Sexual Assault on Campus: Insights from Research on College Student Social Life

1. Sexual Assault on Campus: Insights from Research on College Student Social Life Prof. Elizabeth A. Armstrong Graduate Students: Laura Hamilton, Evelyn Perry, Brian Sweeney, and Amanda Tanner Undergraduate Students: Katie Bradley, Teresa Cummings, and Aimee Lipkis

2. How did an interest in the erotic curricula lead to a focus on sexual assault?

3. Research Question • Why do college campuses remain sexually dangerous places for women in spite of years of sexual assault prevention programming?

4. Three Existing Explanations(and policy responses) • Individual Characteristics Policy response: Educate to change individual attitudes • Group beliefs - “Rape Culture” Policy response: Educate to change group attitudes • Fraternities as Dangerous Context Policy response: Education directed to Greek system, regulate Greek system

5. Method Qualitative investigation of undergraduate student social life. • Focus Groups – 16 groups, 89 students • Ethnographic observation and interviews – floor of 1st year women in “party dorm”

6. Peer Culture Concerns with status, belonging, popularity, and interest in playful, public sexual fun motivate student participation in dangerous party scenes.

7. Peer Culture: Status & Belonging “You see these images of college that you’re supposed to go out and have fun and drink, drink lots, party and meet guys. [You are] supposed to hook up with guys, and both men and women try to live up to that. I think a lot of it is girls want to be accepted into their group and guys want to be accepted into their groups.”

8. Peer Culture: Sex as Public and Fun Describing a Playboy party that was “so fun,” one floor resident explained that, “it was basically an excuse … for everyone to just dress in the sluttiest little thing that they can pull off without looking like complete trash. But it was just so fun. You had an excuse to just let loose.”

9. Peer Culture: Gender & Sexual Expectations “But like I only like will kiss. I just like kissing. I won’t do anything else.” “This guy that I was talking to for like ten/ fifteen minutes… says, could you, um, come to the bathroom with me and jerk me off? And I’m like, what! I’m like, okay, like I’ve known you for like fifteen minutes but no.”

10. Social Organization The social organization of student life intensifies peer cultures and structures social options.

11. Residence Life: Intensifies Peer Cultures Students of similar age, race, sexual orientation, class, and appearance are clustered.

12. Residence Life: Patterns Gender Interaction Men and women mostly live on separate floors. Some residence halls have locked floors. Informal contact between female and male students occurs mainly in the eroticized and alcohol-fueled party scene

13. Residence Life: Push Factors Lack of Public Space Little communal space and dorm structure make spontaneous interactions unlikely Social Control Successful at reducing visible partying, but students experience dorms as not “fun” and leave to party

14. Fraternity Parties: Transportation “All those girls would stand out there at the circle drive and just like, no joke, get into these big black Suburbans driven by frat guys, shoving themselves in there, wearing like seriously no clothes, piled on top of each other. This could be like some kidnapper taking you all away to the woods and chopping you up and leaving you there.”

15. Fraternity Parties: Men Define Party Atmospheres Some Party Themes: • CEO/Secretary Ho • School Teacher/Sexy Student • Golf Pro/ Tennis Ho • Doctor/Nurse parties • Trophy wife and James Bond husband • Pilot/Stewardess

16. Fraternity Parties: Men Control Alcohol Brothers serve themselves first, then women they are with, then other women, and then unaffiliated men. The promise of more or better alcohol is often used to lure women into private spaces.

17. Women’s Experiences One floor resident reported, “Guys pressuring girls to drink who don’t want to drink. Or not even who don’t want to drink, but who just don’t feel comfortable drinking with them. Sometimes boys are creepy and you don’t want to sit and pound shots with them….”

18. Women’s Experiences: Party Rape Respondent A: I didn’t know what happened. I was scared and wanted to get the hell out of there. I didn’t know who it was, so how am I supposed to go to the hospital and say someone might’ve raped me? It could have been any one of the hundred guys that lived in the house. And I didn’t even know if it happened for sure. Respondent B: It’s just so hard because you don’t know how to deal with it because you don’t want to turn in a frat because all hundred of those brothers… Respondent A: I think I was also at the point thinking like, you know, I just got to school, I don’t want to start off on a bad note with anyone, and now it happened so long ago, I don’t know who it was, it’s just one of those things that I kinda have to live with.

19. Defining Party Rape • Assault by acquaintance or in-network stranger • Victims typically the most vulnerable • Alcohol and sometimes date rape drugs used as weapons • Often occurs off of home turf; wake up in unfamiliar location • Difficult to reconstruct what happened • Rarely reported

20. Why Do Women Continue to Participate? Some don’t. They withdraw. “You don’t go to a bar the way you used to before knowing all of this, at least I don’t. … It kills your social life.”

21. Why Do Women Continue to Participate? Peer culture & social organization work together to limit options for: • Meeting people, gaining status • Experiencing an eroticized public scene • Receiving gratifying male attention

22. Status & Agency in a Risky World Students are invested in this world. They take the bad with the good. Sexual risk is normalized. Women are assumed to be skilled at strategies to reduce risk. They are blamed when their strategies fail.

23. Options for Student Affairs

24. Changing the organization of student life • Focus on cultivating community • Provide more spaces amenable to socializing • Enhance aesthetic properties • Make residence halls more appealing to upper-level students

25. Changing the organization of student life • Increasing diversity within residence halls • race and nationality • social class • geographic origin • age • marital status • sexual orientation

26. Mentoring • More contact with upper-division students and adults • More faculty involvement in student life

27. Carefully reign in excess partying Punitive policies may backfire: • Students consume more hard alcohol in less safe ways. • Drinking is pushed off campus to venues where administrators and women have less control. • Men with access to alcohol have an increase in status and control.

28. Implications for Sexuality Education

29. Targeted education Education should • target high-risk populations • start early (orientation) and continue • appeal to students motivations and interests (fun, partying, cross-gender interactions, sex) • offer concrete suggestions for avoiding non-consensual sex • come from credible sources

30. Targeted education • Lessons from our classrooms: • Students’ interests and motivations must be taken into account. • Most students are not critical of gender and sexual arrangements. • For the most part, the party scene is FUN.

31. Targeted education • Involve students in active learning about their social worlds and experiences. • Have them do research and teaching. • Helps to lead students into a critique of gender and sexual arrangements and party scene. • Helps to bridge gap between living and learning, students and faculty.

32. Social Organization & Peer Culture Approach Point 2. Party rape is enabled by features of student peer cultures. Desire for FUN and concerns with status, belonging, popularity drive women’s participation in dangerous party scenes.

34. Social Organization & Peer Culture Approach Point 1. Party Rape is enabled by the SOCIAL ORGANIZATION of student life. • Greek life • Residence life • Etc.

35. Social Organization & Peer Culture Approach Point 3. Social Organization & Peer Culture Work Together. Social Organization Intensifies Peer Culture. Peer Culture Reinforces Social Organization