Don’t Blame the Frats

Article here. Excerpt:

'This year’s monster: Fraternities. As Gawker put it, “No fraternity, no gang rape.” As the Guardian said, “It’s time to talk about banning fraternities.” Bloomberg View decided: “On balance, most campuses would be better off without [them].”

To hear some tell it, fraternities are filled with gangs of leering, entitled deviants who have traded their individual morality for the opportunity to engage in a frenzy of wanton assault. They lie in wait, red plastic cups in hand, preying on defenseless young women. To read the commentary about sexual assault on campus, we’ve never encountered anything quite this bad. The victims are “everywoman”—young, bright-eyed ambitious female students. The evil-doers are made all the more insidious because they hide in plain sight—masquerading as sexually inexperienced 19 years olds.
...
Moral panics all follow a similar trend: There are controversies that speak to an emerging social tension—in this case, the changing set of expectations around connection and relationships between affluent young men and women. The media operates as an agent of moral indignation. Politicians thunder. Good data about the problem is slippery or non-existent—and never mind that. Our fear becomes the reason why we should be even more afraid. And so we grow more afraid. We blindly demonize a particular group—literature on moral panics refers to them as “folk devils”—whose capacity for harming the innocent seems limitless. Sometimes, laws are enacted. Sometimes, jail sentences are meted out. Most always, in the moment, it feels so right. And then comes the slow reckoning.'