Marital Rape Attitudes Among College Students: Gender and Fraternities
This paper examines attitudes toward marital rape among college students, focusing on how gender and fraternity or sorority membership influence those views. Drawing on a survey of 1,800 students at a private Northeastern university, the paper reviews findings from Auster and Leone's analysis of three key questions: whether marital rape should be prosecuted like stranger rape, how a married woman should respond to forced sex, and whether legislation should equate the two offenses. The paper also situates campus rape within broader theoretical frameworks — feminist and evolutionary — before arguing that a fraternity culture of dominance and sexual aggressiveness best explains the disproportionate share of campus rapes attributed to fraternity members.
- Introduction: Campus Rape and Theoretical Frameworks: Statistics and theories explaining campus rape rates
- Marital Rape Prevalence and the Study Design: Study design examining marital rape attitudes
- Findings: Prosecution and Legislative Support: Gender and fraternity gaps in prosecution support
- Findings: Recommended Responses for Victims: Student views on victim remedies and legal action
- Implications for Campus Safety and Policy: Fraternity culture as campus rape risk factor
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What makes this paper effective
- The introduction grounds the topic in concrete statistics, immediately establishing why marital rape attitudes among college students are a meaningful area of study.
- The paper efficiently contrasts competing theoretical frameworks — feminist and evolutionary — before identifying their shared limitation, which motivates the fraternity-culture explanation.
- Quantitative findings are presented with precision, distinguishing between agreement levels (e.g., "approve" vs. "strongly approve") to show nuance within groups.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of empirical data synthesis: it moves from broad prevalence statistics to a specific study's methodology and then unpacks disaggregated findings by both gender and organizational membership. This layered presentation allows the author to build a cumulative argument rather than simply reporting numbers in isolation.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with national and campus-level rape statistics before introducing theoretical explanations. It then describes the Auster and Leone study design, presents findings across two distinct attitudinal questions, and closes with a policy-relevant interpretation that ties fraternity culture back to the opening statistics. The conclusion does not introduce new evidence but instead synthesizes the preceding findings into a risk-factor argument.
Introduction: Campus Rape and Theoretical Frameworks
Close to 62% of female rape victims are between the ages of 12 and 24 (Rosenthal 407), an age group that encompasses the college years. This helps explain why an estimated one in four college women have been raped while attending college (Rosenthal 412). The men responsible for this statistic — between 7 and 25% of all male college students — admit to forcing a woman to have sex, and most see nothing wrong with doing so.
Feminist theory would have us believe that these acts are the product of males attempting to preserve a male-dominated society through an act of violence, while evolutionary theory would posit that these men have low social status and therefore little chance of mating success (Rosenthal 207). Neither theory seems to fully capture the fact that fraternity members are responsible for at least 50% of all rapes that occur on college campuses (Rosenthal 412). It seems unlikely that fraternity members collude to maintain male dominance over women or that they represent low-status males. Instead, the most consistent explanation is that rape committed by fraternity members is due in large part to a culture of competition, dominance, and sexual aggressiveness.
Marital Rape Prevalence and the Study Design
Partner or marital rape accounts for 25% of all rapes committed in the United States (Rosenthal 411). According to one study cited by Rosenthal, the majority of early adolescent boys and girls felt that rape was acceptable between a husband and wife. This may explain why up to 25% of male college students see nothing wrong with forcing a woman to have sex.
To better understand the attitudes college students hold toward marital rape, Auster and Leone extracted survey data to answer three questions: (1) Is marital rape equivalent to stranger rape? (2) How should a married woman respond to being forced to have sex with her husband? (3) Would respondents support legislation making marital rape equivalent to stranger rape in the eyes of the law? The independent variables were gender and sorority or fraternity membership. The study sample consisted of 1,800 college students enrolled at a private college located in the Northeastern United States.
Findings: Prosecution and Legislative Support
The main finding was that 82.8% and 95.4% of male and female students, respectively, agreed or strongly agreed that marital rape should be prosecuted in the same way as stranger rape (Auster and Leone 146). The difference in attitudes on this issue was statistically significant between genders. When fraternity membership was examined, 87.5% of non-members and 74.3% of members agreed or strongly agreed. Fraternity membership was also a statistically significant determinant of attitudes on this issue. Sorority membership status, on the other hand, had no impact.
Regarding legislation making marital rape equivalent to stranger rape, 84.0% and 95.3% of male and female college students, respectively, approved or strongly approved. Fraternity membership was again associated with less support (77.1% vs. 87.7%). When comparing the responses "approve" and "strongly approve" separately, 60.0% and 17.1% of fraternity members gave these answers, compared to 43.1% and 44.6% of non-fraternity college males, respectively.
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