Navigating the Risks of Party Rape in Historically White Greek Life at an Elite College: Women’s Accounts

Abstract

Landmark research from before the 2010s shows that college women rarely held institutions responsible for allowing rape-prone party contexts to persist and failing to support survivors. Yet the college landscape has changed profoundly since these studies were published, with prominent anti-rape campaigns and new guidelines to Title IX policy. To update a research stream that has provided the basis for theorizing about sexual violence in college peer cultures, we examine 121 intensive interviews with 68 women who are at heightened risk of party rape because of their involvement in historically White sororities. Several key findings emerged. First, women were highly invested in the Greek party circuit. Second, participants blamed institutions for failing to do more to keep them safe. Reflecting their focus on institutions, women also proposed that institutional authorities change their policies so sororities could move parties out of fraternity houses and into sorority houses. Third, women took on the labor of trying to protect themselves and other women at parties by designating monitors. However, they reported that with this system, other women could be deemed responsible, not for being assaulted but for failing to prevent rape. Finally, women found ways to identify and exclude men they deemed “rapey” from Greek gatherings. However, boycotting an entire fraternity was more controversial and harder to sustain. Overall, women’s preferred prevention strategies reflect a strong desire to avoid disturbing the Greek party scene. Implications for research and policy on gender and sexual violence prevention in higher education are discussed.

Keywords

college life gender interview study extracurriculars in college historically White Greek life sexual assault prevention

The effects of sexual assault on well-being are severe. They include psychological distress and suicidality (Dworkin et al. 2017), self-blame (Donde 2017), alcohol and drug addiction (Ullman et al. 2013), and chronic health conditions (Santaularia et al. 2014). Across colleges and universities, administrators have committed resources to sexual assault prevention (Richards 2019). However, many implemented strategies have had limited or short-term effects (DeGue et al. 2014; Jouriles et al. 2018), and most college campuses’ social and built environments still provide opportunities for sexual violence (Armstrong, Hamilton, and Sweeney 2006; Boswell and Spade 1996; Hirsch and Khan 2020; Martin and Hummer 1989). In addition, university processes for handlingcomplaints of sexual assault and helping survivors are often inadequate and even counterproductive (Bedera 2022; Cruz 2020; Khan et al. 2021; Nesbitt and Carson 2021).

Research shows that the racially segregated, class-privileged, and male-dominated historically White Greek party scene (Boswell and Spade 1996; Hamilton and Cheng 2018) provides a conducive environment for party rape (Armstrong etal. 2006; Humphrey and Khan 2000; Martin and Hummer 1989; Sanday 1992; Stombler 1994). Party rape is a unique form of sexual violence that takes place at an “off-campus house or an on- or off-campus fraternity and involves . . . plyinga woman with alcohol or targeting an intoxicated woman” (Sampson 2002, as cited in Armstrong et al. 2006).

Party rape is a pervasive problem for women in historically White Greek life (HWGL; Armstrong et al. 2006; Armstrong, Gleckman-Krut, and Johnson 2018). Women in HWGL are socializing with privileged fraternity men who are generally in the racial majority and enjoy a host of gender, race, and class privileges (Hamilton and Cheng 2018). These privileges allow fraternity men in HWGL to operate with a “hyper level of anonymity” and reduce accountability for how they treat women (Ray and Rosow 2010:541).

By contrast, on predominantly White college campuses, Black fraternity chapters lack houses, and Black men lack anonymity. Racial surveillance and racist stereotypes about Black men’s sexual dangerousness force Black fraternity men to be highly aware of how they treat women, how others might evaluate their behavior, and how their actions could reflect on the larger group (Ray and Rosow 2010). Such findings call attention to the role of race as a fundamental factor shaping how college students socialize and how whiteness matters for students’ gendered interactions (Grundy 2021).

Many influential studies on college women’s responses to party rape and sexual violence were conducted before a 2011 U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights “Dear Colleague Letter [DCL]” (Office for Civil Rights 2011) produced dramatic changes in the college landscape. The DCL was followed by highly visible campus anti-sexual violence movements and awareness campaigns, like End Rape on Campus (EROC) and KnowYour IX (Gronert 2019; Heldman, Ackerman, and Breckenridge-Jackson 2018).

Overall, studies conducted before these changes showed that in assigning responsibility for party rape, women in HWGL did not generally point to aspects of the social and physical environment (Boswell and Spade 1996; Stombler 1994). Nor did they tend to fault institutions for failing to protect students. Instead, data collected before the 2010s indicate that women tended to blame women who were assaulted (Armstrong and Hamilton 2013; Hamilton and Armstrong 2009; Stombler 1994).

People’s recognition that sexual violence is an important social problem and their beliefs about the causes and effects of sexual force and solutions for addressing it are not fixed: They vary across time periods, groups, and social and legal contexts and pressures (Armstrong et al. 2018; McMahon and Baker 2011). However, despite a spike in public interest and policymakers’ attention to sexual violence, knowledge about how college women today understand and respond to party rape remains limited. Furthermore, even in existing research on sexual violence in college peer cultures, knowledge about how women arrive at solutions for reducing sexual violence is sparse. The topic is important because without an understanding of women’s motives for selecting particular prevention strategies, policymakers are in danger of creating unworkable solutions.

To fill gaps in the literature and update a research stream that has provided the basis for theorizing about sexual violence in college peer cultures, we examine the accounts of 68 women who are at heightened risk of party rape because of their involvement in historically White sororities (Armstrong et al. 2006; Harris and Schmalz 2016; Humphrey and Kahn 2000). We identify women’s frames for understanding potential solutionsto sexual violence in HWGL. A frame is a “lens through which people observe and interpretsocial life” (Small, Harding, and Lamont 2010:14); frames promote particular assumptions and expectations about interactions and events. Frames allow certain aspects of the social worldto come into view while blocking others. Crucially for our study, frames structure how people understand and evaluate their own and others’ actions (Young 2010; see also Goffman 1974).

A focus on women’s framing allows us to uncover the multiple and even contradictory ways that participants understand, explain, and justify their actions regarding sexual assault prevention in HWGL. In identifying participants’ frames for sexual assault prevention, this article provides empirical evidence of women’s consensus that universities have a legal and moral obligation to prevent sexual violence and support survivors.

Three core questions anchor our analysis. First, from their perspective, what is at stake for women in HWGL as they make decisions about how to prevent party rape? From their perspective, what do women stand to lose and what do they stand to gain in endorsing particular prevention strategies? Second, how do women in HWGL today assign blame and responsibility for party rape and its negative consequences? Third, what kinds of prevention strategies do women imagine as possible, and which strategies do they take upon themselves to enact? How do women arrive at these particular strategies and not others?

In what follows, we first review recent changes to universities’ social and legal landscape that necessitate an update of the literature. Then, we discuss the concept of “sexual geographies” and explain how it relates to women’s experiences of fraternity parties and their solutions for sexual violence. Following that, we highlight how membership in HWGL creates a unique set of costs and benefits that privileged college women consider as they grapple with potential solutions for addressing sexual violence at fraternity parties. In so doing, we attend to the race, gender, and class dimensions of women’s risks and solutions for party rape. We then provide a brief sketch of the history behind a fundamental inequality that greatly bothered our participants: Historically White fraternities can host parties, but sororities cannot.

A New Sociolegal Context Surrounding College Sexual Violence

Currently, there are strong reasons to suspect that women’s framing of party rape may have changed dramatically since foundational studies on college peer cultures and sexual violence were published (Armstrong et al. 2006; Boswell and Spade 1996; Martin 2016; Martin and Hummer 1989; Stombler 1994). This body of research was conducted before a 2011 U.S. Department of Education DCL that dramatically changed the college landscape. The DCL, addressed to higher education institutions, argues that Title IX, as a civil rights law, requires colleges to do everything within their power to prevent sexual assault and preserve students’ access to education. It also contends that Title IX requires colleges to offer students a grievance procedure for complaints of sexual violence (U.S. Department of Education 2011). Sexual violence scholars call the effects of the letter “profound” (Hirsch and Khan 2020:xxiv). Schools stood to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in federal support for violations of Title IX, and the Obama administration placed at least 223 colleges and universities under investigation (Anderson 2017). In addition, anti-sexual violence campaigns that sought to combat stigmatizing slut-shaming and blame-the-victim approaches became more visible following the DCL (Gronert 2019; Heldman et al. 2018). These campaigns circulated messages like, “If you are a survivor . . . your experience is valid, it’s not your fault, and you are not alone” (EROC 2022).

One major work on college sexuality, Hirsch and Kahn’s (2020) Sexual Citizens, was published after these sweeping changes in the social and legal landscape. However, it takes as its central question how college students construct sexual desire and consent and not women’s efforts to reduce sexual violence. Wamboldt et al.’s (2019) study from the same data set focuses on college men and their rationales and strategies for reducing the risk of sexual violence. Most men in that study described themselves as highly motivated to stop a potential assault because of concerns about liability, reputation, and personal morality even though these considerations did not prevent sexual assault from occurring on campus (Wamboldt et al. 2019). Wamboldt et al. (2019) note that college women reported highly individualized preventive strategies related to their own socializing and drinking but seldom talked about intervening to help a close friend. In our study, by contrast, sorority women are the focal population. Taking advantage of this sample, we investigate how women in sororities might engage in in-depth discussions of preventive efforts to help other women as well as themselves.

Sexual Geographies and Party Rape

The concept of sexual geographies (Hirsch and Khan 2020) refers to how the spatial and social dynamics of a place—including access to the space, control over resources, feelings of comfort and ease, and physical features of the environment such as lighting and seating—shape sexual interactions. In line with other research on campus sexual violence (e.g., Armstrong et al. 2006; Boswell and Spade 1996; Martin 2016; Ray and Rosow 2010), the concept draws attention to how students’ resources and social position affect how they experience a space. For instance, a first-year student could find herself at a fraternity party in her first week on campus with few friends and little knowledge of how men approach women at these parties. She is at heightened risk of rape because others are not looking out for her, she feels less comfortable, and she may not know the alcohol and drug content of the drinks. Depending on the campus layout and her class status, she may need a ride home to her dorm but lack the funds to pay for one, potentially making her reliant on untrustworthy peers for a place to sleep or help to get home.

The concept of sexual geographies develops past research that identified how particular aspects of the college party scene affect women’s vulnerability to sexual violence (e.g., Armstrong et al. 2006; Boswell and Spade 1996; Humphrey and Khan 2000; Martin and Hummer 1989; Sanday 1992). For instance, Boswell and Spade (1996) show that fraternities that pose the highest risks for sexual violence share several key features: heightened pressure to drink (compared to lower-risk fraternities), social norms that prevent supportive heterosexual relationships and encourage humiliating sexual jokes about women, lack of comfortable seating, and deafeningly loud music. These social and spatial features hinder groups of men and women from engaging in friendly conversations and create “faceless victims” (Boswell and Spade 1996:44).

Other researchers have picked up Boswell and Spade’s (1996) essential insights about the role of context and space in producing party rape (e.g., Armstrong et al. 2006; Grundy 2021). Pertinent to HWGL, Armstrong et al. (2006:495) warn that “situations where men have a home turf advantage, know each other better than the women present know each other, see the women as anonymous, and control desired resources (such as alcohol or drugs) are likely to be particularly dangerous.”

Historically White Fraternity Houses as Sites of Exceptional Risk

As exclusive organizations that cater to young, racially and socioeconomically privileged men who want to socialize, historically White fraternities have long been sites of excess and risk (DeSantis 2007). Critics of HWGL often note the linkages between fraternities and hazards such as hazing, binge drinking, and sexual violence (Flanagan 2014; Wade 2017b). In what follows, we briefly outline how fraternities arrived at this point. We also explain why, within HWGL, partying and drinking take place mainly at fraternity houses, not at sororities.

First, in 1984, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act increased the legal drinking age from 18 to 21 (U.S. Congress 1984). As a result, drinking among college-age students was pushed out of public bars and campus events. On many campuses, male-controlled fraternities, which operated with little supervision or rule enforcement, became the major site of prohibited undergraduate drinking (Flanagan 2014; Hechinger 2017). Sororities could not host these parties because each sorority continues to have a “house mom,” or live-in adviser, who enforces rules, including restrictions on alcohol and male visitors (for an example of the role’s duties, see Texas State 2019). The house mom is a living relic of past eras when affluent White parents expected the sorority to ensure their daughters’ chastity and marriageability (Freeman 2018).

In the mid-1980s, plaintiffs’ personal-injury cases were becoming more frequent and lucrative. Multiple lawsuits sought and won large payouts from fraternities. One 1985 lawsuit resulted in a $21 million personal injury award (Hechinger 2017). Drinking deaths, serious injuries, criminal assault, and sexual violence were pervasive enough that by 1986, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners listed fraternities as posing the sixth greatest financial liability for insurers (Flanagan 2014; Hechinger 2017). At this point, fraternities had minimal options for affordable insurance coverage and faced a high risk of losing all their assets to lawsuits (Flanagan 2014; Glovin 2013; Hechinger 2017).

In response, fraternities took several steps, including developing national risk management policies that indemnified national and local organizations from being held liable for members’ dangerous and illegal behavior (Flanagan 2014). Nonetheless, fraternities continue to be sites of reckless undergraduate partying (Flanagan 2014; Wade 2017a). Personal injury lawsuits for assault and battery, sexual assault, injuries from slipping and falling, and hazing still occur (Flanagan 2014). Given the hazards and costs associated with the relatively unregulated historically White fraternity party scene (Armstrong et al. 2006; Wade 2017a), it makes sense that national sorority leaders have continued to forbid sororities to host parties with alcohol or to get rid of house moms despite attempts by students and stakeholders at some universities to change these policies (Kingkade 2017; White 2017).

Historically White fraternity houses thus now have exclusive access to two of the most important social assets on campus: physical space to host parties with alcohol and a relative lack of surveillance and rule enforcement. As a result, most on-campus parties in HWGL occur at fraternity houses, and fraternity men enjoy a “home-turf advantage” over women (Armstrong and Hamilton 2013:90).

Benefits of HWGL for Women

Despite these risk factors, the draws of membership in a historically White sorority are powerful. Gaining admission to a sorority in HWGL serves as a stamp of approval for women’s raced, classed, and gendered self-presentations; it also provides women with peer networks and experiences to further refine these self-presentations (Armstrong and Hamilton 2021; Hamilton and Armstrong 2021; Ispa-Landa and Oliver 2020). Being in a sorority helps women conform to a hegemonic feminine ideal involving domination over other women, especially those who lack social class privileges and whiteness (Ispa-Landa and Oliver 2020).

In the United States today, more than 360,000 undergraduate women belong to a historically White sorority across the 670 college campuses that have a historically White sorority chapter (National Panhellenic Conference [NPC] 2020). Studies show that many women gain status, enjoyment, and self-esteem from participating in HWGL (Armstrong and Hamilton 2013; Handler 1995; Silver 2020; Stuber, Klugman, and Daniel 2011). Shorter-term, college women report that men’s sexual attention at fraternity parties brings enjoyment and self-confidence. In today’s hookup culture, hooking up with a high-status peer is viewed as a valuable “win” for both women and men (Armstrong and Hamilton 2013; Handler 1995; Harris and Schmalz 2016; Wade 2017a). Longer-term, participation in HWGL pays off in terms of women’s ultimate class location. At age 30, many women from affluent families who participated in HWGL at a large public university have benefited from the social networks of HWGL and their parental resources. They married high-earning men from wealthy families, thus maintaining the class status of their family of origin (Armstrong and Hamilton 2021; Hamilton and Armstrong 2021).

In summary, participation in HWGL continues to provide a privileged group of young women with short- and long-term benefits while also placing them in a position of exceptional vulnerability to sexual violence. Scholarship conducted before recent changes to the legal and social environment indicated that women in HWGL rarely attributed responsibility for party rape to institutions or to male perpetrators (Armstrong et al. 2006; Armstrong and Hamilton 2013; Stombler 1994). The more recent work on rape prevention strategies focuses primarily on men (e.g., Wamboldt et al. 2019) or on colleges’ institutional messaging (e.g., Bedera and Nordmeyer 2015). Thus, we lack knowledge about how college women in today’s sociolegal context understand party rape, seek to prevent it, and respond to its occurrence. Given the benefits and risks of HWGL, how do young women in today’s social and legal environment make sense of and seek to respond to the threat of party rape at fraternity parties?

Methods

The interviews analyzed in this study are part of a larger project on how women in historically White sororities reconcile tensions between their ideals of women’s empowerment and their participation in a college social system that disempowers them vis-à-vis fraternity men (Ispa-Landa and Oliver 2020). The NPC, the umbrella organization for the 26 historically White sororities in the United States and Canada, bans sororities from serving alcohol at parties or hosting opposite- sex guests. A house mom who functions in loco parentis in each sorority chapter enforces these national policies. Central (a pseudonym) enforces laws against underage drinking, with college policiesbanning both sororities and fraternities from serving alcohol to underage students (for whom Greek parties are largely aimed). However, the traditional lack of supervision in fraternity houses results in a lack of enforcement atfraternity parties, where alcohol is often served. (Names of individuals, their sorority chapters, and the college are given pseudonyms throughout the article.)

In the winter of 2017, we posted recruitment fliers offering $40 Amazon gift cards to sophomore women in historically White sororities interested in participating in an interview study about “social networks and sorority life.” We interviewed all women who contacted us and completed an online scheduling form that showed them to be eligible for the study (i.e., in their second year of college and a member of a historically White sorority), leading to a first cohort of 37 women. In 2019, wanting to learn more about the historically White sorority experience, we added a second cohort of 16 sophomore women. We used the same recruitment methods for the second cohort as we had with the first cohort. All women identified as cisgender.

Over the course of the interviews, our sophomore respondents repeatedly mentioned instances of sexual assault on campus. They noted the role of risk managers/wellness chairs (a student leadership position in each sorority) in helping sorority women navigate the issue of campus rape. After hearing these reports, we decided to interview risk managers as part of our study in addition to the core interview sample of sophomore women. Between 2017 and 2019, we sent emails to 24 sorority members who were serving as risk managers, inviting them to participate in interviews with us; we eventually obtained interviews with 15 risk managers. We were able to interview risk managers from 10 of the 12 sorority chapters on campus. Risk managers were also given a $40 Amazon gift card as a token of appreciation for their time.

Women consented to the interviews, and a college ethics committee (institutional review board) approved all study procedures. Including the 37 women in Cohort 1, the 16 women in Cohort 2, and the 15 risk managers, our data set includes interviews with 68 women in historically White sororities. In the findings section, we note when an interview quote is from a risk manager; all other quotes are from sorority women who were not in this formally appointed role.

Follow-up interviews can be especially helpful in situations where the researcher wants to learn more about a sensitive topic because participants may be more willing to “open up” after the first interview (Weiss 1994). We followed up with the 37 women who were recruited as our first cohort of sophomores in the spring of their junior (2018; n = 27) and senior (2019; n = 26) years. To date, the second cohort of women, recruited in 2019 and interviewed during the 2019–2020 school year, have been interviewed only once. (We did not conduct interviews during the COVID-19 shutdown.) Overall, the multiple interviews with our first cohort of 37 women between 2017 and 2019, our second cohort of 16 women interviewed in 2019 to 2020, and the interviews with 15 risk managers between 2017 and 2019 led to a total of 121 interviews.

Women in our sample came from predominantly privileged positions both economically and socially. They were obtaining an elite education by nature of their enrollment at Central, a highly selective university with an acceptance rate of less than 15 percent. Women in historically White sororities made up 40 percent of the female population at Central. Reflective of the nationwide historically White Greek population, our sample of women in Cohorts 1 and 2 skewed affluent. (We did not ask risk managers for demographic information.) For instance, 38 percent of the women in Cohorts 1 and 2 reported annual household incomes between $250,000 and $5 million or over. The sample of women in Cohorts 1 and 2 was also predominantly White: 60.4 percent of women self-identified as White, 26.4 percent as Asian, and 13.2 percent as Hispanic/Latinx. Notably, there were no Black/African American women in our sample. We were told that Black and African American students almost exclusively rushed sororities in the National Multicultural Greek Council (on the experiences of non-White students in HWGL, see Hughey 2010). See Tables 1 and 2 in the Appendix for more detailed information about Cohort 1 and 2 participant demographics and Table 3 for details on risk managers.

A team of trained graduate students conducted one-on-one interviews lasting from one to three hours. Interview topics covered women’s reasons for rushing a historically White sorority, their experiences and perceptions of social life in HWGL, and how they viewed the pros and cons of being in a historically White sorority. Interviews were designed to be open-ended, allowing participants’ concerns to emerge and guide the conversation. Our research team frequently took advantage of our unfamiliarity with Greek life on campus to ask participants to “explain” or “teach” us about aspects of sorority life (Young 2004). Participants appeared to enjoy explaining sorority life at Central to interested outsiders and often did so at great length. Members of the team met weekly to listen to and analyze audio recordings of the interviews, ensuring that all interviews followed a semistructured format and that interviewers were following up on conversational markers or passing references that seemed particularly salient (Gerson and Damaske 2020). Interviews were recorded and transcribed for later coding.

Throughout our first wave of interviews, sexual assault, personal safety, and the college’s inaction were dominant themes that women introduced into the interview without prompting. Although our initial interview guide did not include questions about sexual assault, participants began describing a campus incident involving drugging and sexual assault and discussing what they believed should be done to prevent additional assaults. We used follow-up probes to capture how women felt about existing prevention efforts and to understand their reasoning about potential solutions. Follow-up probes included questions like, “What do you think needs to be done to make Central safer for women?”

We further refined our interview protocol in Waves 2 and 3 to include questions about how women felt about university responses to sexual assaults, like, “To your knowledge, what resources are available to someone who has experienced sexual harassment or assault?”; “Where would you direct someone to go and why?”; and “Tell me about the kinds of actions your sorority takes if a sister is sexually assaulted or harassed?” Risk managers responded to the same questions about sexual assault and were asked to describe the scope of their responsibilities and their understanding of their role vis-à-vis formal legal and college systems.

Our codebook captured women’s perceptions of the HWGL party scene and the types of action being taken in response to the problem of sexual assault on campus. Codes included items such as “only frats host parties is a problem,” “alcohol and drugs,” “hookup culture,” “lookouts,” and “sober sisters.” While coding, we wrote memos detailing the patterns we observed and passages that stood out as being inconsistent with dominant themes we had identified; we discussed these memos and observations as a team. Members of the research team met weekly to discuss and revise the codebook and analytic memos to ensure the team agreed about when and how to apply the codes. In our final rounds of analyses, we reanalyzed all the excerpts in which a participant explained what she thought should be done to solve the problem of sexual violence in HWGL.

In what follows, we detail our findings from the 121 intensive interviews with the 68 research participants. Our data were gathered in 2017 to 2019, before the Abolish Greek Life movement took hold in the fall of 2021. We therefore capture a moment when frustration with sexual violence against women was high, but women were still strategizing about reform in ways that did not include abolishing the system. Our semistructured, open-ended interviews allowed us to capture a broader range of responses to party rape than have previously been documented, including proposals for change and efforts to sanction and exclude alleged rapists.

What is at stake? Status and social connections

For sorority women, a great deal was at stake in decisions about handling sexual violence at fraternity parties. Women described how their self-worth, reputation, and preferred lifestyles were bound up with being active on the HWGL party circuit. Several participants echoed sorority promotional materials and said that sororities were focused on sisterhood and women’s empowerment. However, most were blunt in reporting that despite the rhetoric, the key benefit to being in an HWGL sorority was the social capital, status, and fun that came from attending fraternity parties. As Sadie put it, “What we’re paying for is to go to parties—like go have formals and events. Everyone dresses nicely.” Research suggests the socioeconomic resources of women in HWGL coupled with on-campus property and alumni endowments that facilitate formals and events result from long-standing race and class privilege (Hamilton and Cheng 2018; Ray and Rosow 2010).

Andrea said that if a sorority was perceived to be insufficiently active on the party circuit, people began to wonder why it existed. Taking part in Greek parties was a core component of sorority women’s lives and identities; the parties were essential for women to uphold their identity as “normal” sorority women. Andrea, who belonged to a sorority that had a reputation for not being “social enough,” explained,

There’s a thing called the Social Six [the three top-tier sororities and three middle-tier sororities who were known to socialize most actively with fraternities]. . . . And this year during recruitment, there was talk like, “If you’re not in the social six, why are you in Greek life at all?” which was shit. In my opinion, it’s very mean to say that.

Participants portrayed access to the HWGL party circuit as a significant benefit of their sorority membership even as they acknowledged that fraternity parties could be high-risk and hostile to women. As Iva summarized,

One of the biggest benefits . . . from joining Greek life is access to parties. But sometimes they are sketchy. Like . . . I remember going to a party at [fraternity name] and feeling super creeped out the whole time. . . . The vibes were bad. They had these drinks out of syringes. . . . Then later I heard that someone was assaulted at that party. And—I got that bad vibe that whole time and [yet I] didn’t trust that instinct.

Iva overrode her sense that a fraternity party was dangerous, a sign of how far women in HWGL were willing to go to preserve the benefits they believed they were getting from HWGL.

Women also emphasized the role of alcohol and drugs in sexual violence in HWGL. As Maeve stated,

I don’t want to say Greek life causes sexual assault, but it pretty much puts all the ingredients in a pot and lights it on a stove. . . . You get lots of males and females that are very intoxicated and not able to stand up for themselves, and not able to make good decisions. Greek life provides a place where there’s not much restriction, and then there is pressure to go out and hook up with someone.

Maeve’s description of fraternity parties as sites of freedom evokes the lack of accountability that prior researchers have linked to HWGL fraternity men’s ownership of on-campus housing and racial privilege (Ray and Rosow 2010).

Yet in the same interview, Maeve said that on balance, she was glad to have joined her sorority; it gave her a way to bond with like-minded people:

Once I joined my sorority, and we started going out together, a lot of them had the same drinking habits, shopped at the same clothing stores, but also just had a very similar personality. I understand how it can seem like what I’m basing that off is superficial traits, but those were the things that I could tie into. I fit in.

Even women like Maeve, who saw the risks of Greek life parties, still found value and pride in their sorority memberships. The social connections that Maeve and other women got from their participation in HWGL help explain why they were motivated to find ways to maintain the HWGL party scene while striving to make it safer for women.

Assigning Blame and Responsibility: Institutional Critiques

National Panhellenic Conference

In attributing responsibility for party rape in HWGL, women offered an institutional critique. They described NPC rules banning women from serving alcohol, barring male guests from entering sorority houses after certain hours, and forbidding men from going upstairs (where women’s bedrooms were located) as outdated, unfair, and contributing to sexual violence against women. (At fraternity houses, the same restrictions either did not apply or were not enforced.) Participants explained that different institutional rules and enforcement unfairly relegated sorority women to the position of vulnerable guests rather than entitled hosts, enhancing power asymmetries.

Women consistently told us that the ideal solution for preventing party rape and other hazards would be to move HWGL parties to sororities. As Aubrey explained,

Party space is an issue. Sororities aren’t allowed to have alcohol or boys—there’s so many rules in the house! So fraternities have to have parties, and that makes it unsafe for women, going into a space that is all owned by men. People feel uncomfortable, and that’s their only option of socializing. If sororities were allowed to have parties or social events, it would be way more safe and way more comfortable.

Aubrey’s thinking was institutional in the sense that she attributed sexual violence in HWGL to institutional polices forbidding sororities from hosting parties. Yet her proposal only pertained to HWGL because sorority and fraternity chapters in the Multicultural Greek Council did not have access to on-campus housing.

Similarly, women emphasized the unfairness of a situation in which women and men had unequal control over the alcohol and selection of guests because of unequal enforcement of rules. As Elena explained, “Fraternity parties—it’s men dominating the space, choosing who gets to enter the space, choosing the girls. The sorority experience is supposed to provide a space for women, but it’s being dictated by men.” Elena’s critique focused on the different rights of women and men in HWGL life, which resulted from institutional policies.

At the same time, knowing how to couple an institutional critique of HWGL with efforts to change institutional arrangements was challenging. Participants acknowledged that as young college students, they faced problems that would be difficult for any group of stakeholders to tackle, much less students with little experience navigating the twin bureaucracies of the university and the NPC. As Sadie remarked,

These discussions of whether Greek life is sexist and leads to whatnot—that’s not new. But there aren’t easy solutions and it’s not easy for 21-year-olds in a sorority . . . to figure it out. The conversation [about how to handle sexual violence] just keeps happening.

Sadie’s comments show how challenging it is for college women to effect change in an institution with such entrenched practices and such a long history of sexual violence.

Other women described informal attempts to change NPC policies, typically by trying to influence NPC representatives when they camefor campus visits. For instance, Penelope said she spoke with NPC representatives about how NPC policies banning overnight guests and alcohol at sorority houses were unfair. However, she was met with indifference and resistance, and she ultimately gave up. As she explained,

If a woman wants to sleep with a fraternity man, shouldn’t she have the option to do this in her place of living, where there isn’t this power dynamic? I find it so demeaning that a house mom and Greek life has the policy and the authority to be like, “You can’t have someone stay over.” And I’ve advocated for this to every single national [NPC] member, and now I’m just tired and I don’t engage.

Women’s attempts to influence NPC policies were conducted individually rather than collectively. No sorority petitioned NPC for a change in policy as a group. This likely made women’s sense of disappointment and futility even greater because they had to face resistance from sorority authorities on their own.

The University and Title IX Policy

Women also offered institutional critiques of the university and its reporting mechanisms. Echoing anti-sexual violence movement messaging about survivors’ rights to supportive measures (KnowYourIx.Org 2022), women emphasized that the college should do more to reverse its reputation of indifference, insensitivity, and lack of transparency to women who reported sexual violence. They argued that the college administration was unwilling to put its women-identifying students’ well-being or safety above other priorities. Iris stated that the college was loathe to take action on sexual assault because doing so could offend alumni and donors, a position she and other women found abhorrent:

They [the administration] prioritize money over everything. So if they’re at risk of losing a big donor, they won’t do anything. They always send emails like, “Oh we believe survivors” but they don’t. They don’t actually care about their female students.

Over and over, women portrayed the university’s implementation and enforcement of Title IX policy as actively harmful—amplifying survivors’ pain and heightening women’s vulnerability to further damage. Jane, whose roommate had reported a rape to the Title IX office, spoke about the highly rigid and overly bureaucratized process and said she expected more from the institution:

The Title IX process should not be so mean and horrible. They [the university] need to stop caring so much about money and start caring about the people on this campus. I think they could . . . make the Title IX process easier emotionally on the victim. Like my roommate has told her story to about probably like 50 different people at this point. . . . Like my goodness, we don’t need to do these things. This shouldn’t be so hard.

Another woman, Katrina, had a roommate who considered reporting a sexual assault but ultimately chose not to. Katrina explained how reporting an assault to the university or law enforcement could further a woman’s sense of violation: “If I were to file a report with the university and the police, this system is not in my favor. I think a lot of people are being deterred by that and try to minimize what happened, and heal on their own, or even just see a local therapist.” Katrina and other women appeared to know a great deal about the resources available to women survivors and the processes through which university authorities handle sexual assault cases. They believed that the university’s Title IX office deserved its reputation for nonresponsiveness and a lack of sensitivity and viewed the university as failing to fulfill its obligations to students.

Overall, women’s critiques of Greek governing authorities centered on sexual assault prevention: They believed that being allowed to host parties on their turf would reduce sexual assault. By contrast, their critiques of the university focused on Title IX investigations and adjudications and did not include ideas about how the university could better collaborate with them to develop workable prevention strategies.

Preferred Prevention Strategies

In light of their sense that the university and the NPC were failing to protect them, women took on the labor of trying to keep themselves and others safe. However, these strategies required a great deal of labor and put women in the position of doing the “dirty work” of sexual assault prevention.

Monitoring Interactions: Sober Sisters

In line with research on the ubiquity of bystander training across college campuses today (Jouriles etal. 2018), respondents endorsed initiatives like the “sober sisters” program. In these programs, women are held responsible for acting as vigilant bystanders at parties, with the aim of preventing individual partygoers from committing assault or becoming victims (for an example of guidelines for a similar sober sister or sober monitor program, see Cornell University Sorority and Fraternity Life 2020).

Most women believed that efforts to monitor other individuals at parties were beneficial. They praised the sober sisters program, which assigns several (usually one or two) women with the responsibility to refrain from alcohol and monitor others’ behavior at fraternity parties. For instance, sober sisters may ask a fraternity man to “cut a sister off” from more drinks, interrupt a conversation between a very drunk woman and a fraternity man, and open closet doors to ensure a sorority woman is not being raped in a closet. As Esther explained,

We have a couple people who are always on the lookout. . . . It’s for anything—people who are very drunk, people who are falling down . . . and generally if I see a girl who is in a situation that is possibly dangerous . . . I go up to them and talk to them, and make sure they’re okay. So even if you don’t know them, and they are with a guy—you would just be like, “Hey, come get a drink with me!” and pull them away and be like, “Are you OK? Do you need help?”

In contrast to the findings from a study of Columbia University women, in which students reported strategies to keep themselves safe but not their close friends (Wamboldt et al. 2019), sorority women in our sample took it upon themselves to try to protect other women.

Although women endorsed such efforts, their accounts hinted at the burdens and labor of this approach. They pointed out that being a sober sister was a difficult job and that women were often reluctant to do it or did the job halfheartedly. Participants said that many women resented having to attend a social event without being allowed to drink and socialize. As Iris explained,

I think they [sober sisters] help. But I think it should be randomly assigned so everybody has to share the responsibility. I mean, I feel like the sober sisters aren’t always super-invested in the job. They don’t really want to be there usually.

Given the severity of the problems that sober sisters were supposed to monitor and address— blackout drunkenness and sexual violence—it is no wonder many women felt put upon and resentful of the role.

Other women described the sober sisters program as well intentioned but difficult to implement. In part, this was because efforts to constrain individuals with higher status were challenging, and sober sistering was often delegated to those with the lowest status. For instance, in Kinsley’s sorority, the sober sister program had initially tasked first-years with the dirty work of looking after others. Kinsley described a conversation in which she told her chapter’s risk manager about the changes she believed needed to be made:

I told her it was terrible that as soon as freshmen join the new pledge class, they’re sober sistering that month. And I was like, “I don’t think you can do that because they don’t know most of the people in the sorority.” But also if I was a freshman and I saw a drunk senior, I would not talk to them. When I was a freshman, I thought seniors were really scary.

Moreover, so many instances of risky behavior were occurring at these parties that no one person could handle the needed oversight. As Kinsley elaborated,

We have one girl always behind the bar watching the guys mix drinks. There’s more of them [than just one] which is also fantastic. Because we used to have one [sober sister per party], and that’s not enough. Like if you’re in the bathroom [helping a drunk sister], there’s probably something else happening that you can’t be part of, because you’re just one person.

The challenges of being a sober sister speak to the risks associated with parties in HWGL. Nonetheless, women believed that sober sisters were essential to keeping them safe at parties—to the point that blame for assaults could and did fall on other women. Women took on extensive and burdensome labor and responsibility for preventing party rape in HWGL, even going so far as to risk their own relationships with other women. As Piper explained, when a woman was raped at a fraternity party, there could be questions about whether the sober sister had done a good enough job:

If someone’s blackout drunk, hopefully a sober sister has noticed and taken care of them, so nothing bad could happen medically. . . . That said, a sober sister can’t be responsible. They’re not responsible for an act of sexual assault—the perpetrator is. This has become a problem, because if a member is assaulted, sometimes there’s a lot of anger towards the sober sister like—“Why didn’t you help me?” “Why didn’t you stop them?”

Blocklisting

Like women in historically White sororities around the country,¹ women at Central developed online forums where sorority members could anonymously list the names of men who they believed had or were likely to perpetrate sexual violence against women (for a history of this practice, see Heldman et al. 2018). Women saw this blocklisting as part of a prevention effort. As Daisy explained,

We have a form. You can anonymously submit any name to our president, and they [the man] will not be allowed to attend the event—anyone that you don’t feel comfortable being there—and that’s a no-questions-asked policy. I think things like that really prevent these things from happening.

Anonymous forms and reporting mechanisms helped women feel more in control of their party spaces. However, given racialized associations of rape with Black men (Collins 2004) and the role of social status in protecting some men from accusationsof rape (Wamboldt et al. 2019), blocklisting could also lead to a situation wherelower-status men and men of color were disproportionately publicly accused, with potentially devasting long-term effects.

Yet controlling the guest list was not always possible. As women explained, they had the most control over the guest list when the party in question was a formal (which involved dates) or a “crush party” (a party in which men received anonymous invitations to a party because a woman had listed them as a crush). Typically, formals and crush parties were held at rented venues off campus, and buses were rented for transportation. Amanda, a risk manager, explained how blocklisting worked for different kinds of events:

Let’s say it’s a formal. If you put a person on there [the blocklist] who is not allowed to come to our events, we [the risk manager and two other designated women] quietly approach you and say, “Hey, so that person you invited is on the blacklist for a valid reason, please invite someone else.” Same for crush parties. We’ll contact the person and be like, “Hey, we wanted to let you know this person isn’t allowed to come to our events. He will not be receiving an invite.” People are super respectful of that. It’s never an issue. Obviously the three of us know who those people are. We know their faces, we know their names. So if somebody did try to show up, we can approach them and be like, “Hi, you weren’t invited, you need to leave.” If they fight us on that, we have boys at our disposal to help remove them. Usually, it isn’t a problem. Usually without an invite they don’t try to show up.

Preventing a particular man from attending a formal or crush party required cooperation and collaboration with the woman who had invited him. If the man was still intent on attending, risk managers had to rely on fraternity men to “handle” the blocklisted individual.

For parties that occurred in fraternity houses, like mixers (where an entire fraternity invited an entire sorority to their house), the situation was more complicated. Amanda explained that in such cases, the sorority would usually designate a high-status sorority woman to try to convince a high-status fraternity member not to let the blocklisted individual into the party:

When it comes to mixers it is tougher. Usually if we have a lot of friends [in the fraternity], one of us has enough weight to go to someone important and be like, “Hey, for real, this person cannot be at this event or we’re shutting it down and leaving and we will not schedule more events with you regardless of the backlash from our own chapter.”

Amanda noted there would be “backlash” if the sorority decided to stop partying with an entire fraternity or leave a mixer early. Blocklisting an entire fraternity or putting parties with them “on pause” would undermine the HWGL social calendar and create conflict among women, some of whom would oppose such a decision.

Brooke, who was a risk manager in a different sorority from Amanda’s, detailed how her sorority had been unable to reach consensus about boycotting an entire fraternity where women in her chapter had been raped. Ultimately, the women in Brooke’s house voted (via an anonymous survey) to resume activities with the fraternity. As Brooke, who was serving as a risk manager when we interviewed her, explained,

There were some incidents [of sexual violence] . . . so we have made the decision that we don’t wanna put our members and our new members in this space. . . . We won’t be hosting mixers with this fraternity. But then some people were like, “well maybe we can start mixing with [fraternity] again.” Because they [the fraternity] were doing a lot of trainings, specifically with the men who were at these encounters, but also the whole fraternity was doing learning. . . . I did an anonymous survey. . . . Most people were like, “I’m okay with it.” So we made the decision to go forward with mixing with them.

Amanda’s and Brooke’s accounts shows it was easier for women to get an individual man permanently blocklisted for “creepy” behavior than to stop socializing with an entire fraternity. Once a fraternity demonstrated it was “doing learning,” most women in Amanda’s sorority were eager to move on and resume partying with them.

The contrast between how women reported dealing with individual men who were believed to be “rapey” and how they dealt with an entire fraternity house where a sorority sister had been raped is telling. In the former case, women were eager to identify and exclude an individual for other women’s comfort and safety. Blocklisting individual men did not threaten the HWGL party scene because the parties could always continue without that particular fraternity man’s involvement. Women appeared to have a well-oiled machine, with an organized set of practices and routines, ready for blocklisting. But to judge by their accounts, women seemed far less prepared to boycott an entire fraternity house—perhaps because boycotting an entire fraternity house was more threatening to the entire HWGL party scene. The social calendar, and the raison d’être of HWGL, could suffer if a sorority house voted to remove one of the options for mixers and parties.

Discussion

We found that participants focused on institutions as a critical contributor to party rape.

Echoing some aspects of sexual geographies (Hirsch and Khan 2020), women framed sexual violence at HWGL parties as inherently tied to their location on men’s turf. Their proposal—to move parties to their turf—flows from this focus on institutions as a potential lever of change. Thus, our findings suggest a sharp turn away from “blame-the-victim narratives” that put responsibility for sexual violence solely on survivors. Our findings also highlight a distinct way that college women today frame party rape, compared to what was found by authors who gathered data before the 2011 DCL (U.S. Department of Education 2011).

Yet the concept of sexual geographies also draws attention to how other aspects of the social and spatial environment—above and beyond who owns the property—create risk factors. These can include social norms regarding drinking and drugs, consent, the volume of music, party themes, and inclusivity of nondominant groups. In proposing to move parties to their turf, women did not surface these other social norms, raising the question of whether holding parties at sorority houses would truly reduce risk. Participants did not appear to recognize that the same risks, liabilities, and insurance costs associated with fraternity houses (Flanagan 2014; Glovin 2013; Hechinger 2017) could become issues for their organizations.

Women’s proposal to move parties into sorority houses also reflected a racialized sense of entitlement to space. If they had been women of color in an African American, Latina, or Asian sorority, there would have been no option to move parties to their houses. Historically White Greek chapters are the only social organizations at Central to own on-campus property.

Notably, women’s proposals to move Greek parties to their residences would have kept the parties largely intact in almost every way, other than location. Respondents’ current prevention strategies focused only on suspect individual men; they found it nearly impossible to boycott an entire fraternity. In so doing, women upheld existing heteronormative, high-risk parties as a critical feature of their social order. Women were willing to undertake high-cost efforts that, in their view, would reduce the risks of party rape, but only if these efforts would not create a disconnect from an entire fraternity or the Greek party circuit.

One interpretation of our data is that women’s alignment with fraternity men put sharp limitations on what they were willing to consider as a sexual assault prevention strategy. Yet the social arrangements women were unwilling to challenge or opt out of predictably produce sexual assault. Their alignment with fraternity men may have to be challenged for prevention efforts to have more robust effects. Yet women’s strategies and solutions are understandable, considering the critical role of friendships and group associations for college students’ well-being and identity development (Khan et al. 2021; McCabe 2016; Silver 2020).

Our respondents’ strategies also make sense in light of the class benefits associated with participation in HWGL. Research suggests that sorority women’s long-term economic prospects partially depend on marriage to partners from the same race- and class-segregated college networks, including those facilitated by HWGL (Armstrong and Hamilton 2021; Hamilton and Armstrong 2021). Thus, women in historically White sororities exist at a highly contradictory intersectional location (Collins 2015; Crenshaw 1989): They are simultaneously privileged vis-à-vis other women and disadvantaged vis-à-vis their male peers. They may trade alignment with high-status men, who could ultimately become their higher-earning marriage partners, for a more limited range of sexual assault prevention strategies. In this way, our findings reinforce the point that sexual assault can function as both a product of and productive of inequalities (Armstrong et al. 2018). One contribution of our research is to identify women’s prevention strategies as part of this same inequality dynamic.

The current study does have limitations. We offer several suggestions for how future research could overcome them. First, the women in our sample were attending a highly selective college. Students at elite institutions often strive to achieve cosmopolitan identities as open, inclusive, and egalitarian (Binder and Abel 2019). Future research could leverage a comparative study design to trace whether students’ strategies for addressing sexual violence vary by institutional selectivity. Future research could also analyze the prevalence of slut-shaming and other blame-the-victim approaches to sexual violence by college context. Our respondents, who attended a highly selective college, largely eschewed such logic, but we do not know how representative their responses may be.

Second, institutional review board regulations prevented us from following women into their party spaces and observing their strategies for preventing sexual violence firsthand. Comparing women’s accounts of their behavior to observations of their behaviors could be helpful. Observations of parties could also help chart how and when power differentials among men and amongwomen—and between men and women— influence women’s strategies for staying safe at parties.

Third, our study was limited to accounts by cisgender women of their attempts to avoid sexual violence by men they presumed were cisgender. This focus makes sense because most sexual assaults on campus occur within these parameters (Hirsch and Khan 2020), and the party environments women described upheld heterosexual masculine dominance. Yet gendered power intersects with many other axes of inequality (Hamilton etal. 2019). We hope future research will draw on expanded population samples to continue developing knowledge about how college students’ preferred prevention strategies align with their available resources and positionality. More research is also needed on how men in historically White fraternities make sense of sexual assault prevention strategies at the parties they host. This would expand the growing literature on masculinities and attitudes toward violence against women (Bridges and Pascoe 2018; Fishman, Nielsen, and Esthappan 2022; Wamboldt et al. 2019).

We conducted our last wave of interviews in 2019. Our data do not reflect potential changes to women’s framing of party rape that may have followed the Trump administration’s changes to Title IX regulations in May 2020 and the ensuing activism and legislation that came in its wake. The May 2020 policy changes required sexual misconduct investigations to include live hearings and cross-examine survivors (Holland, Bedera, and Webermann 2020). Anti-rape activists protested that the changes would bring additional trauma to survivors and contribute to the underreporting of sexual assault (Belmas and Rosenthal 2022). In 2021, a federal district court ruling struck down the requirement that if a person refused to be cross-examined, investigators had to ignore their testimony (U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights 2022). Future research could explore how these and other ongoing policy changes and subsequent protests could influence students’ thinking about sexual assault prevention strategies.

Past research suggests the recruitment practices and mission of African American and other multicultural Greek sororities provide women with greater collective resources to resist sexism than women have in historically White sororities (Stombler and Padavic 1997). Future research could directly compare the preferred sexual assault prevention strategies of women in HWGL and multicultural Greek life.

Finally, like most college students in the United States, women at Central received sexual assault prevention and intervention training as part of first-year orientation. Women in sororities underwent additional training associated with the National Panhellenic’s Sexual Assault Awareness Task Force, which was established in 2014 (NPC 2019). Some critics argue that in educating students in bystander intervention, higher-education institutions have sought to pass the responsibility to protect students onto students themselves (Elk and Deveraux 2014). In this context, women’s labor-intensive prevention strategies make sense. Future research could trace and compare the labor costs that various techniques and approaches impose on women.

At the same time, there is cause for hope. The characteristics of safe and unsafe party contexts are known (see Boswell and Spade 1996). Campus- level sexual assault prevention programs that take a social-ecologic framework, including hot-spot mapping, are attracting research funding and public attention (Basile 2015; Mahoney et al. 2022). In 2021, Hirsch and colleagues released “A Sexual Assault Prevention and Community Equity” (SPACE) toolkit that offers a set of practical recommendations for college students to improve the sexualgeographies on their campuses. With the collaboration of willing and sympathetic officials, college students and their allies can design interventions that improve the safety of party spaces without incurring the costs of blocklisting, especiallythe potential for it to be racially discriminatory.

For instance, in response to crowded dance parties that could lead to social pressure to drink and hook up, a Yale student group worked with administrators to design appealing alternatives before, during, and after the dances. Predance mocktail hours allowed students to have more extended, friendly conversations with their dates and other partygoers. Cool-down rooms with water, snacks, and seating during the dances gave students a safe place to take a break from loud, packed parties. Finally, after-dance food and movie screenings offered attractive options and weakened the assumption that partygoers would automatically go home with someone for a hookup (Yale Communication and Consent Educators 2022). Initiatives such as these hold great promise, especially if they avoid overburdening women with extra labor and responsibility. After all, as our findings show, without appealing alternatives, students will cling even to institutions that fail to protect them.

Footnotes

Appendix

Table 4.

Select Colleges Where Historically White Greek Life Sorority Blocklisting of Fraternity Men Has Been Reported in the Media.

College/university	URLs (last accessed 10/9/21)	Notes
Dartmouth	https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2019/10/greek-house-blacklists-operate-under-secretive-informal-rules
Duke	https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/silent-epidemic
Eastern Michigan	https://www.freep.com/in-depth/news/local/michigan/2021/04/10/emu-rape-suspect-title-ix-assault-dustyn-durbin/7111213002/
University of California-San Diego	https://ucsdguardian.org/2019/06/03/ucsd-sigma-chi-suspended-investigation-sexual-assault-multiple-allegations/
University of San Francisco	https://twitter.com/survivorsusf
Washington University	https://www.studlife.com/news/2018/10/29/wpa-survey-finds-widespread-sexual-violence-across-wu-fraternities/	Appears in a university survey
Yale University	https://legalinsurrection.com/2018/02/yale-sororities-creating-blacklist-of-frat-boys-who-make-them-feel-uncomfortable/

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the feedback we received from attendees at presentations given at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan Brownbag, including Elizabeth A. Armstrong. We are also thankful for assistance,support, and feedback from Quinn Mulroy, Sumaia Masoom, faculty colleagues in the Human Development & Social Policy program at Northwestern, and anonymous reviewers. Most of all, we thank our research participants for their generosity of time, spirit, and interest in helping us understand the topics discussed here

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Northwestern University Institute for Policy Research Faculty Fellowship.

Research Ethics

This study received approval from the institutional review board, and all participants gave informed consent prior to their participation. To protect participants’ confidentiality, names of participants, organizations, and institutions have been changed.

ORCID iDs

Simone Ispa-Landa

Sara E. Thomas

Notes

Author Biographies

Simone Ispa-Landa, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. She studies social hierarchies and status in student peer cultures, cultures of school discipline reform, and intersections of race and gender in educational settings.

Sara E. Thomas, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on the biological, psychological, and social contexts of adolescents and adolescent development, with additional expertise in gender, power, and issues of consent.

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