Rape Culture and Fraternity Risk Levels on College Campuses

Introduction: Fraternities and the Undergraduate Experience

The undergraduate experience is an important one for many young people in America and around the world. When young people go off to college, they have opportunities for a wide range of experiences and encounter the full array of college and university traditions. Unfortunately, some of those traditions are deeply troubling. This paper focuses on one of the most serious: the perpetuation of rape culture on undergraduate campuses, with specific attention to rape culture within Greek fraternity systems.

Joining a fraternity — known by the shorter moniker "frat" among young people — is a defining moment for many young men. Fraternities throw parties, participate in community service, and are, by research accounts, among the most likely places for an undergraduate woman to be raped, humiliated, assaulted, or disrespected. This paper explores the differences between high-risk and low-risk fraternities as a means of analyzing what precise factors contribute to — or undermine — women's safety and overall experience at fraternity parties.

High-Risk vs. Low-Risk Fraternities

The 1996 article "Why Are Some Fraternities More Dangerous Places for Women?" by Boswell and Spade provides insightful and rigorous research on rape culture, fraternities, and the undergraduate experience. The article presents research into Greek culture and local bar culture at a specific undergraduate institution that, until approximately three decades before publication, did not even admit women as students. The authors' findings reveal clear differences and patterns in Greek and local bar culture with respect to women's safety, positive co-ed socialization, and undergraduate sexuality. While it is common knowledge among American undergraduates that fraternities are places where young people use drugs and alcohol, have sexual encounters, and socialize without adult supervision, what may be less well known is that there are significant differences among fraternities themselves.

Boswell and Spade identify two types of fraternities when considering women's safety: "high-risk" fraternities and "low-risk" fraternities (1996). The risk level describes the relative probability that women will be coerced into sexual encounters, that socialization will be strongly gender-segregated, that drugs and alcohol will be consumed recklessly, and that the primary goal of co-ed interaction is sexual consummation rather than conversation, connection, or non-sexual enjoyment (Boswell & Spade, 1996). As one might infer, members of high-risk fraternities are more likely to regard women as nameless, faceless objects — worthy of ridicule, abuse, and expected compliance with any and all sexual advances or desires.

Brothers at high-risk fraternities do not perceive women as fully realized people. Women who attend parties at these houses are rated on their physical appearance and their perceived willingness to engage sexually with the brothers — to "hook up," a term the authors demonstrate carries meaningfully different connotations among males and females, and even among brothers at high-risk versus low-risk fraternities. Brothers at low-risk fraternities are relatively less competitive than their high-risk counterparts and maintain cleaner shared spaces for women, such as bathrooms and main socializing areas (Boswell & Spade, 1996). This seemingly small detail reflects a broader orientation: in high-risk fraternities, women's comfort and dignity are incidental, while in low-risk fraternities, they are considered. The Greek fraternity system thus contains multitudes — from environments that actively endanger women to communities that treat them with basic respect.

Roots of Rape Culture: Tradition and Learned Behavior

Identifying the primary source or cause of the problems described in the research is genuinely difficult. Before attempting an answer, it is worth posing the old question: what came first, the chicken or the egg? High-risk fraternities, like the broader Greek system, operate by tradition. The practice of disrespecting and assaulting women is, in many of these houses, a tradition — one passed down through generations of membership. Brothers learn what behaviors are accepted and expected from older brothers, who in turn learned from those before them, going back to the founding of the organization. These behaviors are not spontaneous; they are learned.

The transmission of harmful norms through fraternity culture mirrors what sociologists have long documented about institutional socialization: individuals entering an established culture absorb its norms, values, and behavioral expectations, often without critically examining them. In high-risk fraternities, the dehumanization of women is not experienced as deviant behavior — it is experienced as normal, even expected, behavior for a member in good standing.