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For decades, sexual assault has been documented at epidemic levels on college campuses. Greek Letter organizations increase the risk of sexual assault for both men and women (Hirsch & Khan 2019). Furthermore, sorority women have been found to be 6 times more likely than their non-sorority counterparts to experience sexual assault while in college (Minnow & Einolf 2009). Since the 1990s, the dominant approach to campus sexual assault has been bystander intervention, which prioritizes surveillance techniques to prevent sexual assault and deputizes students to police peer behaviors (Kovalenko et al 2020). Bystander intervention has failed to move the needle on campus sexual assault (DeGue et al 2014), and it falls short of demanding accountability for harm done (Brush & Miller 2022). This paper uses non-carceral accountability, social movements, and feminist theories to interpret one campus community’s response to sexual assault. This case study provides unique insight into the power of community refusal as a non-carceral approach to sexual assault and documents the material changes that such an intervention could demand.
Methods
This paper is based on 34 in-depth semi-structured interviews with members of four different fraternities at a private university. The demographics of the sample reflect the homogeneity of of Greek-Letter organizations that has been documented elsewhere (Syrett 2009). Thirty-two of the participants (94%) identified as White, one (3%) identified as Black, and one identified as Latino. All participants identified as men and reported their sexuality as heterosexual or straight.
Results
In fall 2021, a student at Merrimon University publicly disclosed that she had been raped at the Sigma fraternity in 2019. Her case had been taken through a confidential Title IX process, resulting in the accused student being suspended. That fall, the accused student had returned to campus. In response, marches and rallies were held on campus protesting the ways in which fraternities contributed to sexual violence towards women. Multiple sororities boycotted Sigma, refusing to engage with them socially. Interviews revealed individual, cultural, and structural changes that Sigma put into place in response to this intervention. In interviews, Sigma men described a heightened sense of urgency to prevent further harm. Within a single semester the fraternity overhauled their bylaws, changed their party planning routines, and created formal roles within their leadership in order to center sexual assault prevention at their events.
Conclusions/Implications
This paper examines an incident of non-carceral community accountability on a college campus through the eyes of the targeted fraternity members. In this case, when public accountability was demanded from their organization and social sanctions were organically put in place, Sigma leapt into action. Findings suggest that structural change to prevent harm can happen at a rapid pace when sanctions are social in nature, rather than carceral. Further discussion in the paper is dedicated to how such interventions could be reproduced and scaled up, as well as a critique of how “bad apple” boycotts can threaten to reproduce existing racial, gender, and sexual hierarchies that put historically marginalized and subjugated students at greater risk.