Jillian was having a fun night with a dozen friends and acquaintances, sprawled in the living room of the large suite in East Campus, a building that housed mostly seniors, with views over Harlem, twinkling lights stretching to the East River and beyond. The music was on but not so loud that they couldn’t talk. The harsh overhead neon lights were off, and a string of Christmas lights somehow attached to the ceiling washed the room in a warm glow. They passed around a magnum of red wine and plastic cups. Considering she was a junior, Jillian had terrible housing: she shared a relatively small room with a friend, without any common space to gather a larger group. This was the kind of night she often longed for—where she could sit around with a group of people, some she knew, some she didn’t, and just talk. The awkward, smelly, loud fraternity parties were part of a past she didn’t regret but was glad to have left behind.
Jillian got up to go to the bathroom, and when she came back she sat down next to a man she didn’t really know. They moved in the same circles and he seemed interesting. Even though there are over 9,000 undergraduates on campus, getting to know someone new was a relatively rare opportunity.1 Bobby, a senior, lived in a single off the hallway that led to the suite they were in. Both history majors, they had taken some of the same classes. They talked about professors they’d enjoyed and others who seemed underprepared for class or slow to respond to email. Conversation flowed easily. It might have been the wine, but they weren’t drinking that much; mostly, it was being with someone easy to talk to, in a place that was comfortable, away from the daily stresses. As both Jillian and Bobby reached the bottom of their cups, she thought she’d pour one last glass of wine and then maybe they’d go out to the local bar to meet up with a larger group. But when she looked up from their conversation to see where the wine was, she noticed something startling: she and Bobby were alone in the dimly lit room.
The situation had changed. She looked across at Bobby, surprised, and he smiled. “I guess they made an ‘Irish exit,’” Bobby joked—everyone had left, somewhat oddly, without saying goodbye. Nothing happened that evening. Bobby noticed Jillian’s awkwardness and they headed out to find their friends elsewhere. But Jillian took home an important lesson, one she felt was important to talk with us about: casual drinks with friends could shift into a far more intimate context, through no action on her part. It was clearly a setup; why else would her friends have left without saying anything to her? Maybe it was spontaneous—they saw her and Bobby engrossed in conversation and decided to slip away to give them privacy. Maybe it was more deliberate—perhaps Bobby asked his friends to help him out by giving him an opportunity to be alone with Jillian. They were, after all, just a door away from his room. What Jillian was certain of was that this sexual opportunity emerged not because she had made it happen, but because her friends had.
We’re not suggesting something terrible happened to Jillian. She wasn’t suggesting it either. Her friends, intentionally or not, had set up a sexual situation. Jillian felt like something had been sprung upon her. It would have been nice if someone had asked. Jillian’s story shows how sexual geography (Bobby’s room was right there) intertwines with how peers produce sexual opportunities, in ways where her own sexual self-determination was not necessarily taken into account.
Readers may think of and experience sex as an extremely personal affair, defined by intimacy between people. Yet this situation illustrates what decades of social scientific research on sexuality has shown: sex is a social activity, with peers working to produce sexual experiences for one another.2 The socializing that leads up to sex usually involves friends, roommates, or fellow members of a team, hall, religious group, student organization, or club. These groups of students often quite intentionally create sexual opportunities for their members, defining desirable partners and producing sexual situations. But in creating such situations, they also create the conditions for assault. Assaults happen frequently within preexisting peer groups, which play a part in interpreting and labeling what has happened, and shaping the aftermath.
Rebecca was hoping for a fun time. It was Friday night, near the end of the semester, and she’d had a long week. She sent a text to her friends to see who was up for hanging out. They knew what “hang out” meant—meet up, get drunk, head to a neighborhood bar, and maybe “get with” someone. By her own assessment Rebecca drank a lot, and so did her friends. That evening, before heading to the bar, Rebecca and her friends pregamed, meanwhile catching up with each other in a way that would be impossible in a crowded space with music blaring.3 Once they were sufficiently drunk, and it was late enough that they knew others would also be at their bar of choice, they headed out together. Rebecca didn’t meet anyone, but she wasn’t really trying to. Her friends didn’t have much luck either. It was a typical night. The group danced, talked, and mostly drank more and more.
At closing time Rebecca was very drunk, as were her friends. Someone expressed concern about whether she could make it back home safely, but luckily two of her male friends lived in the building next door to her. They walked her down the steep set of stairs from the bar to the street and said that they’d make sure she made it home safely. This she remembers. She also remembers passing in and out of consciousness as these friends took turns having sex with her. She woke up alone in her room the next morning, hazy, headachy, profoundly hung over. Something felt wrong about what happened. She went to talk to Jed, a member of her friend group who had been there that evening. He assured her that it wasn’t a big deal, that she was overreacting, and that she was very flirty at the bar, dancing and kissing her friends. This wasn’t that out of the ordinary. Neither was hooking up within their friend group. Confused and late for a meeting of a student group for which she was on the executive board, she left her dorm and started to walk across campus. On her way she called to check in with Shepherd, a friend who wasn’t part of that same crew, to tell him about her night. He was horrified. He insisted that she immediately go to the hospital. “You’ve been raped,” he told her. Rebecca still wasn’t sure how to think about what happened. But on Shepherd’s urging she agreed to go to the local hospital to get a sexual assault forensic exam. As she lay in her hospital bed she was visited by Jed. Shepherd had called him, worried about Rebecca and outraged about what had happened. Jed told Rebecca what he’d also told Shepherd: she really had it all wrong. It wasn’t rape. Did she really want to ruin their friends’ lives?
Rebecca’s horrific story is both typical and atypical. This was the only assault involving multiple assailants that we heard about in our interviews. But Rebecca’s concerns about her relationship with Jed, and with Shepherd, and even Jed and Shepherd’s relationship with each other, are fundamental to understanding the suffering involved in this experience. It wasn’t just the assault, awful as that was. Reporting would have meant risking the loss of her whole social world. Who would Rebecca have relied upon, if her community fell apart over this incident? These aren’t trivial concerns. And for most assaults, they’re inescapable. Anyone who questions the very low rates of formal reporting for campus sexual assault should know that reporting is also very low for sibling sex abuse—and when students come to campus, their peers feel to them like family.4
It was hard for us initially to understand Rebecca’s reluctance to label her friends taking turns having sex with her as she went in and out of consciousness as assault—just as we struggled to grasp why another student who told us her story would endure years in a student organization, spending a great deal of time around the man who had raped her and the people who worked to set up that situation (though they may have thought they were setting up a fun sexual encounter, and not a rape).5 The social networks that these young adults stitch together in college are transitional kinship networks. They help students separate from their families, but they do more than that; they’re sources of identity, access to social spaces where students feel at home, and networks that give them information on everything from what’s happening this weekend to jobs—not just how to apply, but, through networks of alums, how to find jobs.6 And crucially, in a time of sexual discovery and assertion, networks of college friends help young people hook up.
It is hardly a radical notion that communities actively shape people’s sexual lives. Families often try to weigh in on how they feel about potential partners.7 States make rules about the kinds of sex that are and are not allowed.8 Most of the institutions in our communities play a role in organizing and regulating sexual activity. Churches, synagogues, and mosques almost all articulate “acceptable” sexual relations, and serve as places where those with the same beliefs and background can come together to meet one another in the hope of forming a union. Any young person who has ever been encouraged by a parent to participate in a religious youth group knows that from the parent’s point of view, the group offers more than religious education; parents hope their child will meet someone there, someone they would be happy to welcome home for the holidays. Religious institutions use what power they have—blessing sexual unions in marriage, for example—to organize sex in a way that reflects the community’s shared values.
Friends often work very hard, and very purposefully, to create sexual opportunities for one another. We even have names for the social roles of those whose job it is to arrange sexual relations—the matchmaker and the wingman, for example.9 There’s also a term for someone who blocks sexual opportunities: the cockblocker. Ask couples how they met and those stories will almost always involve friends. Event “dating” or “hookup” apps have not fully sidelined peer networks; many students limit their searches to friends of friends, or “research” the people they match with online to see who they know in common. We often only come to see a partnership as serious when the person is introduced to friends and family.
Understanding how our peers and social networks influence our sexual lives thus provides an opportunity to think about how they might also be mobilized to help create healthy rather than harmful sexual experiences. Student life involves peer networks and hundreds of student organizations—the Korean Students Association, Christian Fellowship, the Gaming Society, even a BDSM club. These groups play a crucial and almost entirely unrecognized role in campus sexual assault through creating opportunities for sex and, the morning after, meeting up to make sense of such experiences.
In Chapter 4 we met Octavia, who bemoaned Macauley’s reluctance to “wife her up.” Late one night, Octavia texted her friends to say, “You’re not gonna believe whose bed I’m in right now? Google his name! He’s so hot!” As we’ve seen, she wasn’t alone in thinking about her sexual life as a kind of conquest, with her friends’ assessments a crucial element in each conquest’s value. Not all students share this orientation, but unquestionably those who demonstrate it are not all men. Remember Rowan, the aspiring neurosurgeon, and the orientation week hookup, described in Chapter 3, which she talked about as “very college”? Sex isn’t only (or even primarily) about pleasure, nor is it necessarily private. When people view sex as a kind of conquest, one of the conditions of that conquest is that others hear about and acknowledge their success. To no small degree, this approach fits perfectly within the achievement-oriented lives of Ivy League students. But its roots are far deeper, and more universal. Intimacy is a form of individual expression, but it’s also a way to convey that identity to others: giving a sense of worth on the sexual marketplace, and ranking compared to others.10
Consider the phrase “She’s out of your league.” The concept of “leagues” flags what scholars call “status hierarchies.”11 Groups of people—because of their attractiveness, social position, family wealth, and their race—are “above” or “below” others. American movies often play with this idea—the surprising moment when the captain of the football team chooses to go to the end-of-year dance not with the head cheerleader, but instead the “new girl” who people didn’t think was in his “league.” The implication is that we don’t just date (or hook up) with someone because we want to—we choose that person because we are supposed to. Recall Cheong, whose girlfriend was chosen for him by his older fraternity brother, as part of the rush process. His brother wasn’t hazing him—he was helping him. Or remember Murray and the “Facebook cuties”—that was a moment of making a concrete plan to carry over his high status in high school (he was surrounded by those friends), reproduced through his assurance that he’d succeed in working his way through the list (which, as it turns out, he largely did). Beyond what we individually want, the social patterning of what’s desirable weighs heavily upon us.12
Understanding sexuality, then, requires putting individual desires in dialogue with what’s socially desirable. That means that others—particularly those who are relevant to us—loom large in our intimate lives. Sexual projects are, to no small degree, status projects. Groups have an interest in ensuring that members maintain standards.13 Acts that are socially undesirable can impact the status of all the group members. Norman was emphatic that his unfortunate hookup was not assault. What he regretted was both that the woman, like “three-day-old pizza,” didn’t “check the boxes” for him, and that his friends roasted him for having been with her. The power of the group can even curdle pleasure; in the case of Pratish’s library hand job—which he both enjoyed physically and thought was a good story to tell socially—the experience lost all luster when he told his friends, because the girl was not their type.
The fact that groups organize sexual opportunities for their members isn’t good or bad; it just is. There’s certainly been some recognition of how peer groups form sexual assault opportunity structures—that is after all what the vast literature on campus Greek life and sexual assault is about: how organized groups of men in institutional settings create conditions that make assaults more likely to happen.14 But what has received less attention is that peer groups of all kinds—both peer networks and formal student organizations—play a more general role in producing and interpreting campus sexual assault. Groups construct the contexts for meeting sexual partners: they produce situations (such as parties), use space (for example, by arranging an event on or off campus), and organize people (group members and those they should meet). So groups, as well as individuals, have sexual projects tied to group solidarity and prestige. Groups, like individuals, use sex to jockey for status.
Joaquín was a senior at what most students identified as the “it” fraternity (even if they noted this begrudgingly or contemptuously). Handsome, captain of the golf team, and dedicated to his schoolwork, he had lined up an enviable future in a financial firm. He was popular and respected by his peers. We sat with him on a massive, overstuffed dark couch on the first floor of his fraternity house. Chairs were strewn about the old brownstone, which had few remaining interior architectural details. Wafting up from the basement was the yeasty smell of cheap beer. When he showed us around the basement, the floor was disconcertingly sticky. From the upper levels, we caught an occasional whiff of a locker-room odor, a mixture of sweat and spray deodorant. Joaquín could see our reactions to the place and was slightly embarrassed, but this was also his home on campus, where he could be himself among his “brothers.” And despite the smells and stickiness, we could see why Joaquín loved his house. It was his. Pictures of brothers adorned the walls. As we sat there, men walked in and out. Some were a bit shocked and worried to see their sociology professor sitting there. But it was noon on a Tuesday. No one was up to anything terribly interesting, much less illegal or embarrassing. As they talked with one another, the casual way in which they dropped their stuff in the common area conveyed something powerful: this was home; they could leave their bags packed with laptops and school notes out in the open. This wouldn’t happen just anywhere on campus.
We asked Joaquín about what defined these houses. His answer wasn’t quite what we were imagining. He knew what we were looking for—descriptions of raucous “keggers” and drunken escapades. Sure, those happened (although not with kegs, as they’d been banned on campus), and our research team had spent a fair amount of time in fraternity basements observing these kinds of parties. They’d even been in this particular basement before, as well as in suites on East Campus with sweaty bodies jammed in so close that the dancing was more like a single organism moving about than individuals swaying to the music. For the most part, what our team saw at these parties was uninteresting, because they were almost exactly what we expected. Young people had been drinking. Their party antics seemed like reenactments of scenes from movies. They were having the “college experience” many students wanted, and though the experience seemed “wild,” the script seemed to have been written long ago.
It was the mixers rather than these drunken basement affairs that Joaquín felt defined his fraternity—smaller, more intimate gatherings with a select group of women, and no outside men invited. Joaquín described the care with which the brothers prepared for the event. They scrubbed the place from top to bottom. They bought wine instead of cheap light beer, and splurged on ice. They didn’t pregame, and no one did shots at the party. The aim wasn’t to have a drunken good time, it was to meet someone: that in itself was a different kind of good time. The most important part of this event was making sure that the “right” women came. The brothers invited women from a similarly high-status sorority—there were two they typically paired with. The men and women put on carefully chosen outfits, nothing too formal but nothing too casual either. The music was “chill,” and they stood around, drank a bit, and talked. Men and women might exchange phone numbers, but no couples walked upstairs together to hook up. At Columbia there are more women in sororities than men in fraternities. In this particular fraternity all the men were straight—something a bit unusual, as a lot of fraternities had openly gay members.15 At their mixers fraternity men, like all heterosexual men, had more options for potential partners. This is in part because of a sex ratio where 60% of the campus are women; sororities, as a consequence, had more members than fraternities. This imbalance gave men power.16 Exiting a relationship is easier if you’re likely to have many more options. But there’s more to this power than just numbers. As men aged and acquired status, more women were “available” to them. Senior men could date, or hook up with, a freshman as easily as they could a senior. But for women, the accrual of status had the opposite effect. Few senior women ever hooked up with a freshman. For men, status often yields more power, but for women, as their status grows, their sexual options can dwindle.
Participants valued these fraternity-sorority mixers because they offered the “right” kinds of partners. The groups prepared and showed up in full force to facilitate connections. This conveyed a lot to both the men and the women. Each person was deemed appropriate as a future partner by virtue of association with the group. Each was, in part, protected by that group. And both groups were protective of their relationships to one another. Joaquín thought of these events fondly because two and a half years ago he’d met his girlfriend at one of them. They picked each other, no doubt, but within the clearly circumscribed contours of what had been arranged. Their organizations created a context where consent is not absolutely predetermined but certainly made more likely by defining desirable sexual partners.
Of course, groups like fraternities not only facilitate such happy sexual unions as Joaquín’s with his girlfriend, they also facilitate sexual assault—both rape and unwanted touching at parties. To be clear: the SHIFT survey didn’t find significantly higher rates of assault committed by fraternity members, but it did find that fraternity members were more likely to be assaulted than men who were not part of fraternities.17 The research regarding perpetration by fraternity members is mixed, and there are challenges to research on perpetration, in no small part because sexual assault prevention has made those who perpetrate less likely to talk about it. Both the analysis of SHIFT survey data led by Kate Walsh and our observations and interviews suggest what many other researchers have found: fraternities aren’t safe places, but they’re not much more dangerous than anywhere else.18
Freshmen face the twin challenges of finding a place to meet people, and gaining access to alcohol to make it more fun (and less stressful) to do so; this often drives them to fraternities and parties hosted by juniors and seniors, which provide both alcohol and crowds.19 Spaces controlled by upperclassmen are a major source of alcohol, particularly in the earliest months of school. This is also the time when students are most likely to be sexually assaulted. Part of the “problem” with fraternities may well be that they are all-male spaces centered around a culture of excessive drinking. But another part of the problem, as we’ve noted before, could be the rule that sororities can’t serve alcohol, and the laws and policies that push curious freshmen, including those inexperienced with alcohol and sex, into these spaces.20
Fraternities can serve alcohol in part because of their quasi-independence. But concern over excessive drinking has produced widely varying campus-specific rules. At Columbia, those include “no hard alcohol” and no kegs at parties. As depicted in Chapter 3, university representatives come by the day of parties and confirm that only beer is present in the areas where the party will be held. Fraternities assign a “compliance officer” or “risk officer” to make sure the rules are respected; students are serious about not losing their house, or their charter as members of a national fraternity. This means the hard alcohol is mostly hidden—moved from public spaces to private spaces. Many fraternity men live in their houses, above the party spaces on the first floor and basement. Those who don’t live there spend time in their fellow brothers’ rooms—retreating from the chaos and noise, or to do lines of cocaine or smoke weed, or just to hang out. The “no hard alcohol” policy has an unintended consequence of moving people—not infrequently women—from public spaces downstairs to private spaces away from others, if they are invited. Such asks are particularly attractive to women who (like most people) don’t enjoy warm cheap beer, and who may want to escape the chaos of the party, perhaps to do other drugs, or simply to get a break. The vast majority of the time what happens in these spaces, whether legal or not, is consensual and fun. But not always.
Octavia was thrilled when she got the invitation to hang out Saturday night at one of the most prestigious fraternities on campus. She hadn’t previously needed an invite to get in the door, but receiving one conveyed that she’d been noticed. When they host parties, fraternities have one member work the door—often to keep out other men, but also to regulate the kinds of women they want inside. “Oh, I’m cool!” Octavia thought to herself, upon opening her personal invitation to the party. “I’m getting invited to ABK! I’m just a freshman, and I got an invite to ABK! That’s so cool.”
Octavia couldn’t believe her further luck when she was asked to go hang out upstairs. There she was, doing shots with some of the hottest guys on campus. She felt special, chosen. She wasn’t some random freshman no one knew. She was with the in-crowd. Everything was fine until it wasn’t. As if on cue, all the guys except one got up to leave. They wanted to go back down to the party, they said. The only man still sitting, a senior, told Octavia to stay for one more drink. It was similar to what had happened to Jillian, but Octavia definitely felt it had been planned. She wanted to leave with the group but felt pressured to stay. It would be rude to leave. She might not be invited again, ruining her chances of being able to hang out with the cool guys. She decided to stay for one more drink. The man started kissing her; she didn’t really mind but she wasn’t really into it. Then he forcefully removed her clothes and raped her.
Octavia never reported what happened. “I was embarrassed because I was so dumb to go there in the first place and not realize that I was only going there to have sex with this guy. . . . I felt so dumb for not knowing why I was invited.” She blamed herself. She felt she couldn’t reasonably say something against a senior from ABK. They were powerful, respected, the “coolest” on campus.21 Her story didn’t have a chance against them. The brothers who left Octavia may not have known that she would be raped, or they may have found it unimaginable that she would be anything other than thrilled to have sex with one of them. They did, however, facilitate her going up to a senior’s room, have some shots, and then depart en masse, turning this social situation into a distinctly more sexual one. It may have been a sexual situation, but for Octavia it wasn’t sex; it was rape. The group acted to set up this situation, and then its reputation influenced Octavia’s own behavior. They didn’t do anything to silence her—possibly because even the man who raped her might still think of what happened as sex, not rape. But they didn’t need to do anything: the power disparity acted for them.
Some fraternities have reputations for being “rapey”—for being places where you need to be on your guard. The word is an important signpost in students’ symbolic universe—and, critically, one that sometimes points to relative social prestige, rather than actual risk of assault. Fraternity members we interviewed expressed extreme worry over this kind of reputation, because even if they’re not the one committing rape, the association creates a stigma. As one brother told us,
In a fraternity you have to be especially careful because it’s so easy for anyone to jump to the “fraternity guy rapist” assumption. And not only do I not want to rape anyone, but if I did it affects everyone I’m associated with!
A reputation for being rapey can be very sticky. A sorority member we talked to described one of the low-status fraternities on campus: “You hear weird stuff coming out of there. They’re just weird guys. I wouldn’t go there. They guys are all pushy and stuff. I mean, they’re always trying to prey on little freshman girls and stuff.”
We followed up on this, looking into the reputation and the reality of this lower-status fraternity, which we will call PDQ. We spent time there, and talked to members of the house. The responses were fairly consistent: passionate denial, accompanied by comments bemoaning the struggles the fraternity had with its image. It seemed not to matter what PDQ did. No matter how they responded, they just couldn’t shake their reputation. One brother was so animated about this it was hard to keep up with his torrent of words—
Someone posted on social media that a woman was raped at our house. I freaked out. Like, did I join the wrong frat? Who are these people I’m in with? Did I make the wrong decision? I had made the drinks and was handing them out that night with my friend! I looked into it, and talked to all the guys, and no one did that! I make all the drinks, and I make them kind of weak, just because I don’t want someone to get drunk fast and feel that and think they got roofied. Our brothers would rather not get laid than to do that. I mean, I know they’re not getting a lot of sex, but they wouldn’t do that.
High-status frats like the one where Octavia was raped tend not to have reputations for being rapey. One of the ways—at least at Columbia, but also increasingly elsewhere—that a male-dominated or all-male organization gets to be “high-status” is to brand itself as feminist, or at least gender-egalitarian.22 Many fraternities have gay members, demonstrating their opposition to homophobia and heteronormativity.23 However, we learned of instances of assault in both the high- and low-status frats. Being high-status makes a fraternity’s members sexually desirable—or at least socially desirable for sex. This can make it a far greater challenge to report or talk about sex as “unwanted.” Sometimes it is even hard for someone who is assaulted to perceive the sex as unwanted—they are weighing the unpleasantness of the experience against the lure of recounting having been with a prized social object. High status provides men with some protection against allegations of sexual assault, because it’s harder for others to imagine that sex with such men could be unwanted. This leads to a disturbing conclusion: the reputation of the group may help protect its members from accountability.
Again and again, we saw how explicit and conscientious group members were about protecting or improving their status. We heard high-status groups call lower-status groups “rapey,” “pushy,” “sexist,” or “creeps,” to publicly affirm that they were none of those things. Groups use their reputations to preserve their status and to dominate other groups lower in the hierarchy. We saw this dynamic very markedly with fraternities and athletic teams, and much less so with identity-based groups, organized religious life, or other kinds of extracurriculars. It’s possible that high-status people and groups are actually less likely to commit assault—that is, that their status reflects actual behavior that is more socially desirable, and that conversely the rape stigma attached to lower-status groups reflects actual behavior, not relative social prestige. It also could be the case that being high-status means that when people commit assault, they’re less likely to be reported, and if a report is made, the accuser is less likely to be believed. Or, as we believe, a combination of all of those things is likely true. In Octavia’s case, her rapist was aided by his group affiliation in a number of ways, from his brothers getting up to leave so he could be alone with Octavia, to his group’s power and desirability, which contributed to Octavia’s self-blame for and silence about what happened.
Jed’s pressuring of Rebecca to interpret her experience with their mutual friends was an extreme instance of the interpretive work that students do for one another. For the most part, we saw young people deeply engaged in caring for one another—and both our ethnographic work and SHIFT’s survey showed that most students felt supported by their friends.24 The interpretive work done by peers often had the friend in mind, but friends also experienced important secondary pressures. Peer groups and formal organizations work to manage their reputation. Organizations certainly did not always protect their members; some, in fact, expelled those whose behaviors were unacceptable. But motivated both by a commitment to their organization and by self-interest (because the reputation of the organization impacts its members), the general push we saw both in networks of peers and in formal student organizations was to avoid labeling sex as nonconsensual. We didn’t interview Jed, and so we can’t know what his motive was. But from the way that students talk about managing these situations, there may be reasons behind the frequent “downgrading”—labeling incidents as gross, sketchy, or even rapey rather than actually calling them assault—that are not entirely nefarious. Often it seemed like the primary motivation was to maintain harmony within a friendship community. The result is disturbing, prioritizing social harmony over recognizing and remediating harm. Peers and organizations shape consent not just by structuring sexual opportunities—they also do it through interpretive work and social pressure.25
In Chapter 6 we recounted the time Tim was cheered on by his peers when he went back to his room to grab a condom, only to have the woman he was with text “Help” when he returned to her. But let’s also recall what happened next: Tim went back to his group, bringing the women he knew from high school to convince this woman she didn’t need help, that she had it all wrong. These women, at least as Tim related, saw that she was hysterically laughing, happy to see them, and clearly completely out of her head. They served as witnesses. Nothing bad had happened. That Tim could mobilize pre-college connections to get him out of a complicated situation is just one of the myriad ways in which privilege protects.26
We can read this witnessing as malicious, and it may well have been. But in protecting their friends, people are also protecting the idea that their community is a good one; that the people with whom they’re close are morally upstanding; that the world they’ve built around themselves and by which they’ve defined themselves is to be admired, or maybe even envied. Except for Jed’s friends (and we only have second-hand knowledge of his behavior), we didn’t see any examples of people explicitly trying to “protect rapists.” Instead, we saw and heard about students working to maintain the view of their group as an upstanding, valuable, moral community, and of themselves and those around them as good people. Sometimes the consequence was—inadvertent in our view—protecting people who had committed assault.27
Bystander programs that train students to spot and interrupt unwanted sexual advances and seek to promote campus conversations about respectful relationships are one of the few interventions with a demonstrable impact on reducing campus sexual assault.28 In our analysis of how students act as bystanders, led by Alexander Wamboldt, we saw bystander interventions’ unintended impacts, including that students act as bystanders in ways that sometimes protect the status of group members.29 Students, almost exclusively men, intervened for reasons of liability, reputation, and moral commitments.
The legal boundaries between Greek life and campus life are disputed, but the quasi-independence of fraternities enables underage members of the university to access alcohol and have a “college experience.” Young men in fraternities that we spoke to recognize this, and we understood why they perceived this situation as an offloading of liability. National structures of Greek life explicitly instruct young men to intervene in problem behavior, in part because it’s wrong, and in part because brothers could be held personally liable for things that happen in their house. As one fraternity president told us, “We have to be super careful because we have really no insurance if anything happens. So we always have to be very meticulous about how things happen.” Many fraternities have a “risk management officer” whose job it is to make sure that things like death from drinking or assault don’t happen at their events. No insurance, after all, will protect students from that.
Whether or not they were in fraternities, the men we talked to worried about being associated with “rapey” people. Students routinely exchange information with one another about people or places to avoid. After hearing one of these conversations, a man expressed some degree of pity, but not so much that he wanted to be around the man who used to be his friend. “He’s a fucking pariah. As shitty as it sounds, I don’t fucking want to be seen sitting with him at the dining hall because then you’re like friends with the rapist, you know? It could fuck up your life too!” Readers might think to themselves, “Good! If we just severely punish these people and make them total social pariahs, then people will stop!” But criminologists have shown that extreme punishments are one of the least effective tools at our disposal to deter behavior.30
In addition to being motivated by concerns about liability and reputation, most men we spoke to had moral commitments to being good people.31 Removing potential “sexual offenders” from a group is both a performance of one’s moral nature and an expression of a genuine commitment to sexual violence prevention. The president of a student group proudly told us how he intervened when, at one of their events, a man kept asking a woman out, not taking “no” for an answer and not understanding her avoidance as a polite way to ask him to move on. But he also noted that he needed to be ever vigilant. At that same event, a woman had been groped. His pride shifted to despair. “The fact that it can happen under the radar like that is scary. I mean I saw this one thing and I was able to stop it! But I couldn’t stop that other really bad thing. It’s just sad.”
Peer networks and formal student organizations provide sexual assault prevention opportunities, but the same social pressures regarding reputation, and the same genuine intentions to care for one another, also create sexual opportunities, sexual assault opportunities, and missed opportunities for intervention. Sometimes students interpret the bystander approach to mean that they should keep an eye out for “predators,” when in fact they would be better served by looking at their friends. They don’t always know how to intervene. We saw students talk to friends and peers when they behaved badly. But more frequently we saw people just remove the problem person, using physical force if necessary. One strategy when a peer was seen as being too sexually aggressive was to get the person high so that they would, in the words of one man, “fall asleep or get chill and calm down, or . . . just get the spins and start puking.” Presumably after puking, they’d be less likely to sexually assault someone.
Though “bystander intervention” is presented to students in trainings wherein stopping sexual assault is regarded as everyone’s job, we saw it almost exclusively undertaken by men who acted virtuously, in their view, by protecting women from other men’s sexual aggression. There’s an obvious heteronormative limitation to this, and feminists have reasonably critiqued a kind of neo-Victorian erasure of women’s sexual agency, framing women as objects in need of protection.32 When men noticed that women were excessively drunk, we observed their tendency to intervene by removing these women from the space where they were in control. This could have been a way of “helping,” but it also was a way to avoid the consequences if a woman was later assaulted or had some other terrible experience because of her drunkenness. Such intervention could take the form of walking a woman home, bringing her to a private room where she’d be “safe” from potentially predatory men, or finding her friends and telling them to “get her out of here.” Yet as we’ve seen, getting walked home or being brought to a private space doesn’t necessarily protect women from being assaulted.
As for men who were being “creepy,” the intervention depended largely on whether or not those men were a part of the group or organization. Men avoided embarrassing a friend publicly or raising broader awareness about a friend’s problem behavior. During one of our observations, we saw a group of men notice that one of their friends was getting a little too pushy with a woman sitting next to him at the bar. His friend employed a distraction strategy. He put his arm around the offending group member and said to him, “Hey man, we need another person for this game of beer pong,” nodding at the woman as he walked his compatriot away. The “smoke him up” strategy was also fairly common, particularly at parties held on campus. And sometimes men just tried to defuse the situation by edging into the conversation and pivoting it in a different direction. One man in a prestigious fraternity, who rather immodestly told us he was “very renowned for being the kind of noble shit kind of guy,” described the subtler, educational method used for his brothers. “There’s guys . . . that come off too strong to some girls in our fraternity just because they’re younger kids that don’t exactly know how to talk to girls. And we try to help them. Be like, ‘You need to chill a little bit more.’” His “noble shit” was very different for guys who are not fraternity members; his goal was then to get the offender off the property as soon as possible. Men who used this method would get together and decide to “kick the guy out.” If he didn’t go, they weren’t against using force. The strategy was pretty direct, “Grab the guy in a headlock and remove him!”
These various strategies have unintended, and sometimes adverse, individual and social consequences. One woman we spent a lot of time with talked about avoiding a “known rapey man” who lived on her hall, even though she thought he was, “like, okay.” When we asked her how he was a “known rapey guy” she told us that they’d lived in the same dorm freshman year and he’d been dramatically asked to leave a party where he was “kinda an uninvited guest” because of how he was acting. The reputation stuck, and she wasn’t about to do anything to make it less sticky. “I just worry that hanging out with him sends some sort of signal. Like if I hang out with him [it] says to other people that he’s trustworthy.” We opened this chapter talking about how group dynamics were intimately tied to status hierarchies. Grabbing a guy in a headlock and throwing him out of the party serves multiple purposes. It potentially interrupts bad behavior. It protects a group’s reputation. It helps men establish themselves as “noble shit” guys, while imposing a difficult-to-shake polluted identity on the man kicked out. This potentially facilitates the “noble shit” men’s access to sexual partners by defining them, in contrast, as good and not rapey.
Of course, it could be that some men have fewer social connections because of their behavior, that the campus whisper network is conveying some accurate information. But we didn’t find a lot of evidence for this. We heard about assaults that occurred immediately after the victim and the person who assaulted them had been in a public space where others were around; these friends could have acted as bystanders but did not because they assumed mutual sexual desire. Students have gotten the message that they should intervene to stop nonconsensual sexual encounters, but often those encounters begin with some degree of interest. And more importantly, students’ strongest impulses are typically to try to be “wingmen” or “matchmakers.” They’re often drinking, in spaces where verbal communication is difficult—music is blaring, in a tiny space crammed with people.
Gendered sexual scripts, and the consequent idea that only women need protection, leave men at risk. Students who saw drunk men being groped and plied with alcohol mostly shrugged it off, even laughing about it later. Men’s inability to consent wasn’t really considered; the sexual script that men always want sex made it hard to think through what an intervention would look like. Tim told us how his friends saw a woman plying him with drinks, and simply figured he was on the path to getting lucky. They didn’t want to get in the way.
Rebecca was raped by the men who walked her to her room. Her story isn’t unique. Samantha told us about a friend who “helped” her one night when she was too drunk to get home. Her narrative is fragmented, perhaps like her memory. But also it suggests a struggle to make sense of it.
I think he was a really good guy. He saw that I was sick and said to me, “Let’s get you home.” And so I—I got home. I was fine. I was just—I didn’t really remember if anything happened. In retrospect I don’t think that we had sex. But I was worried and that week I got mono and my period stopped so I was super worried that we’d had sex. I took a pregnancy test. But no, I was just like really sick. But yeah, no, that was really scary.
She’s still not sure what happened, much less how to think about. They remain friends. We are not writing in opposition to bystander interventions; rather, the examples of how students deploy these ideas underlines the need for programming that does more to help them think critically about status and power on their own campus. Moreover, there is a distinction between reactive and proactive approaches to bystander interventions; reactive ones train students to interrupt assaultive interactions as they are in process, while proactive approaches seek to promote broader critical conversations about respectful interactions.33 Given the fundamental role of formal and informal student groups in shaping campus sex, and the earnest desire of many groups to both reputationally and actually be spaces that discourage assaults, there is enormous potential in the proactive approach. It’s hard to know what to say about instances in which a person offers to get someone very safely home, only to then assault them, other than to remember that there is a point at which social analysis cannot explain individual bad behavior.
We have noted how designating some men as rapey has become a way for groups to claim a dominant social position, and to dominate other groups of men. Men in particular work to minimize their friends’ sexual aggression and highlight the aggression of other, unaffiliated men. This is, to no small degree, because of the increased stigma associated with sexual aggression. Men with control over space and powerful allies can use this stigma to augment their position by ostracizing others—and in so doing, to inoculate themselves, to a degree, from assault accusations. The public shaming of men who are socially vulnerable and the protection of men who are institutionally established augments the power of the already powerful. It also produces a distorted sense of the risks within the campus landscape.34
The power of the group can operate even for assaults that take place without any witnesses. Jaylene, who considered herself artsy, was drawn to Columbia in part for its New York location. Her wealthy family didn’t blink at shelling out large sums of money for a purely social extracurricular activity, and so she joined the Epicurean Society, which frequented restaurants around the city and gave her a chance to meet other students (all of whom were similarly wealthy). Spring semester freshman year she started “crushing hard” on one of the upperclassmen running the program. She had to say something. She trudged through the snow to his room. But then, overwhelmed, she abruptly left to go to a party, trying to “destress.” Having composed herself, she returned to his room and declared her feelings. He responded by reaching for her hand, then asking her to kiss him “to see if there’s a spark.” Jaylene’s only intention had been to have a conversation about her feelings—to see if he was also “catching feelings” for her—but she consented to the kiss. After all, she liked him. They moved to the bed and kept kissing, but things started “escalating sexually.” Because they were friends, they had talked about sex before, and so she was surprised when he asked her to give him a blow job. Jaylene had specifically told him in the past that it was something that she would never do because she did not feel comfortable doing it. She kept trying to have the conversation, but he kept kissing her and asking for a blow job. Eventually he wore her down. Looking back, she felt he had manipulated her. They talked about it later and he admitted that he took advantage of her. No one was with them there in his single room; but the group was still present. She ended up doing things she didn’t want to in part because she feared losing a connection to a group that had become part of her identity.
Peer groups are a fundamental element of the social production of campus sexual assault, but in ways that go far beyond what Octavia experienced that night her freshman year. These group-level influences cannot be eliminated, but can perhaps be harnessed, by understanding how groups create risks for their members and for others, by attending to how much (or how little) control groups exercise over their members, and by thinking about how selection processes may amplify rather than challenge the abusive tendencies of some members. Groups themselves aren’t the problem, but particular ways of forming and running groups can be a big problem. Whatever the type of student group—Hillel, the Black Students Organization, Columbia Queer Alliance, one of the many South Asian cultural groups, or any of the hundreds of identity and activity groups that constitute the social landscape—associational life is a central part of people’s college projects. These are where students feel at home. They are their family. Joaquín’s sense of security among his fraternity brothers was as touching to us as it was important to him. There is enormous potential in organizing group-level conversations that encourage students to clarify their sexual projects; to claim their own sexual citizenship and recognize that of others, including students who are not members of their group; and to understand how the dimensions of campus sexual geography under student control produce conditions of vulnerability. This potential exists because these groups, as it turns out, don’t only create the conditions in which assaults occur; they also play a crucial role in the aftermath.