhere to.”

Only fraternities and sororities located on-campus must register events with the university. There is no registration or approval process for Greek chapters either off-campus or without a house.

“Beyond this, there are no additional requirements other than creating a safe event and abiding with university policy and local laws,” Hughes said.

He said Virginia Tech and its fraternities and sororities have a relationship statement, or a broad statement which dives into specific obligations of both university and national chapters, instead of a signed agreement between every chapter.

Unlike the University’s new FOA addendum, that agreement does not specify policies regarding events or parties. It does, however, emphasize compliance with local, state and federal laws as well as university policies.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
abb
Member Avatar

http://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2015/01/bernstein-give-what-is-due

BERNSTEIN: Give what is due
Fraternities should not assume the University owes them due process
by Dani Bernstein | Jan 26 2015 | 15 hours ago

At the start of this semester, all University fraternities agreed to a new Fraternal Organization Agreement enhancing safety measures and creating other changes (though, notably, two fraternities signed “reluctantly” given a threat of suspension). Following the Rolling Stone fiasco and the conclusion that the gang rape alleged in that article did not occur at Phi Kappa Psi, Greek organizations and even my fellow columnist Nate Menninger are suggesting the administration treated fraternities unfairly by suspending them last semester — and by requiring new FOAs now.

In fact, Kappa Alpha Order and Alpha Tau Omega, the two fraternities that initially refused to sign the new FOA, claimed the University was sacrificing due process and will now possibly pursue legal remedies. The claims these groups are making against the University’s actions are valid in a general sense of fairness. But, in terms of a general conception of rights, fraternities cannot necessarily claim due process has been violated.

The concept of due process in America is rooted in our Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Since the Fourteenth Amendment expressly requires states to provide due process, and, being public, the University can be considered an arm of the state, our school therefore must apply the Fourteenth Amendment in its proceedings. This means, obviously, the University cannot arbitrarily expel students. But, this does not necessarily mean the University has a duty to apply due process to student organizations. While we have seen in the past that corporations can be considered people in certain legal realms, an organization is not the same as a corporation. Fraternities sign contracts with the University in the form of FOAs stipulating the rights they may be entitled to, and it is highly unlikely that such contracts provide for the application of due process to the extent it is required for individual students by law. While this does not definitively mean the University does not owe fraternities due process, there is no existing Virginia precedent to suggest it does.

If the University does owe fraternal organizations due process, this would only apply if the University deprives fraternities of their right to liberty or property (as prescribed by the Fourteenth Amendment). The question, then, would be: did the University deprive KA and ATO of their liberty and/or did it deprive them of any property by briefly suspending them and requiring new FOAs? It seems unlikely the University deprived the organizations of their liberty, as it suspended social activities, but it did not expel them or revoke their FOAs (save for Phi Kappa Psi, which voluntarily surrendered its FOA), and the new FOA addenda were drafted together with the IFC. Though sometimes a contract can be considered a property right, an FOA establishing the terms of a relationship between a fraternity and the University would not be considered property. If the University violated the contract it maintained with fraternities, this would not be a question of due process but simply a question of a breach of contract, for which KA and ATO can certainly sue, but as a question of contract law, and not one of due process.

Again, to be clear, this is not to comment on the fairness of the suspension or new FOA agreements — but the legality of the issue is not nearly as straightforward as some fraternities may suggest. A court could easily determine the University owes no due process to fraternities under any circumstances, or a court could find the University does owe due process, but that it did not violate that duty in this case as the issues of liberty and property do not apply (probably a more likely result). While fraternities could, much to their own benefit, achieve a ruling that the University both owes them due process and that these actions have violated that duty, it helps no one to simply throw the term “due process” around as though it is definitively owed. Doing so reveals a minimal understanding of that right.

Dani Bernstein is a Senior Associate Editor for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at d.bernstein@cavalierdaily.com.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
abb
Member Avatar

http://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2015/01/big-sister-is-watching

Big Sister is watching
Forbidding sororities’ formal participation in Boys’ Bid Night will not improve safety
by Managing Board | Jan 23 2015 | 01/23/15 12:58am

Presidents of national and international sorority organizations have distributed letters to presidents of University sorority chapters requesting they not participate in this year’s Boys' Bid Night. Safety issues were at the forefront of the decision.

Boys’ Bid Night can be a particularly high-risk activity because of the amount of binge-drinking. Two years ago, boys’ rush activities were restricted because an unusually high number of male and female rush and pledging participants ended up in the hospital for alcohol overconsumption. Sexual violence is also a concern, given that alcohol is often used as a method of incapacitation to make a potential victim more vulnerable.

All of these factors have been in consideration as part of an extensive discussion on safety at the University over the past several months, with both the administration and student groups working on new improvements. Though it is not illegitimate for national sorority organizations to worry about safety — and Boys’ Bid Night may be of particular concern — a national organization adding more restrictions on top of safety regulations already established will not improve safety within the community.

Initiatives to make Greek social events safer have already been put in place, in the form of new FOA addenda signed by all University fraternity chapters, which IFC President Ben Gorman says will be followed on Bid Night. These rules will hopefully make all parties, including those on Bid Night, safer, but we have acknowledged there is still high potential for violation, and operation within loopholes. Assuming, as the national chapters are, that Bid Night remains a more high-risk environment, additional safety precautions are necessary.

But forbidding participation as a Greek-affiliated group is not an effective safety measure. As we argued in our editorial about Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s national end to pledging, orders from distant national Greek organizations cannot overpower the larger cultural atmosphere in a closer, more tight-knit community at a university. New pledges will want to have the same experience their brothers or their sisters had. Sorority members will likely still celebrate on Bid Night. But the national organizations’ restrictions will likely decrease the level of safety. Sororities often organize pre-bid night talks about safety plans and assign older members to look out for younger ones. Such organized preparation is less likely to occur when national leadership expects no formal participation at all.

Barring participation in a deeply-rooted tradition is more likely to cause resentment and divisiveness during a time when collective cooperation and positive thinking are necessary. Chapters should have the opportunity to discuss their approaches to safe celebration on Boys’ Bid Night and other outings in order to improve overall safety in the Greek community. National Greek leadership may have opinions to offer in such discussions, but they do not have an understanding of the general climate of the University. So even though they may have a high degree of formal authority, their potential to produce effective policies that actually influence behavior is low. There is no doubt the Greek system has room for improvement when it comes to safety, but blanket bans like this one are not helpful.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Foxlair45
Member Avatar

LTC8K6
Jan 26 2015, 04:18 PM
Foxlair45
Jan 26 2015, 01:32 PM
LTC8K6
Jan 26 2015, 12:12 PM
UVa may have trouble, given their own response to the report of the assault. They certainly didn't investigate it much. Had they investigated Jackie's story, this could not have gone very far, and it certainly never ends up in RS.

After all, one of the major points of the RS article was UVa's insufficient response to the rape.

If UVa had actually investigated the criminal report of a rape, from Jackie, they would never have gotten into the situation.

It's way too much to think that they would have disciplined Jackie for the false story, though.

They would never have done that, despite the blatant lies.

But at least they could defend themselves with their investigation of the rape claim.
This directly from the RS article:

If Jackie wished, she could file a criminal complaint with police. Or, if Jackie preferred to keep the matter within the university, she had two choices. She could file a complaint with the school's Sexual Misconduct Board, to be decided in a "formal resolution" with a jury of students and faculty, and a dean as judge. Or Jackie could choose an "informal resolution," in which Jackie could simply face her attackers in Eramo's presence and tell them how she felt; Eramo could then issue a directive to the men, such as suggesting counseling. Eramo presented each option to Jackie neutrally, giving each equal weight. She assured Jackie there was no pressure – whatever happened next was entirely her choice.

There was no investigation because that lying little wench didn't want one. She knew it was a fake and the last thing she wanted was somebody poking holes in her story.
She reported a rape to UVa officials.

There was nothing at all stopping UVa from conducting a thorough investigation.

In fact, they can even be more thorough than the police.

If I were a university official, I would not want the people/psychopaths described by Jackie roaming around free on my campus without at least talking to them to see if they really are that far off of plumb.

In fact, I would want to talk to Jackie's friends about their attitude almost as much as I'd want to talk to the alleged rapists.

I think it would be really interesting to learn more about exactly what Jackie reported to UVa officials.

And exactly what, if any, action UVa took in response.

It's hard to believe the answer is "none".

Unless I missed something, we know almost nothing about Jackie's original report to UVa, and UVa's original reaction to that report.

Does a false report deserve any protection from public view?
I am not sure who the University officials would have talked to. She apparently didn't name names and the one she did name didn't exist. Sorry, you can't make chicken salad out of chicken s___ (as a dear old boss of mine used to say).
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
LTC8K6
Member Avatar
Assistant to The Devil Himself
UVa does not deny that Jackie reported the rape to Dean Nicole Eramo, head of UVA's Sexual Misconduct Board.

I assume that they would defend themselves from that claim if it were false.

"Because nobody wants to send their daughter to the rape school."

Is a quote from Eramo, according to Jackie.
Edited by LTC8K6, Jan 26 2015, 07:31 PM.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Quasimodo

Excellent poster comments at the site:

http://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2015/01/interviewing-phi-psi-on-aftermath-of-rolling-stone-article-at-uva

although the last one should sound familiar ("something happened"); the rest are right on target

Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Rusty Dog
Member Avatar

Quasimodo
Jan 27 2015, 08:54 AM
Excellent poster comments at the site:

http://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2015/01/interviewing-phi-psi-on-aftermath-of-rolling-stone-article-at-uva

although the last one should sound familiar ("something happened"); the rest are right on target

I especially liked the next-to-the-last comment.
Online Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
abb
Member Avatar

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/01/27/u-va-sorority-sisters-ordered-to-stay-home-saturday-night-for-their-own-safety-while-fraternity-brothers-party/

U-Va. sorority sisters ordered to stay home Saturday night for their own safety – while fraternity brothers party
By Susan Svrluga January 27 at 8:40 PM

The University of Virginia campus. (Rebecca Drobis/ For The Washington Post)

Sorority sisters at the University of Virginia were ordered by their national chapters to avoid fraternity events this weekend — a mandate that many of the women said was irrational, sexist and contrary to the school’s culture.

It’s not about one night of parties, several students said, but about their ability to make their own choices.

And they’re not taking that lightly.

The rule came after a traumatic fall semester in Charlottesville, including the violent death of a student and now-discredited allegations of a gang rape at a U-Va. fraternity. Both forced a thorough examination of campus safety, drinking culture and Greek life.

The university administration just days ago lifted a suspension of fraternity and sorority activities that came in the wake of the sexual assault allegations, a break that the university community used to have a broad discussion about student safety in the Greek system. In order to have the ban lifted — immediately ahead of spring rush, when students join fraternities — the school’s Greek houses agreed to new rules amid new student-led initiatives to increase safety.

Many students had been looking forward to celebrating with old friends and new members during the fraternities’ bid night, scheduled for Saturday, Jan. 31.

There are 16 sororities on U-Va.’s campus that are part of the National Panhellenic Conference, with more than 2,000 members, according to the campus Inter-Sorority Council. The NPC can come to “unanimous agreements” among its national presidents that are binding on local chapters and their members.

At some U-Va. chapters in recent days, students described mandatory emergency meetings with representatives from their national chapter telling them they risked suspension, fines and other penalties if any of them attended bid night parties. Boys’ Bid Night is typically a night when sorority sisters wear matching tank tops marked with their house symbols and go from house to house sharing drinks with friends.

Now some sororities are planning mandatory in-house retreats that night, to avoid any risk of inadvertently violating the rule.

At some chapters, women were told not only to avoid going to fraternity parties on Boys’ Bid Night, but to avoid any social gathering with fraternity members, said Ben Gorman, president of the Inter-Fraternity Council at U-Va. That would mean a ban on attending off-campus parties or gatherings at bars that night after a hotly anticipated basketball game on campus, which pits the undefeated No. 2 Cavaliers against No. 4 Duke. “People are very agitated and very upset, and see this as an obstacle to larger cultural change a violation of free rights and student free will.”
Click here for more information!

A university spokesman deferred questions to the National Panhellenic Conference, as did the incoming president of the Inter-Sorority Council at U-Va.

A spokeswoman for the National Panhellenic Conference said the mandate comes not from the umbrella group but from each national chapter president. “Of course, NPC supports the safety of their women, so they do support those national presidents making that decision and encouraging sorority women to plan sisterhood events and other ‘safer’ options,” Michelle Bower said.

An emergency Student Council bill aimed at addressing the issue passed 14-0-3 on Tuesday night, urging the national chapter leaders to join students on campus to talk about the issue Friday. “This was entirely top-down — an edict,” said Abraham Axler, a second-year student who is chair of the representative body. “That is not how things operate at U-Va.”

A petition, started online on Monday, had almost 2,000 signatures by midday Tuesday. It reads, in part:

“Instead of addressing rape and sexual assault at UVa, this mandate perpetuates the idea that women are inferior, sexual objects. It is degrading to Greek women, as it appears that the [National Panhellenic Conference] views us as defenseless and UVa’s new fraternal policies as invalid. Allowing the NPC to prevent us from celebrating (what used to be) a tight-knit community, sends the message that we are weak.”

And another widely-circulated letter, directed to the National Panhellenic Conference, reads, in part:

“Our concerns lie in the way sorority women are being used as leverage to change the actions and behaviors of fraternity men. This resolution has misconstrued us as a passive aggregate rather than active agents for change. It has also had the unintended consequence of subjugating women. … Women have historically been the targets of sexual violence, and forbidding us to exercise our agency plays dangerously into gender stereotypes surrounding the issue.” The mandate is diametrically opposed to the central values of the sororities in fostering and supporting women’s strength, the letter continues, and, “This solution is not long-term, realistic, or sustainable.”
Susan Svrluga is a reporter for the Washington Post, covering higher education for the Grade Point blog.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
cks
Member Avatar

Back to the nineteenth century - the idea that women are incapable of making decisions for themselves.

The Pankhursts, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, among others are rolling in their graves.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
abb
Member Avatar

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2015/01/28/3616373/uva-sororities-frat-parties/

UVA Sorority Sisters Ordered To Skip Frat Parties To Avoid Being Raped

by Tara Culp-Ressler Posted on January 28, 2015 at 11:17 am

"UVA Sorority Sisters Ordered To Skip Frat Parties To Avoid Being Raped"


Greeks at the University of Virginia are now free to party again, with the conclusion of a temporary suspension following widespread controversy over an alleged sexual assault at a fraternity house. But not everyone will be participating. Sorority sisters at UVA have been ordered to avoid frat parties this weekend.

The Washington Post reports that the national chapters of the school’s sororities handed down the mandate, which is upsetting many students on campus who see it as targeting sorority women rather than placing the focus on fraternity men.

This semester marks Spring Rush, when students may join fraternities. A “Boy’s Bid Night” is planned for this Saturday — an event involving parties at each fraternity house that sorority sisters typically attend. But now, representatives from national chapters are telling UVA sorority sisters to stay away from bid night parties, even though the fraternities themselves are not being restricted. Women may face penalties like suspensions and fines if they attend Saturday night’s gatherings.

Tammie Pinkston, the international president of Alpha Delta Pi, told UVA’s student newspaper that “the activities on Men’s Bid Night present significant safety concerns” and encouraged sororities to “plan alternative sisterhood events” for that night.

Representatives from the National Panhellenic Conference (NPC), the umbrella organization for more than two dozen women’s sororities, said that the guidelines came from the presidents of each chapter rather than from the NPC itself. However, the organization indicated its support for restricting UVA’s bid night parties.

“Of course, NPC supports the safety of their women, so they do support those national presidents making that decision and encouraging sorority women to plan sisterhood events and other ‘safer’ options,” Michelle Bower, a spokeswoman for the NPC, told the Washington Post.

UVA students don’t see it quite the same way. More than 2,000 people have signed an online petition pressuring the chapter heads to revoke the bid night policy, saying it “perpetuates the idea that women are inferior, sexual objects” and “sends the message that we are weak.” Another open letter to the NPC criticizes the mandate for using sorority women “as leverage to change the actions and behaviors of fraternity men.”

“Women have historically been the targets of sexual violence, and forbidding us to exercise our agency plays dangerously into gender stereotypes surrounding the issue,” that letter states. “The mandate suggests, inadvertently perhaps, that women should not and cannot exist in certain spaces.”

Even though some of the details in the explosive Rolling Stone article about an alleged gang rape at a UVA fraternity have since been called into question, the campus has remained embroiled in a larger discussion about addressing issues of sexual violence. Several survivors of sexual have come forward to say that the Rolling Stone story resonated with them because they believe the school is grappling with a broader rape culture. Before that article’s publication, UVA was already under a federal investigation for allegedly violating Title IX, which requires colleges to adequately address reports of gender-based violence.

School officials have been wrestling with how to best respond to a flood of negative press this fall. After temporarily suspending fraternity activity, UVA administrators required frats to propose reformed “party regulations” to ensure the safety of students. The university’s Interfraternity Council (IFC) came up with a list of policies that include providing more snacks and bottled water at parties. Kegs of beer and premixed punches will no longer be served.

Efforts to prevent sexual violence often rely on cursory solutions like encouraging students to drink less alcohol, or telling women to avoid attending parties or walking alone. As UVA students point out, many of these recommendations disproportionately target women’s behavior and limit the way they move through public spaces, rather than attempting to change the behavior of rapists. Sexual violence prevention advocates say this approach ultimately fuels victim-blaming.

Real solutions will require more systematic change. For instance, there’s been a recent push toward reforming the current policy among National Panhellenic Conference sororities that keeps their houses dry. Right now, fraternity houses are the only places where Greeks gather to drink, which effectively means they’re the gatekeepers of the party scene and set the social terms — like picking a party theme and requiring attendees to wear skimpy clothing, for instance. “Fraternity members feel so entitled to women’s bodies, because women have no ownership of the social scene,” Molly Reckford, the social chair of Sigma Delta, told the New York Times.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
abb
Member Avatar

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/sexist-mandate-bans-uva-sorority-girls-frat-parties-article-1.2094770

Some UVA sorority sisters banned from 'Boy's Bid Night' frat party over safety fears, leading to cries of sexism

'Why must women make adjustments while men can continue?' one member questioned after the no-party policy was put in place by Alpha Delta Pi. 'Boy’s Bid Night' is a fraternity event that welcomes new members. Following the controversy at UVA involving an alleged gang rape at a Phi Kappa Psi, some sorority leaders are nervous about members attending wild parties.
BY Meg Wagner

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Wednesday, January 28, 2015, 10:34 AM


The president of an international sorority told members of the group's University of Virginia chapter to stay home from a big frat party planned for this weekend — instructions that some members saw as sexist.

Tammie Pinkston, international president of Alpha Delta Pi sorority, issued the directive out of fears of frat-house dangers, as the UVA community gears up for Saturday’s "Boy’s Bid Night," a fraternity event in which new members are welcomed into the campus brotherhoods.

The night of parties was expected to be one of the first big fraternity events since the prestigious university lifted a ban on Greek life earlier this month. UVA suspended all fraternity and sororities in November, after the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity chapter was implicated in an alleged gang rape said to have taken place at one of its parties.

In a Jan. 20 letter, Pinkston requested that all 2,000 sorority sisters at UVA refrain from attending "Boy's Bid Night" parties, the Cavalier Daily reported.

“We believe the activities on Men’s Bid Night present significant safety concerns for all of our members and we are united in our request that the 16 (National Panhellenic Conference) sororities not participate,” Pinkston wrote.

Pinkston said the UVA campus’ “tumultuous” fall semester, highlighted by a Rolling Stone article on the alleged gang rape, should prompt the Greek system to prioritize safety.
People gather with signs during a protest at the front porch of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the University of Virginia in November. Ryan M. Kelly/AP People gather with signs during a protest at the front porch of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the University of Virginia in November.

The National Panhellenic Conference — which oversees 16 sorority chapters at UVA — said it supported Pinskton's directive but could not impose it on all chapters. But sorority members fired back and created an online petition urging the university to revoke the “discriminatory” order, which they say “perpetuates the idea that women are inferior, sexual objects.” More than 2,000 people signed the petition by Wednesday morning.

“The policy is sexist, implying that women can only be safe by being kept away from men,” one signer wrote.

“Why must women make adjustments while men can continue?” another asked.

Fraternity brothers said they were also upset because the mandate vilifies them and the Greek system as a whole.

“I think fraternity members are frustrated,” UVA Inter-Fraternity Council President Ben Gorman told the student newspaper. “They have been written off as incapable of being responsible individuals without the chance to demonstrate [that] they can hold safe social events.”
Students walk past the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house, where a woman claimed she was gang raped in 2012. Jay Paul/Getty Images Students walk past the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house, where a woman claimed she was gang raped in 2012.

Some of national sororities sent representatives to visit their UVA chapters this week to outline similar stay-at-home edicts. The sorority leaders threatened to punish the local chapters with suspensions and/or fines if their members defied the ban, students told the Washington Post.

Fearing punishment from their superiors, some UVA sororities have scheduled mandatory in-house meetings or sisters-only retreats for Saturday — creating a conflict for members that they hope keeps them away from frat parties.

UVA was embroiled in controversy last fall by the Rolling Stone article, which described in graphic detail the alleged gang rape of a student named Jackie inside a campus frat house in 2012.

But after it was published in November, critics quickly questioned the reporter's efforts to track down the alleged suspect and the credibility of her sources. Charlottesville, Va., police launched an investigation, but investigators closed the case earlier this month, saying they failed to “substantive basis to confirm that the allegations.”

Still, the article prompted the school to reevaluate its Greek system.

During a months-long Greek life shutdown, sorority and fraternity leaders developed new rules to “create a safer student environment,” some of which regulate alcohol at student parties.

mwagner@nydailynews.com
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
abb
Member Avatar

http://jezebel.com/rush-after-a-rape-on-campus-a-uva-alum-goes-back-to-ru-1682251600

Rush After 'A Rape On Campus': A UVA Alum Goes Back to Rugby Road
Jia Tolentino

Today 11:10am

It's a blue, cold Thursday in January and I'm walking down Rugby Road on the first night of fraternity rush at the University of Virginia, brushing past groups of identical gossiping boys in matching preppy outfits: fleeces, checked oxfords, khakis, boots. "Excuse me," they say politely when our coats touch, then turn back to each other and their offhand drawling: "What was that back there, Bronyfest?" "Not enough of a tobacco enthusiast for that house, I can't just sit around ripping cigs." "I wasn't feeling them, dude, they had, like, a serial rapist vibe."

I am startled at the boy who just threw that out in the winter night to his two friends, because all four of us are crossing the street on our way to Phi Psi, the fraternity whose huge Christmas-lit mansion is a landmark in the middle of the physical fraternity scene in a way that the fraternity itself—until Rolling Stone—was not. But the boys were talking about a druggier, prep-school frat; they're not talking about Phi Psi.

No one here is talking about Phi Psi, at least not "Phi Psi," the figural fraternity or the true, unchecked scourge of sexual assault that it was used to represent. (The frat has since been cleared of charges, with "no basis to believe that an incident occurred.") In fact, if there is a single male interacting with the Greek system—or even one human on campus generally—who wouldn't rather tuck away last semester as a bad dream, I won't hear about it over the next five days. It was enough that Sabrina Rubin Erdely's egregiously misreported gang rape story put everyone at Thanksgiving dinner with Grandma asking about consent mechanics between bites of mashed potato, but there were three undergraduate suicides, too, and Hannah Graham, a first-year girl found dead a month after she went to a party and then disappeared.

It was a lot. Everyone's ready to move on. Rush numbers are robust and steady, both for frats and sororities, which rope in a third of the undergraduate population: the boys in fleeces on the street are just trying to hurry up, bro, and belong. "Those guys are so Southern I felt racist just walking in," one says. "That one dude was gay as f*ck," says another. Their elementary language belies both the bigoted underpinnings of the Greek system that are common to every Southern prestige structure—classism, racism, homophobia, sexism—as well as the genuine desire among many participants in these structures to process and transcend the bad blood that stains the corners of their party.

The boys walk into the Phi Psi house, which is—as per usual, and like all the other frats I'll see over the weekend—gently flouting the university rules that mandate a "dry" rush process. I keep going, and a blonde girl representing her Christian student group gives me a set of hand warmers. "Good luck!" she says happily.

I fall into a swarm of girls, also rushing, all in loose staticky curls, high boots, tiny skirts that disappear under black quilted jackets. They line up outside sorority houses, whose doors open for brief minutes, little portals to golden light and a stack of hotties on the stairs who clap their Potential New Members through the entryway in part 49 of 204,583 of the elaborately choreographed (and actually dry) process that is sorority rush. The girls will receive their bids on Monday, and, newly crowned with colors and "sisters," they'll get to attend increasingly elaborate fraternity events until the bender explodes in a series of white-boy mobs and Greek letters on January 31, everyone finally sorted by manner and wealth and vibe.

It was almost a decade ago when I did this, in these same houses: 17, my name scrawled in silver on a name tag, a cowboy boot and a music note glitter-stickered on either side. I was chubby from shots of sweet liquor; I was always trying to dance. By that time I had already endured my first and only attempted sexual assault of college, which did not occur within the framework of the Greek system. Raised in Texas, I found Virginia rush to be warmly effortless in comparison to what my friends were doing at schools farther south, and still it had the same brazen superficiality, the same savage efficiency: it was a process that showed you less who you were than who you wanted to be.

I keep walking. Boys apologize when we get too close. I get to the Corner, the undergrad strip of bars and restaurants, and slip into a wooden booth in everyone's old standby bar, the Virginian. My friend Steph is there; we're the only two non-white people in the place. She asks me how my lap around Rugby went. "Great," I say. "All the boys keep moving out of my way."

"I know!" she says enthusiastically. "Isn't it funny, how nice they are?"

"I used to love it," I say. Around us, girls are dancing on the tables.

"I still love it," she says. "It makes it impossible to hate anything about this place in a simplistic way."

Rush After 'A Rape On Campus': A UVA Alum Goes Back to Rugby Road

Sabrina Rubin Erdely started looking for a touchstone travesty in June of last year. She interviewed students at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Penn, and soon found herself floating south down the prestige river to the University of Virginia: a tradition-heavy school, not unique in its miscarriages of sexual assault justice, but distinct in its particular intersection of public obligation and private interests, bourbon-chugging and obsessive respectability, obedience to tradition and individual intellectual spine.

There, she found a girl she'd call Jackie telling a wild, horrible story of gang rape as fraternity initiation. It was something so violent as to fall out of the unprosecutable "gray area" that many people don't even consider troubling; a brutal crime covered up by institution (male privilege) within institution (the Greek system) within institution (an elite university).

Erdely homed in on UVA, contacting administrators who made themselves less than available. She interviewed students, who talked gamely but grew cautious after word spread about her interview practices: multiple people told me that, for example, after the reporter spent hours talking to the president of the all-male sexual assault peer education group One in Four, she told him that she wasn't going to use anything he told her. The conversation hadn't been juicy enough, sources claim she said; he'd answered her questions "too well." (He was reportedly the one to tape the conversation; Erdely did not.)

Erdely also made a point to interview women who had survived sexual assault at the university, who then started to realize that their stories wouldn't make the cut. What may have been her well-intentioned acknowledgment of the poor state of consent dialogue led Erdely to create a narrative that pushed "normal" assault and its attendant nuances completely off the margins; mild-mannered and articulate rape survivors who spend 30 hours a week conducting peer education appear in the Rolling Stone article as crop-top-clad fixtures of "UVA After Dark," saying things like, "It's a good idea to act drunker than you really are."

November drew closer, and Jackie's story was the one Erdely latched onto, although she never attempted to verify it with UVA administrators once during their email exchanges, and Jackie—perhaps understanding that her story wouldn't stand up to scrutiny—was feeling coerced. Pre-emptive meetings were called all over campus, fraternities started making tighter guest lists for their parties; the week before the article came out, students talked about it in class, making guesses as to which frat would be accused.

And then it was up, and it was a blockbuster: a graphically violent gang-rape lede as the emblem of a preppy cash-and-reputation nightmare institution full of violent frat boys and the spineless, selfish girls who loved them. The shocked UVA student body rallied in favor of the justice they didn't know they had been denying each other. "How could we not believe it?" said Charlotte Cruze, a fourth-year sorority member. " Rolling Stone is a big magazine. She wasn't just a random writer. She'd been here for months. Who was I to doubt anyone's story?"

There was a Board of Visitors meeting, a rally, a memorial. The Phi Psi house was vandalized; people gathered in front of it, marching with "Burn Down the Frats" signs. (Naturally, a miniature backlash followed: male alumni yelled "Nobody wants to rape you!" at marchers and the memorial was vandalized.) The Phi Psi fraternity brothers moved into hotels. One of them, I'm told, cried to a friend, saying he didn't know what kind of an institution he'd become part of. (He might have known, anyway: a woman named Liz Seccuro was very much gang raped at Phi Psi in the '80s, getting closure only when her attacker wrote her a letter decades later, confessing the details that UVA's administration had refused to believe. One dean asked her, while her ribs were still broken, if it had just been "regrettable sex." )

Five years after I'd left the UVA Greek system, I read "A Rape on Campus" as an outsider account about a true problem, written by someone good at cherry-picking. I knew what rape was like on UVA's campus: common, hidden, complicated to adjudicate—just like it is everywhere else. For me, the article exposed more in the tenor of its responses: friends from college prefacing their own rape stories with, "I know this isn't as bad as Jackie's"; my boyfriend on the phone with his former frat brothers having heartbreakingly earnest arguments with their opinions that the piece rang as "fantasy." After the piece came out, I interviewed one of 14 UVA women ever to convict her assailant of sexual misconduct within the school's system—it is likely true that your UVA career would be more at risk for fudging a chem lab report in front of the wrong people than from f*cking a near-unconscious 18-year-old—and a handful of guy friends responded to me with not just, "not all men" but also, "not all successfully charged rapists."

So it took me a day or two to admit that I found many of Erdely's details unrecognizable. No one says "UVrApe"; no one I know has ever heard the Rugby Road-themed "traditional fight song" that poetically ("f*ck for 50 cents"/"panties on the fence") separated the article's sections. And, in the words of one sorority girl I talked to in Charlottesville: "We knew something was bullshit when she wrote that Phi Psi was a top-tier frat."

Details aside, Charlottesville was reeling. By the weekend, the entire Greek system was suspended. ("Even now, you're blaming women," read an email from one sorority to the Inter-Sorority Council.) While students went home for Thanksgiving, other journalists re-reported Erdely's work, and the story's foundations started to crumble. Ten days after the story broke, Rolling Stone issued a retraction, and the pendulum at UVA swung the other way.

"If you're going to deliberately avoid nuance in your article, you're going to get a reaction to match," an alum told me. Emails calling for mandatory reporting, automatic police involvement and the expulsion of the accused (all terrible ideas) were replaced by emails calling for Jackie's expulsion and a formal apology to the fraternities for the suspension of their civil liberties (equally bad). #IStandWithJackie competed with #f*ckJackie on Yik Yak, the anonymous, localized gossip app. Details about the story's process came out: the accused were never contacted, the date of the incident was never double-checked, Jackie was lying, and railroaded into the spotlight on a story that now appears to be a PTSD-laced delusional flashback obscuring the details about an actual, "lesser" assault. ("Was that what rape had to look like to get everyone to care?" asked Maya Hislop, a graduate student.)

By December, "A Rape on Campus" was done for, while rape on campus was still well in sway—further concealed by the powerful, reinforced (and in practice, exceedingly rare) narrative of the falsely accused. Sympathy slid (as it doesn't do in a vacuum) to those poor fraternity men, and the underhanded logic of Erdely's article stuck where the facts had not.
"Was that what rape had to look like to get everyone to care?"

Now the mood among undergraduates at the University of Virginia is exhausted, cautious cynicism, tugging at the Energizer Bunny sincerity that defines student life. There is the sense that, last semester, everyone was forced by someone else to cry wolf: Jackie, Rolling Stone, the fraternities, women, the administration, the students in achingly sincere responses that now seem dissipated into the air.

"The article wasn't right in a factual sense or a justice sense, either," said Charlotte Cruze, across from me at a bar booth, bright-eyed and put-together after 12 hours of rush. "It was about supporting women, but she wrote all the women up as dumb and weak." She tells me what her sorority sister sent to group text the morning of the article's release: "She made us look like sex slaves to the patriarchy."

Erdely did do that, and worse: in trying to expose rape at UVA, she obscured it. The story contained not just factual errors but a fundamental contradiction: a reporter trying to make a cold-blooded fraternity gang rape story both salaciously anomalous and blandly representative at once.

Jackie's story is either atypical or typical. It can't be both. So: which is it? What is actually happening within these fraternity houses at UVA?

Rush After 'A Rape On Campus': A UVA Alum Goes Back to Rugby Road

It's Friday, the second night of rush, and I'm by the huge gym next to my first-year dorms. A blue bus pulls up, the carriage that will take us all the way down Rugby Road. About 40 white male teenagers dressed like soccer dads shuffle on, followed by me, all my lipstick wiped off so I can "pass."

It's warmer tonight: fleece vests instead of pullovers, boat shoes instead of boots. The boys chug Monster energy drinks in the fluorescent light, check their makeshift schedules on their iPhones, and absentmindedly talk shit. The guy behind me says, "My parents only want me to join the ones with a good reputation." Well, sure. I think about the second-year sorority girl I had coffee with that morning.

"I do want Phi Psi to have a second chance," she said. "So I don't want to sound rude—but, honestly, can you imagine calling your mom and telling her you pledged Phi Psi?"

I can't. And I've been wondering: who is going to pledge there this year? I never knew anyone in Phi Psi, so I've been asking everyone I talk to what the frat is actually like. (Responses include "stoners"; "guys like my buddy Jason, but not cool"; "the least weird of the weird frats"; "engineering school"; "I have literally stolen two handles of vodka out of one of their pickup trucks but that's all I know.") But their big house is crowded with people every night, light blazing from the windows. The other frats have their blinds drawn.

On the bus, I turn around in my seat and ask the two guys behind me what houses they're liking. They rattle off some letters (not Phi Psi) but say it's a long process, who knows what'll happen. "So long," I say sympathetically. "At least it's more fun than girls rush. We can't even drink."

"Technically we aren't supposed to, either," they say. I ask if enforcement has gotten any worse this year due to—we exchange an exhausted look— you know. They say no.

"Cooool," I say. We get off the bus in the middle of Rugby; the boys disappear into the evening.

Rush After 'A Rape On Campus': A UVA Alum Goes Back to Rugby Road

Now is a good enough time as any to mention that—although I was in a sorority and my boyfriend of many years was in a frat and five years ago I would've been slamming shots at Down Under with the worst of them—I am, for obvious reasons, getting dead air from every fraternity guy I have formally reached out to, even the ones I contact through close mutual friends. The exception is a fourth-year named Win Jordan, a member of Phi Delt, a frat with a dry house and an upstanding reputation. Jordan works with One in Four, the male-to-male peer education group, and has spent much of his free time in the last two years talking to dorms, frats, and sports teams about sexual assault.

What's that like, I asked him. "Apathy is more disheartening than outright resistance," he said.

But Jordan was optimistic about the fraternity system: the fact that it's an enormous grouping of students who are accountable to UVA for their social functions, the fact that recent rule revisions seem to be attempting to use the organizational hierarchy to implement change. Nearly all the frats voluntarily signed a new agreement to operate under a new set of rules: no kegs, no liquor unless under strict conditions, accessible food and bottled water, three sober brothers, outside security, a guest list. (I feel certain that no frat will follow these rules to the letter in actuality, the same way that hazing and underage drinking are technically prohibited but both things are facilitated with relative formality every day.)

"Parties aren't the most important thing about fraternity life," Jordan says—something that many guys have said, sincerely, to skeptical me—and adds that he thinks a better way to facilitate internal change at fraternities is through actual conversations, in the hours when it's just guys hanging at the house. "But you can't sign a paper necessitating that into action."

I ask Jordan whether or not he thinks there's an open admission among frat guys that assault is a problem. He hesitates. "I've surrounded myself with people that believe this," he says. "But it's hard to say."

"It's hard to say," says Charlotte Cruze, when I ask her the same question. "They don't think rape has happened anywhere near them. They think that if there was a problem, we would know. People would tell."

People would tell, we say to each other, about something like this:

"Grab its motherf*cking leg," she heard a voice say. And that's when Jackie knew she was going to be raped.

She remembers every moment of the next three hours of agony, during which, she says, seven men took turns raping her, while two more —- her date, Drew, and another man —- gave instruction and encouragement. She remembers how the spectators swigged beers, and how they called each other nicknames like Armpit and Blanket. She remembers the men's heft and their sour reek of alcohol mixed with the pungency of marijuana.

"If it had been a different frat," an undergrad girl tells me, "a place that everyone knows is aggressive—if it had been a scene with a ton of coke on the ground—if there hadn't been those Animal House ripoff details about people who we're supposed to believe are nicknamed 'Blanket,' then maybe. But frat guys from the beginning knew it wasn't true. They knew there was something about it."

The frat boys knew. They just knew Jackie was lying. This "sense of conviction," buoyed in part by selfishness and outright denial, has bothered me from the minute the story came out, through the retraction, through now. "This doesn't fit my experience," these frat boys say.

"Great," I want to tell them. "Then what do you have to lose?"

But anyway, regardless of motivations, the deniers were right: Jackie's story wasn't true. It wasn't true in the larger sense, either, about the real ways that violence—economic, physical, cultural, sexual—is actually protected within the Greek system.

Fraternities do not have a monopoly on rapists: not at UVA, not at any frat, not even the deep Southern ones where upwards of 100 guys live in the house. (The plumbing; one shudders.) But: what the fraternity system does collect together is a group of male teenagers who enter their organization through rites of interpersonal physical violence, and who, military-style, reproduce this violence onto each other's bodies. "Thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, [they] cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities," wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1785, about the male children of Virginian slave-owners. The sentiment there is still viable. Fraternities are worth examining as groups of rich, young, mostly white boys who were either born or bred into a tradition of getting away with things they should not.

This doesn't mean rape, of course, but perhaps you'll see how it's related. When I was an undergrad, a frat boy accidentally and infamously forwarded a hazing schedule to his club sports team, an email with the order to give pledges (among other stuff) a "pill/line." The fraternity—an ultra-rich group with a clever dues structure of having members pay nothing while in college but tithe a portion of their income later on—lawyered up, lawyered out. Students died at and after fraternity parties while I was in school: girls fell out of windows; a first-year got in a DUI car wreck during a hazing event; a Southern frat put on blackface. None of them got anything more than probation, none got kicked off campus (though UVA has disbanded some chapters since I graduated) and perhaps more importantly, none of them were effectively shamed by the student population.
What the fraternity system does collect together is a group of male teenagers who enter their organization through rites of interpersonal physical violence, and who, military-style, reproduce this violence onto each other's bodies.

In fact, the reaction to the "antics" of frat boys is much more likely to be the opposite: a blind, cooing Southern protectiveness, one that—crucially—does not at all preclude frat-friendly women from being smart, self-determined, or in control. One year while I was at UVA, during the season where frat pledges walk around looking like someone just dog-collared them in a pile of gefilte fish and basted them with a 40, a sorority girl sent another locally infamous email in which she told girls in her chapter to carry Advil, bottled water and sandwiches to class to administer to the cute little suffering dudes as needed. "Just in case!" she wrote happily. That girl, with her strange priorities, probably pulled six figures at McKinsey straight out of school.

But in a national context, UVA's Greek system is legitimately low-key. Sororities don't haze or send 5,000-word emails about coating your person in Vaseline. Fraternities don't, as they do in other places, force their pledges to beat each other unconscious. Greek students at Virginia are just trying to meet their best men and future maids of honor, just trying to find someone to smoke weed with on a Sunday; they're just trying to follow in their grandparents' footsteps (possible only, of course, if said grandparents are white); they're just trying to put on a neon tank top and hook up with the best-looking rich person they can. "What's the f*cking big deal?" they might say, reading this. It's just a good time, isn't it? I met my boyfriend seven years ago at a sorority pre-game; he lived in a frat house and came out much sweeter than me. I, like the majority (but certainly not all) of the current and former UVA women I talked to while writing this piece, never felt unsafe at a fraternity party.

But neither did my college friend Kelly on the night that she was raped. Neither did UVA alum Jessica Longo, forcibly penetrated while unconscious in her own bed, by a guy in a prestigious fraternity who everyone jokingly called "Predator."

"There are guys you know are creepy," Charlotte Cruze told me. "Not just at UVA, I mean, but everywhere. There are guys whose behavior you question. But the thing about those guys, the ones who really warrant your fear—the problem that makes it so hard to do anything about them—is that they would never hurt someone out in the open. They would never, ever tell."

And there's the rub.

If there is a system-specific problem with the Greek system, it is not "the existence of rapists." It's the practices that make these rapists invisible. Many people I talked to cited a well of survivor support at UVA but little acknowledgment that the perpetrators of this violence are embedded within student society. The Greek system is not a hotbed of sexual criminals, but rather a hotbed of people invested in a tradition and lifestyle that inherently allows a tremendous amount to go unseen.

Let's take alcoholism as an example. Imagine a frat is throwing a keg kill, in which teams race to finish off kegs of beer, either for fun or philanthropy. (People who love fraternities are always pointing to how much money they raise for charity, which they do in the way that all rich people do: through events with enormous production costs that involve heavy drinking.) So, say a team of 10 is assigned to do a keg kill for the children. All the boys (or girls!) drink 16 beers on a casual Wednesday, and only one of them is an addict, and nobody will ever know.

It's the same with sexual assault. Multiple university studies have shown it: fraternity brothers are three times more likely to rape someone. Nearly every frat guy I know would dismiss that statistic as some sort of personal attack, because they haven't heard anyone yelling for police, have they? Of course they haven't. They would, almost universally, help someone who was being obviously injured. (Unless it was pledging, and the someone was one of them.) But rape in college is rarely obvious. The broad action—"hooking up with a super-drunk girl"—is so common as to be almost universal; the difference—ignoring her say in the equation—happens secretly and almost always goes unseen.

And again, rape happens everywhere. But at frats at UVA, it happens like this: Two third-year boys dance with two wasted first-year girls at a party; they take them upstairs to their respective rooms, a one-minute walk from "should we do this" to doing it. One girl wakes up proud of the sloppy, fun, brownout sex she had in a top bunk; the other girl wakes up horrified and silent, finds her shoes, slinks out. It'll take her several weeks to even consider that the boy should have listened to her muffled stop it, please stop it. It'll take much longer for her to understand that she wasn't just embarrassingly wasted, that what happened to her was rape. And from the outside, who can know the difference? And who would go out of their way to try?

Which isn't to say that UVA students would necessarily be great at discerning. At a school full of intellectually curious double majors who are genuinely embarrassed to get a B, a few major blind spots—about consent, and the ways that it can be given—may remain.
If there is a system-specific problem with the Greek system, it is not "the existence of rapists." It's the practices that make these rapists invisible.

When I was in college, Valentine's Day brought a shower of white flyers plastered to columns and bulletin boards all over the school, featuring Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, with a big red heart in between. "TJ <3 Sally," the flyers read. Most people—and granted, this was seven years ago—thought these "love notes" were sweet. Were they? Can a slave say no to her master? Can a frat boy really say with a straight face that they're sure no one's ever been taken advantage of in the house?

It is hard for young privileged Americans to reconcile their good intentions with the violence that has facilitated their lifestyle. Students at UVA love their school sincerely. They remember their founder as a bastion of modern ideas and forget he owned humans as property. They are history majors who'd like to focus on the positive: the gorgeous brick buildings, but never who built them, or the fact that UVA as an institution purchased slaves too. The erasure of suffering exists in every transaction of power, on Grounds as it is in America. In just weeks, UVA has found millions of dollars to fund infrastructure improvements that will satisfy stakeholders who want something to be done about "the rape problem." The school has also spent a decade ignoring a vocal, sustained campaign for them to pay their hourly employees a living wage.

I believe that UVA students understand these fundamental inequities—if in a buried, conflicted, self-effacing way. Sorority bid day this year was on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a coincidence which set Yik Yak buzzing: "The running of the white girls," one poster wrote. "March of the Canada Goose." As the girls ran out to meet each other, shrieking in their T-shirts and clutching matching balloons, someone wrote, "Nameless Field right now is the sound of white privilege."

"Chill," someone replied. "Colored girls get into sororities too."

The "colored girls" do get into sororities, and the "colored boys" get into fraternities too—just not the ones that Rolling Stone cared to mention. The UVA Greek system is segregated, not just unofficially but explicitly. The unmarked but almost totally white system is the school's default: the Inter-Sorority Council and Inter-Fraternity Council are the largest student organizations on campus, with no mention of race anywhere on their literature. Shoved off to a corner somewhere are the Multicultural Greek Council, for "Latin, Asian and local" fraternities and sororities, and the National Pan-Hellenic Council, for historically black Greek organizations.

No broad segment of the American population experiences sexual violence at the rates that black women do. And yet, before and after Rolling Stone's bombshell, guess which of the above councils were never invited to the Board of Visitors meetings, to national press conferences, even to sit down for a talk? Would it surprise you to hear, after all this exhaustive media coverage, that the first reported rape at the University of Virginia occurred in 1850 and concerned three male students who took a seventeen-year-old Charlottesville slave girl out into the woods?

The students—George Hardy, Armistead Eliason, James Montadon—skipped town and never faced formal charges. The slave girl's name is lost now, like Jackie's real one will be.

Rush After 'A Rape On Campus': A UVA Alum Goes Back to Rugby Road

Here is the difference between the way UVA treats its black Greek community and its white one. White sororities and fraternities all occupy enormous mansions leased to them in perpetuity for (often) a dollar per year. Black sororities and fraternities don't have land access at all; not one of them has historically owned a house. White frats throw parties downstairs from their bedrooms and keep the good liquor under their desks upstairs; black frats have to rent spaces every time they want to to party, and they always pay security and often fork out for a staffed bar. The new regulations that IFC organizations are groaning about are nothing compared to the normal way black frats, and black frat brothers, have to carry on.

And, although the black Greek community—like the white one—is stocked with members who are actively trying to address and acknowledge sexual assault in their midst, Sabrina Rubin Erdely didn't acknowledge them with a mention. Neither, in the aftermath, did UVA. Nor has almost anyone reporting on "campus climate" or institutional changes.

White sorority girls I talked to brushed off the idea that fraternities had any excess of power. "She wrote it up like we feel lucky to get into a frat party? Please," one girl told me. But a second-year black student named Kiana grows quiet when I ask her what her first UVA drinking experiences had been like. Had her best option for procuring alcohol been—like mine was, and so many other girls' is—to ease her way into a fraternity and bat her eyes for booze?

"I couldn't get into the frat houses," Kiana says. "I didn't know anyone. I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt once and I thought I looked nice, but then I saw other girls in tube skirts and halter tops and I realized— that's why I'm not getting in. As a black student, you come to see what places you can and can't access, and I was like, I guess this just isn't for me."

Kiana quickly adds that no one was outright malicious. I tell her: don't worry, I understand. I, along with a half-black girl, made up the entire melanin cohort of one pledge class in my very white sorority; the experience was fine except for when girls would fall all over themselves trying to demonstrate that the two of us made them "diverse."

I ask Kiana about her response to the Rolling Stone piece. "I immediately thought it overwrote the presence of people fighting against sexual assault all over the school," she says, "And what made it worse was that nobody contacted the historically black Greek organizations. Nobody invited our council presidents to the conferences. We weren't even given the chance to defend ourselves. That's how little they cared."

Kiana adds, "I don't believe this piece would have had as much national attention if the woman at the center was black."
"Nobody contacted the historically black Greek organizations. Nobody invited our council presidents to the conferences. We weren't even given the chance to defend ourselves. That's how little they cared."

UVA has made national news in the last four years mostly under circumstances in which a white girl was dead or victimized. There was Yeardley Love, a beautiful lacrosse player and sorority girl, beaten to death in 2010 by her violent and sociopathic boyfriend. (The racial dimensions of George Huguely's sentencing are not lost on anyone in either Greek system: "A white guy from DC who absolutely committed the horrible crime he was accused of, and he's not going to be in jail for much more than 20 years," said Charlotte Cruze, grimly.) Hannah Graham, this year, her face all across the news followed by her dreadlocked murderer. Shelley Goldsmith, a second-year attending UVA on the same merit scholarship that brought me there, dead last fall from a molly overdose in DC. Jackie, now.

There have been black girls, black women, dead and raped and murdered on the same streets in Charlottesville. Forget the national media: very few students know names like Sage Smith, the black, transgender 19-year-old who disappeared in 2012 on the main drag of town.

"We've had this conversation over and over within the black community," says Kiana. "Would anyone look for us if we were missing? And we're not sure."

She talks about how black enrollment has dropped at UVA. She wants to help more with recruiting, but worries that she's selling a facade. "The good impact this school has had on our education is real," she said. "But we know the environment we're in."

The environment is one in which a white student will argue against affirmative action in front of black classmates by saying, "My family thinks charity is the best way to help people"—one in which, on the night of the 2012 election, two black girls went walking past the bar rented out by the college Republicans and got a cigarette thrown at them, along with a hissed "Ni*ger." There was no administrative acknowledgment of that incident. There has been no administrative response to the public Yik Yak rants calling the students at a #BlackLivesMatter protest "farm equipment" and "proof of why affirmative action as a joke." Police came to the post-RS Slutwalk to keep the girls safe as they crossed the crosswalks; they came to the Eric Garner protests to police. And the extra police presence now promised by the UVA administration to protect women will likely fall unequally: a lot of it on (I'd guess) minority "townies" and black male students, who are already followed disproportionately when they walk around town.

All weekend in Charlottesville, this is what I'm thinking: it's so difficult to get anyone with power and lax accountability—the true American dream, if we're honest—to ever give any of it up. But the rest of the world is coming. " Rolling Stone showed how many people were waiting for proof of what they've already experienced," says Maya Hislop, the graduate student. "It was the same with Trayvon Martin." This is the thrust behind Erdely's article, the reaction, the backlash to the reaction: Someone is finally trying to hold privilege and power accountable for itself.

But how? Not with a story that's not fact-checked.

Rush After 'A Rape On Campus': A UVA Alum Goes Back to Rugby Road

I sit with Hislop at a coffee shop one sunny afternoon. "[UVA president] Teresa Sullivan is trying to keep her donations, and no one has admitted, this whole time, that we don't really know about what to do about sexual assault. No one has admitted that this isn't a problem that can necessarily be 'solved' with 'swift action,'" she says, adding, "Activism is seen as unproductive here. People don't think of demanding things. They think: you cajole. You pay."

She tells me about watching her undergraduate students react to the piece: the defensiveness, the anger that their school was being represented in a way that erased everyone who was actively trying to do good. "Then," she says, "they started to realize, I have a friend that's been through this. I have a friend that's been through this too."

She tells me about a sexual assault peer education group meeting that happened soon after Erdely's article was published. "These two very young fraternity members came, and they were so lovely. They kept saying they wanted to help, but didn't know how. They didn't know where the problem was. They couldn't see it."

"I've reached a place of just trying to help black students," says Maya. "That's what I'm here for. I am involved with issues of sexual violence, because it's interconnected—everyone wants to say that violence happens somewhere else—but with the Greek system, I think they should just disband it." She looks around calmly. "Everything they love is founded on everything I hate."

Rush After 'A Rape On Campus': A UVA Alum Goes Back to Rugby Road

So what are rape survivors at the University of Virginia actually left with?

A recent alum and survivor articulates a basic hope: first, simply, that students who have been raped and assaulted are able to understand that what happened to them was wrong. She is still involved in peer education, still gets texts from students at 4 a.m. "We're at a point where a lot of survivors can acknowledge that their assault was bad," she says. "But not that it was wrong."

The alum, who asked to be anonymous, tells me that she's tired of the rhetoric surrounding this issue, the signs that sprung up all over grounds saying PROTECT OUR WOMEN. "I have felt incredibly patronized by the idea that schools aren't doing enough to protect women," she says. "That's not the problem. Schools aren't doing enough to ensure equity."

They're not. One change that would be effective in both a symbolic and practical sense would be if national Greek organizations relaxed the prudish facade imposed on sorority chapters: the live-in house mom, the prohibition on drinking and house parties, the rules against boys sleeping over. Top-down moralism obscures the fact that sex and drinking are not in themselves bad or shameful, and get much more dangerous when female agency surrounding those subjects is redirected to the sticky turf of young bros. (The national sorority organizations have now asked UVA chapters to refrain from participating in boys bid night, which is notoriously wild. The girls are surely still going to party, but now, prohibited from moving in obvious packs together, they will be much less safe.)
"I have felt incredibly patronized by the idea that schools aren't doing enough to protect women," she says. "That's not the problem. Schools aren't doing enough to ensure equity."

There are also many common-sense things that could be done to improve the adjudication framework at UVA. For one, the committees that hear internal sexual misconduct allegations should be composed of people who are independent from the university, not (as they currently are) stakeholders in the school. There are bills currently in the state legislature that would require administrators and staff to report alleged assaults to the police, who would then (if other bills pass) have to report to the commonwealth attorney: these "reforms" are unwise and unwanted, and would decrease the already-small percentage of women who report their assaults. College girls who are raped don't want to be dragged either legally or personally. They don't want to "ruin the life" of a "good kid" when "stuff just got out of hand." For the most part, they just want to not have to look at their rapist when they go to class.

And, though the proper procedural adjudication of sexual assault is vital, in the end it's just disaster control. I still remember what this UVA survivor told me: that law and justice aren't the same. Affirmative consent laws are immensely tricky. Even in a bias-free vacuum, there's no way around the essential difficulty of one person's word against another.

The most honest ways of addressing sexual assault have very little to do with rules and punishment. They start with early education about consent and bystander intervention, two ideas that are in no way limited to preventing rape. Sex education should be frank, practical, emphasizing safety and pleasure. (As an undergrad girl told me easily, "If you're drunk it's not good anyway.") In high school, a conversation about how alcohol will alter your behavior in college. In a dream world, a gradated drinking age where students can buy beer and wine at 18 so teenage girls won't—not that I'm speaking from experience—rip six shots before leaving their dorm rooms to create a "buzz" that will last all night. In college communities, support for your friends who have been hurt, and uncompromising disdain for your friends whose behavior might hover near the line.

Because that's how to stop a rapist in the Greek system: not to give his future victim an extra bottle of water, but to internally cut him off. Informal community policing works in the interstices that the criminal justice system will never be able to touch.

It's telling, still, that the best and most practical idea I heard all weekend is predicated on the worst, most misogynist impulses. From a sorority sister of mine whose actual sister—also a UVA alum—is now a police officer who works with victimized women: "Make it a taboo for frat boys to hook up with blackout girls," she said frankly. "Make it so that it's a safety thing for them. Make it so they will do anything to avoid a girl 'crying rape.' Give them a hand signal they can use at parties. Make them say, 'Bro. Protect yourself. She's wasted. You never know what she's going to say in the morning.'"

The two of us looked at each other, cringing.

"I was so offended when my sister brought this idea up," my friend said. "And then I realized it doesn't matter the motivations that would make it work, as long as it worked. As long as it made a difference in what actually happens at the end of a night."

It's Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I'm sitting at the top of the hill that overlooks Nameless Field, which is where the screeching tutu-and-balloons madness of sorority bid day is about to take place. The rushees are gathered in a nearby gymnasium, awaiting the final results, and their future sisters are lined up on the grass. Guys are assembling, some with popcorn, all of them in their same hungover Ken doll uniform of fleeces, khakis, boots.

Crowds of girls start pouring in from above and beside the field, crossing the road, grouped by the color of their trappings: red and green, black and gold, bright blues, dark maroons. Numbering in the hundreds, they are astonishing in a group; a fleshly murmuration, squads of them fluttering thickly down the hill in ball caps and glitter and spandex and sneakers, their long straightened hair flying behind them, the balloons they carry bopping into each other overhead. All told, this was the biggest rush in Virginia ISC history.

The bros are pulling out their lawn chairs, sipping their beer. "Bet that black girl's a token admit," says one of them, watching a dark-skinned girl in gold leggings run down the hill. His friend says he thinks every sorority is required to have one. They talk about the "sick blowjobs" that this one sorority is known for.

A few latecomers in tutus and rave onesies run down the hill, and a dozen guys start chanting, "Fall! Fall! Fall!" One girl actually does it—she's tumbling head over foot. She stands up at the bottom of the hill and takes a huge bow. All of us, me included, clap wildly.

The new pledge classes come sprinting out of the building where they've received their bids; they assimilate into the crowd; they scream, hug, cry, chant, take pictures. It looks like drunk summer camp, and after a few minutes, the girls dissipate. The bros—lacking a formal framework to communicate with these harpies on fire with sisterhood, these girls who are so tired of being polite in heels that they're all going to be rude as hell at bars tonight—start ambling back to their dorms and their houses. One half of the sorting has happened, the other half is still to come. Soon the frat boys will be in mixers with all of these new sisters; they'll dress up like Navahoes and Cowboy Bros, they'll f*ck in costume, drunk in a way as to make everything a bit confusing, and if they stick with it they'll have Greek letters on the cake at the country club wedding seven years down the line. The balloons float into the pale pink sunset. A dog is overwhelmed at the intersection and barks all the way home.

Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
abb
Member Avatar

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-28/moral-panics-won-t-end-campus-rape

Moral Panics Won't End Campus Rape
33 Jan 28, 2015 12:12 PM EST
By Megan McArdle

T. Rees Shapiro, the Washington Post reporter who has done an amazing job covering the debacle of Rolling Stone's story about an alleged rape at the University of Virginia, has gotten an interview with members of Phi Kappa Psi. This is the fraternity that was accused in the article of staging some sort of gang-rape initiation ritual. And the story its members tell is more than a little worrying.

The most striking moment for me: when the fraternity brothers say they knew within 24 hours that the Rolling Stone story was false -- provably false, because their internal records and bank statements showed no party on the weekend in question, and no brothers matched the description of the alleged rapist. Yet the brothers kept quiet because they thought that fighting the story in the news media "would only make things more difficult."

Think about that. They had evidence they could have shown to a reporter to demonstrate the problems with a story, and they decided not to because that might only get them into deeper trouble. To be fair, lawyers often want to keep their clients from making public statements, which might unwittingly give ammunition to prosecutors, even if the clients are innocent. The brothers didn't necessarily refrain from talking because they expected more trouble with the freelance jurors who vandalized their fraternity house and threw bricks through their windows, or because they simply expected that reporters would treat them harshly for daring to contest the allegations.

Yet both are deeply troubling possibilities -- remember, the attention focused on the fraternity was so intense that brothers living there had to move to a hotel. Even more troubling is the fact that the media broadcast these allegations widely, and for two weeks, opinion columns and Facebook exploded into a frenzy of condemnation, while all along the brothers of this fraternity had information that could have showed the story did not happen as it was told. At root is Sabrina Rubin Erdely's poor reporting, of course -- the brothers say that she didn't provide checkable details they could have used to refute the story, such as the date of the attack. But that doesn't really explain the bricks. How did things go so terribly wrong?

The answer, I think, is that we've been in the grip of a moral panic about campus rape. I could offer my theories about why we had such a panic just now, but they would just be theories, highly speculative. So I'd rather focus on the evidence of the panic itself, which I think is strong, and the effects on public debate.

There are a lot of definitions of moral panic running around, but here's mine: It's when a community becomes hysterical about some problem -- often, but not always, a real one -- that becomes defined as an existential threat to public safety and moral order. In such a climate, questioning how big the threat actually is, or contesting any particular example, is not a matter of rational discussion, but of heresy.

While the moral panic is raging, ludicrous and improbable stories suddenly become convincing, and it's dangerous to question them, because why are you defending witches? Are YOU a witch?

One of the most glaring modern instances of a moral panic is probably the alleged great ritual satanic abuse cases at preschools such as Fells Acres and McMartin in the 1980s, in which presumably competent adults suddenly began to believe obvious confabulations by young children being incompetently interviewed, which ranged from unlikely in the extreme (a sexual assault that took place in a hot air balloon) to obviously physically impossible (children being driven through nonexistent underground tunnels beneath a school). Families were arrested and put on trial in these bizarre cases and, in the case of the Amiraults of Fells Acres, put in jail for lengthy periods. Even after people woke up to the obvious problems with relying on the extensively coached testimony of 4-year-olds, and a Massachusetts parole board recommended 5-0 that Gerald Amirault have his sentence commuted, prosecutor Martha Coakley (yes, that Martha Coakley) lobbied to keep him in jail, and then-acting Governor Jane Swift denied the commutation.

The sexual abuse of children is not an imaginary problem. It is one of the worst crimes known to our society, and it happens all too tragically often. But somehow, in the 1980s, we became convinced that it was an omnipresent threat, and that we must go to any lengths to eradicate it -- up to, and including, believing in the impossible. Many people seem to have swallowed their doubts about these stories for fear of being denounced -- just as folks such as Richard Bradley, who first raised questions about the Rolling Stone story, were accused of "rape denial" and being "truthers."

When people are in the grip of a moral panic, going up against them to question the extent of a threat, even by doubting so much as a single case, can become dangerous. Questioning any expression of the panic is not seen as a logical debate over statistics or the details of a particular instance, but as somehow defending the threatening behavior. Note how careful many people who wrote skeptically about the UVA case were to say that they believe campus rape happens, and it is terrible. People who write that they think an accused murderer may be innocent rarely feel compelled to affirm that yes, they sure do believe that murder happens, and boy, are they against that. This ought to go without saying, and unless we are in the middle of a moral panic, it usually does.

Yet once moral panic sets in, an accusation can also become sufficient evidence unto itself to trigger a severe response: no need to see what the brothers might have to say, or to wait for a police investigation, before you write that op-ed article about rape culture -- or start throwing bricks.

Unfortunately, our panicked determination to believe does not ultimately help the cause; in fact, such determination hurts the cause, as well as the innocent people whose names are tarnished along the way. As Judith Levine wrote in the aftermath of the UVA revelations, "feminism can handle the truth."

I don't blame the Phi Kappa Psi brothers for keeping quiet rather than immediately going public with their evidence. I wish I could. Because rape is a terrible crime that does happen everywhere, on and off campus. And if we are going to actually combat rape, on campus and elsewhere, the only way we can do so is with all the available facts -- facts that tend to get scarce when a moral panic is in full swing.

(Corrects spelling of former acting Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift's name in eighth paragraph.)

To contact the author on this story:
Megan McArdle at mmcardle3@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors on this story:
Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.net
James Gibney at jgibney5@bloomberg.net
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
abb
Member Avatar

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-28/uva-sororities-protest-banishment-from-fraternity-party-night

Punishing Us For Being Women': UVA Sorority Members Protest Frat Party Ban
by Michael McDonald
1:18 PM CST
January 28, 2015



(Bloomberg) -- Sorority women at the University of Virginia were ordered to stay home on the biggest party night of the year to protect their “safety and well-being” -- and they are furious about it.

Members of the National Panhellenic Conference told 16 UVA sorority chapters last week not to participate in Boys’ Bid Night fraternity parties on Saturday. The revelry has led to allegations of sexual assault and excessive drinking in the past. Women who break the prohibition may face sanctions.

“They are treating us like children and punishing us for being women,” said Whitney Rosser, a senior from Lynchburg, Virginia, and a member of Alpha Phi. “We’re angry because we are being told we are not allowed to go out instead of addressing the deeper issue of why sexual assault happens.”

The movement to prevent assault is now dividing women on college campuses. The sorority protest in Charlottesville evokes the late 1960s, when women battled college administrators for social and sexual freedom. The women’s rights movement of that time helped end strict dorm curfews and curbs on interaction with men imposed to protect women’s virtue.

Students at UVA were placed at the center of a national debate about sexual assault and student drinking after a November Rolling Stone article that purported to detail the gang rape of a student at a fraternity house. The story was later discredited and the magazine apologized for it.

More than 2,000 supporters have signed the sororities’ online petition asking the national organization to reconsider their ban from Boys’ Bid Night, when fraternities celebrate the induction of new members. The sororities also wrote a letter to the committee, calling the directive unfair and sexist.

“Sorority women are being used as leverage to change the actions and behaviors of fraternity men,” they said in the letter. The “mandate plays into gender stereotyping around the issue of sexual assault.”

Banning women from events isn’t the way to solve social problems on campus, feminists and legal scholars said. In attempts to combat sexual misconduct, some say the Education Department and some schools have gone too far in creating rules that regulate women’s behavior.

“This is the wrong approach to thinking about how to empower women,” said Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor of civil rights and family law at Harvard Law School. “It’s not the right reaction to say we need to keep women away.”

Bartholet is one of 28 law professors who signed an open letter last year condemning Harvard’s sexual-misconduct policy, saying it “departs dramatically” from current law. The policy, drafted when the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based school was under investigation by the Education Department for alleged civil rights violations, establishes internal judicial procedures that are “overwhelmingly stacked against the accused.” It also holds only one party culpable when both are impaired by alcohol or drugs.

The Education Department has placed more than 90 colleges under investigation for their handling of sexual-assault complaints, forcing administrators to craft new policies and step up policing.

The order for UVA sororities came in a Jan. 20 letter from members of the National Panhellenic Conference asking them to stage alternative events on Saturday night “with expectations of full chapter participation.” The letter was signed by Tammie Pinkston, the international president of Alpha Delta Pi, who is affiliated with the conference based in Indianapolis.
‘Safety Concerns’

“We believe the activities on Men’s Bid Night present significant safety concerns for all of our members and we are united in our request that the sixteen NPC sororities not participate,” Pinkston wrote. She didn’t return calls seeking comment.

Michelle Bower, a spokeswoman for the national organization, said the decision was made collectively by the heads of the 16 national sororities.

“This directive is intended to help uphold an NPC unanimous agreement of women not participating in men’s recruitment and address safety and risk management concerns associated with this tradition,” Bower said in an e-mail.
Bid Night

Boys’ Bid Night is one of the biggest social events at UVA. Last year a number of campus groups asked the frats to designate brothers at each house to serve as active bystanders.

Bid Night also brings to a close the annual weeks-long rush when fraternities make a decision on new members. The event begins with the frat members tossing the inductees into the air outside their dorms and ends with parties at each of the more than 30 frat houses around campus.

In the wake of the Rolling Stone story, UVA put a temporary ban on events at Greek houses. President Teresa Sullivan reinstated fraternities earlier this month after a police investigation turned up no evidence. The university went ahead with new rules such as banning pre-mixed drinks at parties.

Sororities traditionally participate with members of each chapter, wearing tank tops with matching colors.

“It’s taking a step backwards rather than forwards for the university,” said Maura Riley, a senior and member of the Pi Beta Phi. “It’s essentially taking women out of the picture rather than holding men accountable for their actions.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Michael McDonald in Boston at mmcdonald10@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: John Hechinger at jhechinger@bloomberg.net Chris Staiti
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
abb
Member Avatar

http://reason.com/blog/2015/01/28/why-rolling-stone-chose-uva-not-vanderbi


Why Did Rolling Stone Writer Choose UVA, Not Vanderbilt, for Gang Rape Exposé?

Robby Soave|Jan. 28, 2015 1:50 pm

VandyPublic DomainA jury convicted two former Vanderbilt University football players—Brandon Vandenburg and Cory Batey—of gang raping a female student during a night of heavy drinking and drug use. Authorities had plenty of graphic evidence to make their case, including photos, videos, and damning testimony. A snapshot, from the Associated Press:

Testimony showed Vandenburg passed out condoms to the other players, slapped her buttocks and said he couldn't have sex with the woman because he was high on cocaine.

Batey raped the woman and urinated on her, prosecutors said. His attorneys argued the images didn't show that.

Defense lawyers argued that Vandenburg and Batey were too drunk to know what they were doing and that a college culture of binge drinking and promiscuous sex should be partly to blame. ...

Rumors about what happened quickly spread around campus, and the assault might have gone unnoticed had the university not stumbled onto the closed-circuit TV images several days later in an unrelated attempt to learn who damaged a dormitory door. The images showed players carrying an unconscious woman into an elevator and down a hallway, taking compromising pictures of her and then dragging her into the room.

It's telling that the perpetrators couldn't muster a better defense than drinking culture made us do it! Culture doesn't commit crime—individuals do. And the evidence that these young men behaved like animals and deserve prison is overwhelming.

But, while the culture argument is no defense whatsoever of their actions, and does not reduce their responsibility or culpability one iota, it is true that substance abuse played a role in the attack. At the very least, it was the tool by which Batey and Vandenburg perpetrated the crime, since the victim was incapacitated from drinking while it occurred. Such is often the case when rape disputes arise, which is why any productive discussion about reducing campus sexual assault must be intertwined with a discussion about the complete failure of national drug and alcohol policies.

Incidentally, I've seen some people hold up the Vandy case as if it somehow lessens the wrongness of Sabrina Rubin Erdely's debunked University of Virginia rape story. The UVA gang rape might not have happened, they say, but there's no reason it couldn't have happened—look at Vandy! This response is, in a word, wrong. UVA skeptics did not reach the conclusion that Jackie's allegations were unbelievable because she suffered a gang rape. Of course gang rapes happen on campus; there are numerous examples. What distinguished the UVA story from anything else ever reported was that the assault did not involve drugs or alcohol, required elaborate planning, and involved so many people that the perps could not have reasonably expected to get away with it—a confluence of factors that caused the allegations to have substantially more in common with ones that ultimately proved to be false, like the Duke lacrosse case and Tawana Brawley incident.

On a related note, the convictions of Batey and Vandenburg have prompted several writers to ask variations of this question, best summarized by Richard Bradley in a recent post—why didn't Erdely choose Vanderbilt for her gang rape story instead of UVA? Bradley writes:

The rape for which two Vanderbilt students (they’re always referred to as football players, though I have no idea if that’s relevant or just convenient) were just convicted is plenty horrific. And it has, from a crusading journalist’s perspective, the advantage of being true. Is Vanderbilt just not as sexy a story as UVa?

I think I have an answer: At the end of the day, UVA's incredible story fit Erdely's narrative better than Vanderbilt's credible one. Erdely wanted to tell the story of a campus body and university administration behaving indifferently to an unspeakable crime. That's not what happened at Vandy: The students were expelled, convicted in criminal court, and now face lengthy prison sentences. The system does not always deliver justice to victims—or fairness to the accused—but in this case, it largely did.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous)
ZetaBoards - Free Forum Hosting
Fully Featured & Customizable Free Forums
Go to Next Page
« Previous Topic · DUKE LACROSSE - Liestoppers · Next Topic »
Add Reply