Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, spoke at the University Thursday about the problem of campus sexual assault and what universities can do to help address the issue.
Armstrong’s talk — titled “Beyond Rape Culture: Organizational Approaches to Sexual Assault on Campus” — followed an introduction by University President Teresa Sullivan and focused on concrete solutions universities can implement at the institutional level.
Rape culture is a term that refers to a social climate in which sexualized violence is normalized and male sexual aggression towards women is encouraged, according to the rape crisis center Women Against Violence Against Women. Armstrong said the way we talk about rape culture is leading us to ignore real changes we can make to solve the problem.
“The bottom line is really to look at what universities as organizations can do to reduce… sexual assault,” Armstrong said. “[We need to start] moving beyond only changing beliefs in individual people’s heads and start thinking in a more systematic way.”
Armstrong said a big part of this is reducing opportunities for sexual violence.
“There are certain contexts that actually just provide opportunities to rape,” Armstrong said. “They make it easy for predators to find victims and they make it really hard for them to get caught. They can create group or mob mentalities that encourage people who wouldn’t normally rape to do so.”
Armstrong said a common type of campus sexual violence is what she calls “party rape,” which she said often take place in the male-dominated environments.
“[These] events are usually male-controlled or out-of-control — people don’t know each other, want to fit in and are drinking,” she said. “Inexperienced first year women attend parties organized by older male students, [where they] defer to men and strive for male approval.”
Armstrong said victims of party rape are often young women new to campus and assailants are often “in-network strangers” — individuals who know people within the victim’s circle, but to whom the victim has not been introduced.
“In this particular kind of assault, [women] are at risk from people who seem like someone they would trust, but may not in fact be someone they knew before that evening,” Armstrong said.
Armstrong said at these parties, men control the alcohol and entry to the party, often enforcing gender ratios or setting sexualized themes.
“[These] parties often [have] a male dominant, female submissive theme to them, [like] ‘CEO and Secretary Ho,’” Armstrong said. “[Men are] trying to get the women to come to the party in as little clothes as possible.”
Armstrong says change is often resisted because a social scene that revolves around partying is fun and is part of the “college experience.” However, party rape is a form of sexual violence amenable to organizational solutions.
Armstrong suggested creating alternative social spaces for students and better late night transportation to cut down on opportunities for sexual assault to occur. Increasing diversity would also be beneficial, she said.
“A lot of these social scenes are scenes that are very white and very wealthy,” Armstrong said. “If you have more a diverse campus with more integration, I think you can kind of push back against these particularly dangerous contexts.”
Armstrong’s lecture was part of a series of talks called the Intimacy Lectures, an interdisciplinary effort at the University to address different types of intimacy from different perspectives. Sociology Prof. Allison Pugh organized the lectures with three other professors at the University.
“[The Intimacy Lectures] got started because I and my co-organizers all shared a view or a hope that U.Va. could become an important place for the latest conversations that are happening about intimacy,” Pugh said.
The organizers reached out to Armstrong because of her expertise.
“Elizabeth is really a strong scholar on intimacy issues,” Pugh said. “She’s the preeminent scholar on sexual assault on campuses, and we really wanted to have at least one person talking about those issues.I wanted us to think seriously about intimacy from a number of different perspectives, including its dark side.”
Media Studies and Sociology Prof. Andrea Press, another organizer of the lecture series, said she thought Armstrong’s lecture would bring something new to the discussion of intimacy.
“She’s one of the few people who has years of study under her belt in this topic, and we have a crying need for more data and more info grounded in research in this topic,” Press said.
The Intimacy Lectures will continue through December 2015.
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