by Claude Opus 5.5
Sanday documented ritualised group sexual violence in fraternities in 1990. Why has the phenomenon proved so resistant to reform, and what does that suggest about where responsibility lies?
In Fraternity Gang Rape (1990), the anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday described group sexual violence in American fraternities not as the aberrant conduct of a few individuals but as a ritual with social functions. Drawing on a case at a large university in the early 1980s and on ethnographic work, she argued that in some fraternity cultures shared sexual aggression served to bond brothers to one another, to display a particular form of masculinity and to mark women as objects through which male status was exchanged. The pledging process, with its humiliation and demands for loyalty, prepared members for a group identity that could override individual conscience. Three and a half decades later, the allegations in the case behind these seminars, which concern a fraternity house and a large group chat whose members reportedly received messages and a photo during the night without anyone calling the police, have revived the question of why so little seems to have changed. Nothing in what follows assumes that the specific allegations are true; the question is about the persistence of a pattern.
Why reform has been so difficult
Several features of fraternities make them unusually resistant to change.
Turnover. Undergraduate membership turns over completely every four years. Reforms imposed after a scandal must be adopted by cohorts who did not experience the scandal and may resent the reforms. Institutional memory resides less in members than in rituals, traditions and alumni, which tend to preserve the culture reforms are meant to change.
Autonomy and property. Many fraternity houses are owned or controlled by alumni corporations or national organisations rather than the university. Universities can withdraw recognition, but they often cannot control who lives where, or what happens inside a privately owned house. Closing a chapter may simply produce an unrecognised one, beyond even the limited oversight a university had.
Money and influence. Fraternities are often supported by loyal alumni who are also significant donors to the university. National organisations have resources, legal expertise and an interest in protecting the brand. Universities may depend on fraternity housing. These relationships create incentives for administrators to manage scandals rather than address causes.
Law and liberty. Members have rights of association, and attempts to restrict membership have met legal resistance. Harvard, for example, abandoned its policy of sanctioning members of single-gender social organisations in 2020 after litigation. Universities are rightly wary of punishing students for association rather than conduct.
Risk management instead of culture change. Much of the reform effort has been driven by liability. National organisations have adopted risk management policies on alcohol and events, and universities require consent training. These measures can reduce some risks, but they can also shift responsibility onto individual members and onto victims, while leaving untouched the norms of loyalty, secrecy and status that Sanday identified.
The loyalty norm itself. Sanday’s central insight is that the group is constituted in part by the behaviour reformers want to stop, and by a code of silence that protects it. Any reform that relies on members to report one another runs into the very bond that makes the organisation what it is.
Where responsibility lies
If the phenomenon were simply a matter of individual wrongdoing, its persistence across decades, institutions and generations would be puzzling. People change; the pattern does not. That persistence suggests that responsibility is not exhausted by the individuals who commit particular acts, though it certainly includes them.
Philosophers such as Larry May have argued that groups can share responsibility for harms that arise from their culture, even when not every member participates. Members who sustain the norms that make violence possible, who laugh, who stay silent, who protect the group’s reputation, contribute to the conditions of harm. On this view, the roughly fifty members of a group chat who reportedly received messages that night, if the reports are accurate, would bear a form of responsibility distinct from that of anyone who committed an assault: not for the act, but for the culture of non-intervention.
The persistence of the pattern also points beyond the chapter. National organisations and universities are repeat players. They have known about the risk for decades, have the power to change structures and have chosen, at various points, strategies that protect themselves. Responsibility for foreseeable harm attaches to those who can prevent it and fail to do so. A university that has repeatedly responded to fraternity scandals with temporary suspensions and training modules, without addressing the underlying structures, cannot claim to be surprised. Cornell itself has a history of attempting to reform Greek life after earlier crises, which is evidence both of awareness and of the limits of its approach.
Finally, the culture is not unique to fraternities. Sanday herself was clear that fraternities amplify wider social attitudes about masculinity, sex and status. A society that tolerates those attitudes elsewhere cannot simply locate the problem in fraternity houses.
The danger of dissolving responsibility
There is a risk in this analysis. If responsibility is spread across cultures, institutions and society, individuals may disappear from view. Structural analysis can become a way of excusing. The better conclusion is not that individuals matter less, but that structural responsibility is additional. A person who commits sexual violence is fully responsible for it. Those who enable it, those who could have prevented it and those who maintain the structures that make it recur are responsible for their part. The resistance of the phenomenon to reform suggests that, so far, most of the effort has been directed at the first category, and too little at the others.