I implied it before, I’ll say it now: Rolling Stone sucks.
I went to the University of Maryland. It was a mixture there. Frat row was school property but there were plenty of frats that were off campus.
Freudian Slit already quoted the part of the article that addressed that. But in other situations, it’s not a given that rape victims will scream. Not everyone has the reaction of fight or flight, some people freeze instead. Or they are afraid of getting more hurt by the attacker if they aren’t able to scream loud enough that someone hears. Or any number of other reasons.
Off grounds. (not UVa alum - went to W&M, but that’s my understanding)
Are we really debating if a college student would say she lives “Off-campus?”
I’m not far removed from college, and such nomenclature is as everyday as it gets.
It is possible that no one came to investigate the initial scream, and that the rapists managed to silence her after that. I would agree that it’s possible.
But we’re being asked to believe that this was an initiation ritual, so it happened over and over. And the rapists were not hardened criminals, but boys barely past high school. And yet somehow they always managed to plan, coordinate, and carry out the crime, with nothing going wrong, no victim ever escaping, and no one in the building ever noticing.
While it may be possible to carry out a gang rape in a crowded building, it would be immensely difficult. Organized crime goes smoothly in movies and TV. In real life, things happen. People screw up, miscommunicate, get cold feet. Especially when they’re dumb frat boys who are drunk and high.
Caitlin Flanagan did a major investigation of frats nationwide for a recent article in The Atlantic. She encountered lots of dumb behavior. (Shoving a lighted firecracker up one’s butt, jumping out a window to get away from the guy with a lighted firecracker up his butt, etc…) She documented a fair number of sex crimes. But she says that she never encountered anything remotely like the premeditated gang rape described in the article.
There was a gang rape accusation in the dorms of my college, back in the 80’s. The case was pretty extensively (anonymously) reported, at least locally.
One of the details of the case involved a “break from the action”, when the accuser was ‘escorted’ to the women’s restroom (which would have been in another wing of the dorm) and then back to the ‘scene of the crime’. She didn’t use this opportunity to call out or ask for help.
This detail seriously undermined her credibility with the jurors (that is, I think it went to trial, with acquittal) and with many students.
Today, I know that this kind of response to trauma is not unusual, and while I doubted her story at the time, I do not doubt it now.
Different places have different idioms. It’s not irrelevant to notice someone not using the local idiom. Not proof of anything, but not irrelevant.
IMO, the largest problem is that the article suggests that this was all only slightly out of the ordinary for the fraternity, and was some kind initiation ritual that happened every year. It describes the lead rapist seeing her afterwards, smiling and saying “I had a great time last night,” like it was all no big deal. That’s not "rape culture,” that’s the normalizing of Ted-Bundy-level sociopathy.
If this was some kind of ritual, that would mean several women gang-raped a year (the frat surely has more than 7 pledges per year), every year for … what? Decades? Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of women ritually gang-raped over a period of years, and everyone kept quiet because they were afraid of missing parties? Not one smart, strong, and capable young woman (this is UVA) summoned up the courage to call the cops? Not one pledge said “hell, no” and blew the whistle?
And above all, knowing that this is some kind of semi-regular thing at this (all?) frats, the response of the activists is to say that if Jackie declines to press charges, they’re okay with that? They care more about not making things harder for her than about calling in the cops and thus stopping the rapes that will happen next year, and the year after, and the year after?
If anyone really believed that the story was both factually true and remotely typical of things that went on normally in their community, they’d be screaming for the police, the FBI, investigative reporters, everyone. The fact that the reporter has already retreated all the way to “Well, something happened, who knows what,” tells me she herself knows the story, as detailed, isn’t true.
Yes, something happened; almost certainly something traumatic and scarring and horrible, and quite possibly something illegal. But making the jump from “something happened” to lurid recountings that smear hundreds of young men as sociopaths is beyond irresponsible
The author – by her own account – had her narrative first and then went hunting around college campuses all over the country looking for a victim to build the article around. When she found a frightened young women with a story that “was too good to check,” she commenced to use the poor girl like a prop.
I suspect that the RS article will make things worse for everyone.
That’s what’s sad. We’ve conditioned our culture to easily and readily believe any random group of males will turn into a crazed, sadistic rape gang. I’ve been in tons of different groups of males, and never once did anyone even joke about forming a rape gang.
Well, that’s consistent with the quote furt mentions. That “male”–or that male character, if the thing is fiction–clearly doesn’t think he was a crazed, sadistic rapist (at least, not all of those).
Right – which would make him (and all of his compatriots) Ted-Bundy-level sociopaths.
Hell, even sociopaths know, intellectually, that what they are doing is wrong and societally shunned, and hide the evidence. The article would have us believe there is a whole cohort of men walking around campus either unaware or blithely unconcerned by the fact that gang rape is considered a vile and criminal act.
“Oh, what, you didn’t like lying on broken glass while we shoved a beer bottle into your vagina? My bad, I thought girls were into that. Hope we can still hang out!”
As Levdrakon notes, it’s ludicrous, unless you’ve already talked yourself into some kind crazy presupposition that this is in fact what men are like.
Not “men.” But such gang rapes do happen, yes? (Whether this one did or not.) Steubenville was just the most notorious recent one. So clearly some number of men are so unaware/unconcerned.
Why is that ludicrous? If you accept that there are college guys who are messed up enough to rape someone, why is it such a stretch to accept that they’d act entitled and blissfully unaware of another person’s pain? Their responses do make sense, considering how many rapes go unreported and unpunished. How many college rapists face expulsion, let alone jail time or even ostracism by their peers?
The interesting thing here is that on first read you are shocked and repelled at the story because you are assuming that some level of due diligence has gone into verifying these details. And frankly I didn’t pick the story apart looking to see if she interviewed any of the alleged rapists, I just assumed that it was verified that this had happened* because the article writer was saying this* had happened.
Now, looking at the narrative without that authoritative assurance the sequence of events seem borderline ludicrous. A sadistic rape gang of pledges to an elite fraternity torturing a woman for hours with violent rape and beatings as part of an initiation ritual. An experience that after the fact is casually dismissed by her friends as a drama-queeny over-reaction and viewed by the perpetrators as a jolly good time.
Not to put too fine a point on it that narrative is just plain unbelievable. Kids primarily from upper and upper middle class households admitted to a somewhat exclusive university and under huge pressures and expectations from family and their own egos to succeed are going to start off their college career as part of a sadistic rape gang? Not just one twisted individual… but a whole crew of pledges will do this?
There’s a point at which you have to stop and say “I may not like frats on principle. but this smells like grade A bullshit”.
Yes, they happen. And in Steubenville (just going off of Wikipedia), the perps pleaded with her not to press charges, then tried to intimidate her, then organized a coverup. They knew what they did was wrong.
AFAICT, they did not see her on the street, and say “hey, I had a great time last night.”
The UVA article would have us believe that several Stuebenvilles happen every year at this frat, and that everyone, including the anti-rape activists, would rather let it keep happening than just say "The guy’s names were ____. "
Not impossible, I guess, but very, very improbable.
Jesus, I had never read the details on that case. I feel fucking nauseous now.
Most murderers are not sociopaths. Most rapists are not sociopaths. And, as noted, even remorseless sociopaths know that society condemns what they have done and take pains to cover up the crime.
If you think it’s plausible that highly educated, very smart, very ambitious men at an elite university, who have likely attended multiple seminars on consent and whatnot, literally don’t know that “Hey, society seems to think ill of this sort of fun, maybe we ought to cover our tracks when we commit our annual gang rapes” … well, nothing I say will persuade you.
On my first read of the story, I assumed this was a kind of gaslighting.
I think they knew what they did was rape, but they thought they could get away with it. Look how many people find it hard to believe this happened. How many people find it hard to believe it’s a common occurrence. Why is it so hard to believe that they thought they could get away with it? Look at the Steubenville case–with photos and tweets of the crime. I don’t think all or even most men are like that, but there are people fucked up enough to basically revel in this kind of behavior.
I got no implication that it was an annual ritual. I would have no trouble believing that there might be a situation like that in which a group of guys thought up an initiation ritual on the fly that wasn’t some yearly tradition. I don’t think that it’s unusual for initiation rituals—especially the hazing kind—to be created anew, especially since there’s an instinct “top” the previous year’s hazing.
I have heard of rape stories in which the next day the perpetrator acts like it was a pleasurable activity for the victim.
I’m not taking a position on “Jackie’s” story or its veracity. But you should never, ever estimate what “a whole crew of pledges” will do under the right circumstances. News articles at the time didn’t even report the worst parts of the story, which I suspect had something to do with the university’s concern about its own legal liability.