This is the second article in a series about alcohol and the college experience.
At the beginning of each school year, first years watch a play written by the Princeton group Sexual Harassment/Assault Advising, Resources & Education to raise awareness about sexual assault and campus resources that are available to help victims of such assault. In the play, a male and female student are at a party and they drink beer until they are heavily intoxicated. The male student takes the female back to his room and rapes her while she is unconscious. At the end of the play, a SHARE peer talks about the importance of bystander intervention in preventing sexual assault.
Throughout SHARE’s debrief, one crucial message is absent: The entire situation probably could have been prevented had everyone chosen to drink less alcohol at the party. It is not the victim’s fault for being raped. Rather, the student and bystanders likely could have better recognized the risks of traveling back to the dorm of a stranger and taken a different course of action had they not been drunk.
Sexual assault is undeniably one of the greatest problems that faces colleges across the country. Bureau of Justice statistics estimate that between 6 and 20 percent of college women have been sexually assaulted.
Moreover, the link between sexual assault and alcohol is very strong. A poll conducted in 2015 by the Washington Post found that 62 percent of college students had been drinking alcohol prior to their sexual assault. 56 percent of the surveyed students thought that alcohol and drug use was a big problem at their schools, and 77 percent said that drinking less alcohol could prevent sexual assault.
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism has found that women “who had been drinking prior to being sexually assaulted reported that their intoxication made them take risks that they normally would avoid” and that alcohol's effect on motor skills prevented people from resisting sexual assault.
But in spite of the overwhelming evidence that alcohol plays a role in sexual assault, students largely ignore it, and the University does not directly tell them to prevent it by drinking less.
The reason for this is simple.
Students like to get drunk. If they admitted that alcohol has a role in sexual assault, then they would have to cut back on drinking. Princeton does not tell students to prevent sexual assault by drinking less because it would result in backlash from students who would accuse the University of being sexist for advising women to drink less than men.
Sexual assault itself is not directly caused by alcohol. It has been well established that the crime is primarily perpetrated by predators in rape culture. But there are also a number of instances — like that of the SHARE play — where rape occurred because both parties were too intoxicated to judge risks and communicate their desires or lack of desire.
Whenever alcohol’s role in sexual assault is mentioned during conversations with students, they immediately say that it is victim blaming and places the responsibility on a substance instead of a person. But that could not be further from the truth.
We live in a reality where sexual assault is caused by rape culture and also significantly magnified by alcohol. These issues are not mutually exclusive. By failing to directly address alcohol’s role in sexual assault, we are doing a disservice to ourselves and the college community.
When students drink to unconsciousness, they lose full control of their bodies. This leaves them extremely vulnerable to sexual assault, theft, kidnapping, murder, or any number of other crimes. Although we would like to live in a world where we can drink to unconsciousness and not worry about being raped, the fact is that there are dangerous people and we should take every possible measure to mitigate the chance that they take advantage of us.
This is victim prevention, not victim blaming.
Dually, this message should be conveyed to students of all genders and sexualities. Men become more aggressive when drunk than when sober. Sexual assault is also much higher for LGBT students in college than it is for their heterosexual classmates. It too is surely magnified by alcohol use.
We should continue to educate students about bystander intervention, but bystanders are not always present outside of the college setting. Moreover, people who have not taken bystander intervention classes — which is still the vast majority of the population — are less likely to intervene, so we cannot always expect them to help us.
Changing rape culture is a long-term endeavor and will not be fixed overnight.
But the conscious decision to drink less beer at a party can be made instantaneously on any given night. The University should directly tell incoming first years to do this during their alcohol training. While this will not completely eliminate sexual assault, I am certain that the number of cases will decrease if students heed this advice.
By addressing this issue at the start of each year, we can build an academic community that is safer and more inclusive for all.
Liam O’Connor is a first year from Wyoming, Del. He can be reached at lpo@princeton.edu.
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