by Claude Opus 5.5
May and Strikwerda argue that men in certain groups share responsibility for a culture that makes rape more likely. Does this case lend their thesis support, and does the thesis survive the objection that it dilutes individual culpability?
Larry May and Robert Strikwerda’s “Men in Groups: Collective Responsibility for Rape” (Hypatia, 1994) argued that rape should not be understood solely as the act of individual deviant men, but in part as a product of group cultures in which men participate. Drawing on social-scientific work on fraternities and on Susan Brownmiller’s analysis of rape as serving a broader system of male power, they argued that men in certain groups, particularly those with cultures of sexual aggression and male bonding, share responsibility for the prevalence of rape, even if they personally never commit it. They described this responsibility as shared rather than collective in a strong sense: it distributes to individuals in proportion to their participation in, benefit from and failure to oppose the relevant culture.
Does this case lend support?
The case behind these seminars is contested, and nothing below assumes the allegations are true. But several features of the case as reported fit the structure May and Strikwerda describe.
First, the setting. The allegations concern a fraternity, a paradigm of the kind of group they discussed. Peggy Reeves Sanday’s Fraternity Gang Rape (1990), on which they drew, documented ritualised group sexual violence in fraternity settings and described its role in male bonding.
Second, the bystanders. Around fifty members reportedly received messages and a photo during the night, and none called the police. Whatever each individual saw or understood, the aggregate pattern is the one May and Strikwerda predicted: a culture in which group loyalty, the treatment of women as objects of shared display, and the norm of not reporting brothers combine to make collective inaction the default.
Third, the institutional response. Cornell closed the chapter, a collective sanction premised on the idea that the group, not only certain members, bears responsibility.
These features do not prove the thesis, which is empirical as well as normative, but they illustrate the mechanisms it posits.
The dilution objection
The most serious objection is that shared responsibility dilutes individual culpability. If all men in the group share responsibility for rape culture, then the specific men who committed any assault are, in a sense, merely the most visible part of a collective wrong. Their individual guilt is spread across a wider population, and the moral and legal significance of their choices is diminished.
A related objection concerns fairness. Men who never assaulted anyone, who may privately disapprove of the culture, are told they share responsibility for something they did not do. That seems to violate the principle that people should be blamed only for their own conduct.
Does the thesis survive?
It survives, but only in a qualified form that May and Strikwerda themselves partly anticipated.
First, responsibility is not a fixed quantity. The dilution objection presupposes that there is a finite amount of responsibility for a given harm, so that ascribing some of it to bystanders leaves less for perpetrators. This is false. A perpetrator’s full culpability for his act is not reduced by others’ shared responsibility for the conditions that made it more likely. May and Strikwerda can and should insist on additive, not distributive, responsibility.
Second, the responsibilities are of different kinds. The perpetrator is responsible for the act. Group members are responsible for their participation in, or failure to oppose, a culture. These are different objects of responsibility, with different grounds and different appropriate responses: punishment for the act, reform and moral reckoning for the culture.
Third, shared responsibility must be graduated. May and Strikwerda’s own formulation ties responsibility to participation, benefit and failure to oppose. A member who actively promoted degrading norms bears more than one who joined last term and kept his head down. A member who spoke out bears less, or none. This makes the thesis compatible with the principle of individual fault: each person is responsible for his own contribution to the culture.
Fourth, the forward-looking dimension. Iris Marion Young’s social connection model, developed later, offers a way of reading May and Strikwerda that sidesteps much of the fairness objection. On her view, those who participate in structural processes that produce injustice share a forward-looking responsibility to change them, without implying that they are to blame for past harms. Applied here, all members of a group with a culture of sexual aggression share a responsibility to change it, whether or not they are culpable for what has already happened.
Remaining concerns
Two concerns remain. One is that the thesis may be used rhetorically to condemn whole categories of people, which can provoke defensiveness rather than reform. The other is empirical: whether a particular group really has the culture the thesis describes is a question of evidence, not assumption, and a seminar should be careful not to presume that every fraternity, or this one, fits the template.
The thesis, properly understood, does not dilute individual culpability; it adds a further layer of responsibility that individualistic accounts overlook.