As the rush season is about to kick off on campus with newly reinstated fraternity activities, national representatives called emergency meetings with sorority chapters in order to forbid members to attend on- and off-campus fraternity events.
Not only would the annual “Boys’ Bid Night” and other official campus events for rush week be off limits, but some chapters instructed members to avoid attending off-campus parties where fraternity members would be present.
The penalties that national representatives outlined for violating the bad included possible suspensions and fines.
New Policies “Invalid”, “Degrading”
UVa sorority women have reacted angrily as what they see as a top-down, ill conceived and undermining policy that puts the responsibility for preventing sexual assault on women, rather than on potential perpetrators or the wider culture that enables them.
A Change.org petition that went online quickly and received over 2000 signatures by Tuesday called on the National Panhellenic Conference to retract the ban:
“This is gender discrimination. Instead of addressing rape and sexual assault at UVa, this mandate perpetuates the idea that women are inferior, sexual objects. It is degrading to Greek women, as it appears that the NPC views us as defenseless and UVa's new fraternal policies as invalid. Allowing the NPC to prevent us from celebrating (what used to be) a tight-knit community, sends the message that we are weak.”
A widely-circulated letter, written by the Sexual Violence Prevention Coalition, concedes that “it is appropriate and necessary to question the occurrence of Boys' Bid Night and its value to our community” but rejects the NPC’s methods and lack of transparency.
“This resolution has misconstrued us as a passive aggregate rather than active agents for change. It has also had the unintended consequence of subjugating women…Women have historically been the targets of sexual violence, and forbidding us to exercise our agency plays dangerously into gender stereotypes surrounding the issue.”
The student council passed a bill Tuesday night in an emergency session that called for a meeting of students and national chapter heads, who the NPC says are responsible for the orders that were handed down.
“Of course, NPC supports the safety of their women, so they do support those national presidents making that decision and encouraging sorority women to plan sisterhood events and other ‘safer’ options,” Michelle Bower, a spokeswoman for the NPC told the Washington Post.
Brewing Crisis Boiling Over
All fraternity and sorority activities had been suspended at UVa following widely publicized allegations of on-campus rape which intensified an already heated nationwide conversation about sexual assault on college campuses. The ban on such activities, conditional on new rules and regulations, were lifted only days before the scheduled traditional fraternity bid night.
A widely read exposé of UVa in the November 2014 issue of Rolling Stone Magazine, later seriously discredited on many points, stoked the fires of an already heated nationwide debate. But despite the story’s flaws, many women came out to say that the ways in which college campuses like UVa fail victims of sexual assault were still very real.
Indeed, a student at Columbia University, Emma Sulkowicz, had already been making national headlines in September for staging a protest against her school’s administration by carrying her mattress around campus until they expel her rapist.
In November, after the Rolling Stone article came out, the campus news outlet, WUVA, published an interview conducted the previous month with Dean Nicole Eramo of the campus’ sexual assault board, in which she offered explanations for why cheaters receive harsher punishments than rapists.
— Zach Carter (@zachdcarter) December 5, 2014
In addition to addressing the administrative structures that have proven abysmal at holding perpetrators of sexual assault accountable, many discussions on college campuses also include proposals for how to reform the frat party scene to leave women less vulnerable. But some reforms like shifting party sites to women’s own houses would involve changes at the national level, as the NPC has policies about keeping sorority chapter houses dry.
“Fraternity members feel so entitled to women’s bodies, because women have no ownership of the social scene. You can’t kick a guy out of his own house,” Molly Reckford, the social chair of Sigma Delta at Dartmouth, told the New York Times.
