Dealing with Creeps and Weirdos: Fraternity Men's Motivations and Justifications for Bystander Behaviors

For decades, bystander intervention has been touted as the premier strategy for preventing sexual misconduct on college campuses. In a recent systematic review, researchers found that the most common and strongest factor influencing bystander behavior was the belief that peers supported such behavior (Mainwaring, Gabbert, & Scott 2022). However, while many bystander intervention evaluations document changes in beliefs or attitudes about sexual violence and misconduct, increases in actual behaviors remain elusive. Furthermore, the risks of encountering a scenario where bystander intervention to prevent sexual misconduct might be called for are not equally distributed across campus contexts. Young, college-aged men are at particular risk for perpetrating gender-based violence (Hirsch & Kahn 2020), especially within the context of peer cultures like historically white fraternities, which are known for emphasizing masculine norms like aggressiveness, competition, and sexual conquest. This paper asks: What bystander intervention behaviors currently exist in high-risk environments on college campuses, and what are the underlying beliefs and motivations for those behaviors?

This paper is based upon longitudinal interviews with 42 fraternity men at a private university in the southeastern United States. Interviews occurred at two points in time—first from March to October 2022, and again from October 2023-August 2024. All participants in this study were born between 1999-2003, all identify as heterosexual, and the majority identify as white or Caucasian. Participants were identified for the study through snowball sampling and interviewed exclusively over zoom. My analytical approach to this data was primary an abductive one (Timmermans & Tavory 2023) and also drew on grounded theory (Corbin & Strauss 1990).

A catalogue of over 30 reported bystander intervention instances—ranging in intrusiveness from casual distraction to interrupting a sexual engagement in a private bedroom—reveal that bystander intervention behaviors occur frequently in fraternity social spaces. Participants justify their decisions to intervene in what they deem risky or “red flag” situations based on their construction of a particular character who was common at fraternity parties, who they called the “creepy guy” or “weirdo.” These individuals demonstrated specific inappropriate or uncomfortable qualities that raised concerns for fraternity men based on issues of organizational liability. In other words, men frequently intervened in situations where they were concerned about sexual misconduct not because they felt concern for a potential victim, but because they sought to protect their organization.

Overall, I interpret and catalogue these reports to make an argument that bystander intervention behaviors in historically white fraternity spaces may not be as elusive as previous studies have suggested. Instead, the ascribed meaning, justification, and motivations for those behaviors on the part of fraternity men may make them difficult to translate into the current world of bystander intervention literature, which emphasizes individual beliefs and attitudes over instrumental or self-serving rationalization. The results of this study have important and immediate applications to bystander intervention training curricula across the United States and also represent a potential new way to interpret behavior change. Ethical considerations for the future of bystander intervention given these findings are also discussed.