Hazing, Sexual Assault & Alcohol Abuse Need To Be Defined To Be Fought.

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There is a common conception, despite warnings, that three issues the fraternity and sorority community must tackle before completing anything else (such as having people to recruit) are hazing, sexual assault and alcohol abuse.

These topics are very emotional, very disturbing, and, conveniently for us, great causes to improve our public relations.

It is in my humble and lightly-experienced opinion that we focus so heavily on these issues because they are unsolvable, they distract us from actually needing to run organizations with real products. If we teach our men not to drink, not to sexually assault and not to haze, we’ll have done our job of making them better.

Right?

Why are these three topics so difficult to wrap our heads around? Shouldn’t it be obvious that a decent person would drink to a limit? Shouldn’t it be obvious that a decent person not humiliate or torture another person? Shouldn’t it be obvious that a decent person does not have sex with an unwilling victim?

It should be obvious, but our failure to define these issues has forever limited our ability to take action. We know that people are more likely to respond to an issue if it applies to them, and so we widen the definition of hazing, alcohol abuse and sexual assault in hopes that more men and women will feel affected and will therefore take action.

Unfortunately and like the NSA, which you should all be paying attention to this weekend, casting as wide a net as possible does little to help those lucky fraternity and sorority professionals looking to “solve” these issues. Rather than targeting where we need to be and what we need to say, we generalize to the point where we don’t even know what to call what or which frat boy to belittle.

In our Fraternity Man post this weekend, I’ll discuss with more detail the following thoughts and how our presumption of guilt has hurt the health of fraternity.

Hazing: There is one question that every chapter asks, “is a scavenger hunt hazing?” Our answer is almost universally, “It could be.” That is not right. Let’s be clear, hazing itself may not need to be ruled illegal. There are three issues with hazing in my mind. It often incorporates assault (already illegal), coercion (already illegal), and humiliation (not illegal and should never be). If any of those are present, it’s hazing. Signing a contract does not mean one was not coerced. We give our chapters no product to use, only seminars to stop these 3 issues. Chapters resort to hazing because we give them no organization-wide purpose to orient new members around. (For the last time, “Better Men” and “Better Women” is NOT a purpose; I’m better when I leave the dentist too!)

Sexual Assault: As an “issue” Sexual Assault needs to be better defined, especially now that inept lawmakers and higher education leaders are attempting to control it. There is a difference between assault, misconduct, abuse and communication error. The more we wrap “he said she said” into a debate about people getting brutally raped, the more we stifle those who are getting brutally raped and abused.

Alcohol Abuse: Zero tolerance has worked quite well for us. No but really, this one is so simple I’m not even sure why it’s an issue. Our rules on alcohol are for the sole purpose of avoiding lawsuits. Those rules have no place in dealing with a chapter suffering from a binge drinking and stupidity problem. Alcoholics should be treated like patients, not criminals. Amnesty should be given to chapters open to change, a tie-up with Alcoholics Anonymous would be ideal, and we should lobby to reduce the drinking age in hopes that the craziness will die down. Ultimately though, we confuse students by mixing our impossible rules with faked empathy and a disdain for the privileged.

Check FraternityMan.com this weekend for the full post!