Will Cracking Down on Drinking Prevent Sexual Assault on Campuses?

Some colleges are trying it, while others are critical. 
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After two sexual assaults at fraternity parties, Brown University is clamping down on drinking, banning alcohol in all residential areas, including Greek houses. Parties have to take place in public university areas, have adequate supervision, and only serve students of legal drinking age. Dartmouth instituted a similar policy, barring students from possessing hard alcohol on campus. But will that decrease the kind of heavy drinking that has been associated with sexual assault? Or will it drive the parties underground and make students less safe?

Some students say rules that limit partying create more problems than they solve. 

"If anything, it's going to make it more dangerous for the students," University of Pennsylvania freshman Shannah Reagan told her campus newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian. "Partying is going to happen regardless of whether or not there are rules against it."

The relationship between sexual assault and alcohol is a tricky one. Alcohol is widely referred to as the "most common date-rape drug," and it is widely used in sexual assaults, especially on college campuses. Numbers vary, but numerous studies have found that a majority of victims sexually assaulted on college campuses were incapacitated by drugs or alcohol.

That fact has been used to encourage young women not to drink — or at least not to drink too much. Thinkpieces on the dangers of (female) binge-drinking abound, and on many campuses, "avoid drinking to the point of intoxication" is standard "don't get raped" advice. 

But the focus on sexual assault victims obscures whatthe data actually says: that perpetrators are more likely to be drinking or using drugs than the people they assault. Perpetrators also routinely ply their victims with alcohol, focusing on targets they perceive as vulnerable and trying to get them drunk. Perpetrators also rely on the fact that the victim was drinking as cover for their crimes, knowing that the dialogue around sexual violence often assumes that if both parties were drinking, the assault was little more than a drunken sexual encounter, and perhaps there was confusion about consent but no real malice involved. 

In other words, drinking may in fact be a contributing factor to sexual violence. But it's not because drunk girls are getting themselves raped. It's because perpetrators use alcohol both to lower their own inhibitions and to generate plausible deniability for their attacks. And well-intentioned hand-wringing about women making themselves vulnerable to attack by drinking too much may actually contribute to an environment where it's easy for an assailant to shield his crime behind a smokescreen of "she consented" or "she was asking for it by being so drunk" or "it was just drunk sex." 

Unfortunately, none of that provides an easy answer for colleges on the question of whether cracking down on drinking actually prevents assault. 

But there is no question that, at the very least, the drinking culture at fraternities in particular often turns dangerous and deadly. That might be reason enough for schools to want to rein it in. But, some experts say, the no-alcohol policy may be a wrongheaded solution. 

"Brown runs a serious risk in banning these kinds of parties," president of Penn Drug and Alcohol Peer Advisor Program and Wharton sophomore, Theodore Caputi, told the Daily Pennsylvanian. "When you ban parties like this, sometimes you drive them underground."

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