Hannah Soyer
This past week, Stanford University announced its new policy put in place in an attempt to lower the rate of sexual assaults on campus. This policy bans large containers of hard liquor from campus undergraduate events and parties in an effort to target sexual assaults that occur in an environment of intoxication, which, according to the Stanford website, makes up 75 percent of all sexual assaults.
On top of this, Stanford’s home page had a link to another page titled “Female Bodies and Alcohol,” which was taken down by Stanford staff Aug. 24 after many people expressed anger. The website page has been archived, however, and is still available for anyone to read. A quick Google search will lead you to the page, so if you’re bored and looking for another infuriating example of how sexist many organizations still are, I’d highly suggest you read it.
The page mainly discusses how women get drunk at a faster rate than men when consuming the same amount of alcohol. More troubling, however, is the section titled “Alcohol affects both sexual intent and aggression.” In this section, there is one sentence that says, “Research tells us that women who are seen drinking alcohol are perceived to be more sexually available than they may actually be.” Even though this section never outright says, “Women who are drinking and get raped are responsible for being raped,” it is all too easy to glean this overarching idea from this page. The mere fact that the page is titled “Female Bodies and Alcohol” already suggests that the focus is heavily weighted on one side and not enough on the other.
However, I do believe that discussing alcohol consumption in relation to sexual assault is a necessary step to take, especially when organizations and universities are coming up with policies that they hope will lower the rate of sexual assault. The reality is that most cases of sexual assault do happen when one or more persons are intoxicated, since a person under the influence is unable to give consent. Such discussions regarding the place alcohol plays in experiences of sexual assault needs to happen, but certainly not in the way that Stanford has done.
At the University of Iowa, the No. 1 party school in the nation four years ago, such discussions particularly need to occur. It seems to me that if the amount of underage drinking were cut down, situations in which sexual assault could occur would also be cut down. That being said, discussions surrounding the intersection of sexual assault and alcohol consumption should be handled in a way that does not implicitly say it is a person’s responsibility to not get raped and instead make it clear that the only one responsible for sexual assault or harassment of any kind is the person performing the act.
