Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood and Privilege on Campus (FEMINIST CROSSCURRENTS) - Hardcover

This book on gang rape in fraternities tells explicitly about sexual practices on university campuses. The evidence shows how gang rape occurs with regularity in fraternities, in athletic dorms, and in other exclusively male enclaves. Male bonding, pornography, what culture teaches adolescents about sex, and the "boys will be boys" attitude of authorities all contribute, according to the author, to an atmosphere which leads to sexual harassment, to date rape, to gang rape. Beginning with one incident at one fraternity when, after a Thursday night party, one woman - all accounts agree - had sex with five or six fraternity brothers, the book explores what happened through interviews with the victim, the participants, onlookers, and university administrators. Professor Sanday reconstructs the daily life in the fraternity, showing the role played by pornography, male bonding, degrading jokes, and ritual dances in shaping the fraternities' attitude toward women and toward sexuality. Two fraternity brothers were willing to share details of the humiliating initiation rituals they were compelled to undergo, and they are presented here. According to the research, gang rape occurs widely on college campuses. The evidence suggests a common pattern, in which the brothers seek out a "party girl", a vulnerable young woman, one who is seeking acceptance, or is high on alcohol - sometimes her drinks have been deliberately spiked - and then take her to a room. She may or may not agree to have sex with one man. She then generally passes out and a "train" of men have sex with her. Party invitations may even suggest the possibility of a "train". Incidents of this sort are rarely prosecuted or even labeled rape, part of an institutional attitude which privileges men and sanctions sexual power. This sobering view of sexual life among America's youth is one which some may, despite all evidence, choose to disbelieve. Yet what cannot be denied or ignored is the struggle by college-aged men and women to define their sexuality in the terms society offers them. Taught to deny the feminine and embrace sexual power, as this view suggests, men can see it their natural right to degrade and to assault women. And women - the unwilling victims - through their own lack of self esteem or sense of power, may seek social status by attaching themselves to men in power, in this case, the fraternity brothers.

Peggy Reeves Sanday is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of many books, including A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape on Trial and, most recently, Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy.