Greek Rape Culture

The topic I am researching is how greek life, parties, and alcohol play a part of rape culture on college campuses. Many of my sources focused on the same issues, and many of them concluded studies showing how Greek life contributes to this modern issue. Factors within this issue is how fraternities and male sports teams are perceived and who is attracted to joining these organizations. The main argument among all of these sources were that parties and alcohol abuse create an environment that can be a breeding ground for this unacceptable type of behavior.

My first source, written by Stephen E. Humphrey conducted several tests and surveys with questionnaires using college students as the subjects. After conducting a study, this article is

It reveals the percent of students in a fraternity or sorority, actively involved or not, involved in binge-drinking episodes over the past two weeks. They studied binge drinking incidents and how often they binge drink (defined as having five or more drinks in a row), the average number of alcoholic drinks they consumed per week, the adverse consequences they had experienced in the previous year due to alcohol or other drug use, and the beliefs they hold regarding alcohol. Situations also recorded were average weekly alcohol consumption, hangovers, fights caused, and blackouts. Along with these statistics, beliefs were also recorded and there was a clear connection between alcohol and sexuality. Many believe that drinking alcohol makes it easier to create new friendships and new sexual opportunity. This article argues that greek leaders are the culprits of initiating binge-drinking at universities. They state that anyone involved in Greek life feels compelled to drink, and further instigating that they will lose control, or blackout. While their intent of this was to bring up the serious issues binge-drinking can cause, they did not mention anything about students not involved in greek life’s drinking habits. While it is suspected that Greek leaders would be most worried about the liability and consequences that may follow a binge-drinking accident. The conclusions were that leaders of greek life had a higher percentage in all categories, including hangovers, blackouts, and fights caused by alcohol and other drug use. According the the survey, greek life is more prone to supporting and participating in heavy drinking at partying. It is unknown whether heavy-drinkers are attracted to greek life or if Greek life promotes heavy drinking practices. While I agree that drinking levels can be escalated in