Read The Five-Year Party Online
Authors: Craig Brandon
The Five-Year Party (17 page)
Even those victims like Megan Wright who were brave enough to file complaints find that colleges set numerous roadblocks in the way of justice. Many victims complain that campus security offices actually discourage them from filing complaints by telling them that if they had been drinking that night they are “unreliable witnesses.” It would be their word against that of their attackers. This is, of course, total nonsense. According to the definition of rape in most states, an intoxicated person cannot give consent to sex. So any victim who has sex while drunk is, by definition, a rape victim. By that line of thinking, about 90 percent of women have been raped at least once in college.
Colleges are required by federal law to list on their websites the number of rapes that are reported, but as we will see in the next chapter, party schools deliberately falsify these reports for public relations purposes. My student journalists told me that date rape is a very common occurrence that rarely gets reported. After all, if you concentrate five thousand to twenty thousand adolescents in an area of a few acres and figure that about 40 percent of them are intoxicated at any one time, date rape is perhaps the inevitable result. When I asked my student reporters about why so few rapes are reported, many of them mentioned the Kobe Bryant incident, in which the alleged victim’s name and photo were posted on the internet and she became a target of ridicule and hatred. No college student, even one who has been attacked and injured, wants to risk that kind of public scorn. Victims also said that if they reported a rape by a fraternity brother or a star athlete, the authorities were more likely to believe the powerful male than the unknown female.
College women told author Alan DeSantis that most rapes were never reported. “It’s like ridiculous the number of rapes that happen on campus,” a sorority vice president named Nancy told him. Janis, another of DeSantis’s informants, said she knew a woman who was raped by a “big man on campus” and never reported it because it would just be her word against his.
128
128
Women students told me that date rape drugs, widely available from campus drug dealers, were a major concern. Although there are several drugs, including animal tranquilizers, the most popular are Rohypnol pills, popularly known as “roofies.” The verb “to roofie” refers to someone dropping this drug into a woman’s drink, where it quickly dissolves in the alcohol. Someone who consumes a drink that has a roofie in it becomes incapacitated, and bystanders may simply assume that the person is drunk. The drug takes effect about fifteen minutes after it is consumed and can cause amnesia, so victims are often unable to remember what happened to them. Roofie victims find it almost impossible to report the crime to police when they have nothing other than suspicions on which to base their complaints.
Party school administrators take well-publicized steps to prevent stranger rape by setting up emergency telephone systems and organizing escorts for students who need to walk across campus at night. But stranger rape is actually quite rare on college campuses. When it comes to dealing with the much more common problem of date rape, the administrators are reluctant to get involved. Because the accused rapist is likely to be a fellow student, date rapes create a conflict of interest with party schools’ prime mission: retention. If too many rapes are reported on the federal crime forms, party schools risk developing a public reputation as a high rape campus, shunned by fathers of daughters. If they can discourage rape victims from filing official charges, however, they can cover up the number of rapes that actually occur.
By failing to prosecute student rapists, however, party schools are declaring open season on their women students. Men who think they can get away with rape, particularly campus leaders and student athletes, are much more likely to take advantage of a woman, particularly if she is intoxicated. When party schools decline to prosecute rape complaints and post ridiculously low numbers of rapes on their campus crime reports, they are making the problem worse. Women students who assume that rapes are not common have no idea how much danger they are in and are unprepared to deal with date rapes when they occur.
Although it is illegal in every state, hazing by fraternities, sports teams, and even student organizations is a common problem. Although much of this activity is hidden from public view, it often gets out of hand and results in injuries and even death to young people who are pledging. Fraternities are, by far, the strangest and most dangerous organizations on today’s college campuses. They are regularly busted for activities like gang rape, homicide by alcohol poisoning, drug dealing, and protection rackets and their missions include the spread of sexism, homophobia, and racism. In other words, they represent the very opposite of the enlightened wisdom that colleges used to provide. Their presence on college campuses is like finding hit men in the Boy Scouts.
Party schools and fraternities exist in one of those symbiotic relationships that are so common at party schools. They need each other to survive. In exchange for allowing fraternities to get a little out of control every once in a while, party school administrators depend on the Greek system to provide the kinds of illegal drinking parties that are an important part of the party school culture. High school students looking for a place to party for five years rightly see the presence of fraternities as an indication that the school is not entirely serious about academics and understands what students are really looking for.
Although many fraternities devolved from the eating clubs and academic organizations of a century ago, they operate today as the outlaw street gangs of academia, complete with deadly initiation rituals and utter disregard for the law. The gangsta culture of the twenty-first century has reinvented fraternities as powerful anti-administration forces to protect the campus party culture and keep it supplied with alcohol, illegal drugs, and places to party. When colleges ban them, they simply move off campus, where the little control that colleges had over them disappears entirely.
Such was the case with the PIGS fraternity at the State University of New York at Geneseo, which operated as an off-campus drinking club after it was disaffiliated by the college in 1996 after two students were hospitalized for alcohol poisoning. The PIGS house was raided regularly by police for supplying minors with alcohol and college officials warned students about associating with it. That was the state of affairs in the spring of 2009 when Arman Partamian, a nineteen-year-old sophomore from Queens, New York, asked to join.
Partamian was a model student, bright and promising, a biology major who worked as a volunteer EMT in the Geneseo area. The fact that someone like him could be drawn to pledge a fraternity like the PIGS should be a warning to every parent: this could have been your son. Adolescent students who are not yet capable of making adult decisions are easy prey for sadistic fraternities looking for victims. Partamian took part in a three-day hazing ritual that culminated on February 28, 2009, when he drank beer, champagne, and vodka before going to the PIGS house, where he was seen with two other pledges jumping over a bonfire in a drunken state. Witnesses said the pledges were being forced to drink entire bottles of liquor at a time.
Partamian was found by paramedics in an upstairs bedroom at 11:00 A.M. the next day and was pronounced dead a short time later. During an autopsy, his blood alcohol level was measured at 0.55, nearly seven times the legal limit. Three members of the PIGS fraternity, including two of Partamian’s fellow students, were charged with criminally negligent homicide, as well as unlawfully dealing with an underage drinker and hazing. One of the fraternity members was also charged with evidence tampering after he allegedly removed Partamian’s pledge shirt after his death.
129
129
Death by fraternity has become increasingly common on college campuses in recent years. Just a few months before Partamian’s death, Johnny Smith, an eighteen-year-old freshman at Wabash College in Indiana, died of alcohol poisoning at the Delta Tau Delta fraternity house. Just a few weeks after Partamian’s death, Jason Wren, nineteen, a high school honors student, died at the University of Kansas’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house, where he had consumed ten to twelve beers and was seen drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
130
130
“These deaths, at least several dozen every year, are the end result of decades of collusion between fraternities, college administrators, and college boards of trustees,” said Michele Tolela Myers, former president of Sarah Lawrence College. “What they fail to see is that the root of the problem is not simply individual behavior, but the values and norms of the entire fraternity system.” Fraternities, she said, should be eliminated from college campuses, just as Williams and Amherst did years before. Until that happens, fraternities will continue their dangerous and illegal behavior and college presidents will have to make “that nightmarish call to parents who won’t understand how it was possible that their child was left to die in what they trusted was a safe home away from home.”
131
131
Party school administrators fail to get tough with fraternities because their alumni are often powerful community leaders and because they are afraid of losing their reputations as party schools, which could drive away the students they need to fill their coffers with tuition money. Fraternity hazing, which can cause death and disfigurement, goes on right in front of the noses of party school administrators, who look the other way to protect the bottom line. Administrators go to seminars and workshops where fraternity practices are discussed in great detail. When they come back, however, they continue to sit on their hands and allow this deadly mischief to continue because closing fraternities would be a poor marketing decision that could have an impact on their prime directive: retention.
At New England College in New Hampshire, seven members of the Sigma Alpha Beta fraternity were charged in March 2009 with hazing after seven pledges showed up at the college’s infirmary with severe, seven-inch burn marks across their chests where they had been branded during an initiation ritual. What is unusual in this case is not that hazing took place but that it was disclosed. Usually, police investigations into hazing are frustrated when everyone refuses to talk about it.
132
132
At Plymouth State College in New Hampshire in 2003, for example, Kelly Nester, twenty, a pledge with the Sigma Kappa Omega sorority, died in a car accident a mile from the campus. Police found that the car contained six blindfolded pledges, but the code of silence prevented the filing of any charges. Witnesses said the car was being jerked back and forth on the highway to scare the pledges when the accident happened. Other common hazing procedures involve physical and verbal abuse, abandoning pledges in the woods in winter without clothing, and depriving them of sleep.
133
133
Another common crime committed at fraternity houses is gang rape. Peggy Reeves Sanday, author of
Fraternity Gang Rape
, said fraternity brothers refer to it as
gang banging
or
pulling train
, but it is essentially the same thing. It involves a group of men lining up like train cars to take turns having sex with the same woman.
134
There seems to be no documentation on how often this takes place, because no one, not even the victims, ever discusses it in public, but estimates range from once a semester to several times a semester for each fraternity.
Fraternity Gang Rape
, said fraternity brothers refer to it as
gang banging
or
pulling train
, but it is essentially the same thing. It involves a group of men lining up like train cars to take turns having sex with the same woman.
134
There seems to be no documentation on how often this takes place, because no one, not even the victims, ever discusses it in public, but estimates range from once a semester to several times a semester for each fraternity.
My student reporters said the common practice on our campus was for a fraternity to appoint a member to scout out potential rape victims on campus. What they looked for were women with low self-esteem who would not be tempted to report the rape and could be counted on to keep it secret. The woman was invited to a party only to find she was the only woman there.
Fraternities are, however, only one kind of college group that participates in the sadistic hazing rituals. It is also common among sports teams and even marching bands, but it is hidden from the public, not only by the groups themselves but by administrators concerned about the college’s image.
Most of the time, party school administrators do an excellent job of preventing the public from getting a good look at what goes on inside their campus walls. But when things get seriously out of control and a campus party turns into a riot, the community quickly finds out how dangerous thousands of intoxicated students can become. The police tend to stay on the sidelines until property damage begins or bonfires set in the middle of the street threaten nearby houses.
At Keene State College, there were dangerous riots when the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 and 2007. Nearly a thousand students, about one out of five students at the college, started fires, broke windows, turned over cars, threw rocks and bricks at police, and threatened to go on a rampage through the middle of town until they were turned back by dozens of city and state police who had been put on active duty to prevent the riot. Although these seemed to be spontaneous celebrations, my students showed me Facebook groups on which they had been planned weeks in advance. The goal was to create videos of the riot to be posted on YouTube, where you can still view them today.
Other books
Charming for Mother's Day (A Calendar Girls Novella) by Ardito, Gina
Escape (Chronicles of Hart) by Kat Murray
Hard Way by Katie Porter
The Miracle Stealer by Neil Connelly
The Lost Journal (A Secret Apocalypse Story) by Harden, James
Zombie Dog by Clare Hutton
The Storyteller of Marrakesh by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya
Coldhearted & Crazy by Michel Moore
Swimming with Cobras by Smith, Rosemary
Chastity's Chance by Daniels, Daiza
