I don’t think the sororities staying away from the fraternities this weekend is a bad idea. However, I think it is up to the young women at UVA to make this decision. If it was suggested/recommended by the national Pan Hel groups and the girls agreed, it is one thing. I don’t agree with it being mandated.
If they were at a party and everyone was drunk that seems like it could be a relevant fact. Particularly, when you throw in the can’t consent because I was drunk angle. How can, “How drunk were you?” not be an okay question? It seems as though it could be very pertinent to me. Unlike, when you report a burglary where it probably wouldn’t matter much.
I certainly see your point. I didn’t say is was definitely not a pertinent question. I said you could make an argument that is was not pertinent.
Also, there was nothing in the write-up that I saw that said anything about being at a party. The “drunk so can’t consent” angle is definitely NOT applicable. That would be something that would be very applicable to ask the alleged rapist if the state or campus was one of those with such a law/policy.
PG and I have been on several sorority threads together. Sometimes we have differed in our point of view. My belief is that when you join, you join a national group and become sisters with every single girl in that group. Therefore, you don’t necessarily have individual campus autonomy. You are part of a whole. However, National can direct individual groups to do certain things that may not apply to all chapters. Some chapters have special issues which must be addressed.
PG: thoughts here?
Hunt, i am sure there are plenty of cases that are never going to be winnable in court. I can’t quantify the number but we will have more arrests and convictions if there is a better understanding by the police.
You can’t win in court if your case is lying on the bottom of a trash can. You can’t win if nobody is looking at your rape kit.
I agree with you, Alh. I see no reason why the national chapters can’t mandate certain things for certain chapters in certain circumstances.
The NPC is trying to cut off the power of the fraternities. That’s how you go about influencing groups you don’t have control over - if you have something they want, you don’t give it to them unless they change. No sorority girl will up and die if she can’t go drinking at a frat this weekend,
Dstark’s link is showing women who report rape are feeling like the police are not believing them, and stopping pursuing the cases, at the first contact with police. If the police haven’t even finished questioning the woman and ascertaining all the facts, it’s too soon to drop the case as unwinnable.
Dstark’s link is also showing police who say that they disbelieve most rape reports that come in. Those police are treating victims reporting rapes as liars, because the police believe the victims are liars. When I’ve reported crimes to police, I haven’t been treated as a liar, and I don’t think it’s good tactics to treat rape victims as liars either. To be sure, some women who come to the police to report rape are liars, but the police are throwing out an awful lot of babies with that bathwater.
I completely agree that National groups (and I am also a member of a large national sorority) can/should be able to mandate certain things for specific chapters. If a specific sorority had an issue (and yes I know they do sometimes, my national group has had to suspend/close down chapters) then by all means the national group should step in and take action.
But in the UVA case the sororities are not the parties who are causing the problem, so I think the mandatory ban is wrong.
What is the supposed justification for the party ban? Would it be a problem for the sororities to schedule parties this weekend for the campus majority that is not in fraternities?
CF- I am pretty sure most (if not all of the NPC sororities) are not allowed to serve alcohol (I know the one I belong to isn’t) and I don’t think they are allowed to host parties at least not in their houses. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong about that.
But that brings up an interesting point. I understand that some of the sororities are scheduling mandatory member events so they know that their members are complying. If not, can the girls road trip to another school and attend a fraternity party there? Just wondering.
According to one report (the one from the Washington Post I think). some chapters were telling the members that not only could they not attend bid night events, they could also not attend off campus parties or bars where fraternity men were present on Saturday night. Virginia (currently number 2 in basketball) plays Duke (#4 ) on Saturday. It will be a big night in Charlottesville. Many sorority members are very upset about the whole edict from the national chapters. and feel it is sexist, irrational , and unfair.
Are fraternity parties the only social events that UVa has on weekends? Is a weekend social event without alcohol so awful that most students wouldn’t be interested? Do women in sororities feel they have to drink alcohol every weekend, so that any social event without alcohol would be worthless?
If someone feels that they have to drink alcohol to have fun, that’s not a good sign.
FallGirl wrote:
This morning al2simon asked:
I had really hoped PG would address this. I want to know her thoughts here. And also yours, FallGirl.
In my opinion sororities are enabling the problem, by supporting and participating in the rapey fraternities’ culture of violence towards women, their dehumanization of women, their general degradation of women. I also think these fraternities are corrupting our young men. I have been pretty much boycotting fraternities since my sophomore year of college, although I come from a family with four generations of fraternity members. My boycott was suspended while I paid the expenses associated with a son being a member of a non-rapey fraternity. That was really a crisis of conscience for me. I justified it by telling myself those dues were coming out of an inheritance from a grandfather who most definitely would have wanted his great-grandson to have that opportunity. My grandfather was extremely proud of his fraternity membership and was getting together annually with his brothers until he died in his 80s. And I don’t think fraternities are all evil. But I’m still not clear my decision was the correct one.
I don’t think my reasoning here is victim blaming. I’m still considering this development which is absolutely staggering to me. It is so far beyond what I ever could have imagined, it is taking some getting used to.
Re Post #4724:
I do think as a summary of what could be done this is very good, but I do think it is optimistic, at best, in terms of getting towards an actual reduction in sexual assault, rape, i.e., un-consented sex.
This would work, but it is dependent on two assumptions, which I am not convinced actually exist at the level people think.
First, this is dependent on the assumption that many assaults are being done by standard males who can be trained otherwise. However, if it is true that most rapes are being committed by serial predators, then training them what is or is not consent is moot and their committed rape number will not change. Predators ignore laws, ignore rule, and ignore boundaries and that cannot be untrained.
Second, if it is also true that a fair number of alleged rape is also being done by intoxicated males with intoxicated females, there is the other problem that is illustrated by the intoxicated driver example - that is, laws are only effective if remembered, processed and followed. Therefore, to expect intoxicated males and females to logically wade through consent laws and what they mean when in an intoxicated state is asking a lot, especially if, by example, an intoxicated driver cannot even remember to stop for a big glaring stop light or stop sign. If we know intoxicated people cannot even process basic signs, I do think it is a big leap to think they will be thinking logically about any law at that time.
Thus, even with this training, I do not see where a reduction in these two rape scenarios occurs. The training is great, but if the two conditions do exist, then the rape number will not change. I am not saying do not do the training, but the expectation of the results are off, I believe.
Perfect, however, I would add the need to teach women to ignore the illogic that when they actively avoid or takes steps to reduce exposure to risky situations that it is somehow the equivalent of victim-blaming. No, it is called the basic law of nature, self-protection and self-preservation first.
I like the report aspect a lot, but my first thought was, to whom? That matters. And it matters especially if it is a real predator out there. Shuffling a real predator off to a tribunal to be kicked out only allows him to continue raping another at other venues. That is not a reduction in rapes, that is only a shift in the rape environment.
Maybe I am mistaken, but the impression I got from many of these cases was the female already went voluntarily with the male and there was little indication for bystanders to think anything was amiss. But, this I can see having a very small effect in the positive direction.
You have way more faith here than I do.
Real courts that are dedicated to this have to work hard to assure check and balances, due process etc. in treating accusers and the accused. I just do not see how, for each school, one literally trains teachers and administrators to become litigators, prosecutors and judges.
Why have criminal justice schools, law schools and established courts if people could be trained so easily to do this? I just do not see it happening on either a cost effective basis and on a functionally useful basis.
I guess my vision of the goal is different. Except for the avoidance of risky stations section and possibly the bystander intervention, I could see how these pieces increase the reports of rape, but I thought the whole point was to reduce the number of rapes? Maybe I am missing something, but there seems to be little reduction out of these approaches, unless females take the serious lead and actively avoid risky situations and avoid getting themselves to an intoxicated state where they cannot take smart decisions and thus become dependent on others for their personal safety.
CF, I don’t sense it’s all about the alcohol at all. Many are outraged at having the national chapters tell them what to do, how to behave . Some have been threatened with fines or expulsion if they don’t comply with the edict. I find it outrageous. And there are certainly plenty of social events at UVa that don’t involve alcohol , as there are at any major university.
The national chapters already “tell them what to do.” They have to pay dues of x, attend rush functions, they have to live in the house per that particular chapter’s facility situation, they can’t drink/ serve alcohol in the house, can’t smoke in the house, etc. I agree it’s an unusual step to tell them they can’t go to a frat party, but they’re trying to exert what leverage they have over the frats - and their “leverage” is their presence.
“Do women in sororities feel they have to drink alcohol every weekend, so that any social event without alcohol would be worthless?”
Losers think that way IMO.
I understand how power and influence work. In my own college days, my sorority sisters frequently knew which fraternities were not decent people and we avoided them. We all had friends in the other sororities, so word got around and we stuck together.
The difference was that we empowed ourselves.
And according to many reports, one of the objections the women have is that feel they are being leveraged and used by the national chapters in this.