by Tamara Stein and Joanna Rosenhein
My friend's statuses about Take Back the Night informed me that Sigma Phi Epsilon, a fraternity on campus, would be proudly co-sponsoring this event.
My first thought when I saw this was: Wow, that's awesome! The more groups that show their support of sexual assault prevention and awareness, the better, and especially if it is from a group of men on campus.
However, after immediately doing more research, my excitement quickly turned into disappointment. I found out that Sigma Phi Epsilon, as wonderful as it was that a brotherhood was co-sponsoring this important event, was the only fraternity in the Inter-Fraternity Council on AU's campus to cosponsor Take Back the Night. Out of the 13 recognized IFC members, 12 of them were not publicly participating.
To preface this, there are many men that I know, in other organizations that are co-sponsoring Take Back the Night, that will be at the event and who are proud of co-sponsoring it. Among these include Men of Strength, men a part of Alpha Phi Omega, and many other men who will come alone to stand in solidarity with these victims, because they too can be victims.
Overall though, the number of victims of sexual assault are overwhelmingly women. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, for every "1,000 women attending their institutions, there may well be 35 incidents of rape in a given academic year (based on a victimization rate of 35.3 per 1,000 college women). For a campus with 10,000 women, this would mean the number of rapes could exceed 350."
There were far more women's organizations than men's and, from my own observations being there and looking around, be far more women in attendance (just as there was last year), than men. So, why is it a problem that 12 out of the 13 men-only organizations in the IFC are co-sponsoring Take Back the Night?
Just last year, on the day of Take Back the Night 2012, the VP of IFC made a Facebook status stating that the women participating in the event were "inexplicably angry women." This year, a group of certain fraternity brothers wore shirts to the Jacobs Fitness Center that stated, "please don't feed the sorority girls...Campus Beautification," which in and of itself, is harassment against women.
We don't just see this sort of aggression and harsh discourse regarding women in fraternity men. No, it's somehow become part of our culture for many men, affiliated or non-affiliated, to see this issue of sexual assault and rape as only a women's issue.
Well guess what, it's not a women's issue.
In March 2010, former Eagle columnist, Alex Knepper, implied that rape is in the control of women when he stated, "'Date rape', is an incoherent concept ... Sex isn't about contract-signing. It's about spontaneity, raw energy and control (or its counterpart, surrender) ... Feminists don't understand history, psychology, biology or sexuality."
In accordance with Knepper's statements, saying that rape and sexual assault is a women's issue implies that it is something that women are causing and thus having to live with and take care of. Saying it's a women's issue implies that men are completely off the hook for any and all sort of sexual crimes.
This discourse around sexual assault and rape as being the fault of the women and the absence of most men in the discussion has to end in order for any progress to be made. Sure, after the incident last year regarding the ignorant Facebook post, the IFC made a public statement saying that they did not endorse this post and that they take sexual assault very seriously. Sure, the fraternity that caused the incident this year made the same public statement saying that they did not support those t-shirts and they felt it was wrong to send that message of public harassment of women.
It's very easy to apologize and hindsight is 20-20, but progress in the realm of sexual assault, all assault for that matter, will only be made when our campus can have proactive support from all of the male organizations on campus, making this issue be seen publicly as less of a women's issue and more of an everyone's issue.
Tamara Stein is a sophomore in the School of Public Affairs and Joanna Rosenhein is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences.
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