Harvey Weinstein was no priest, and the stories of his sexual misconduct should surprise no one. Apparently his reputation was so well-known in entertainment circles that NYU professors discouraged female students from interning with him. Even entertainment outsiders could have guessed that Weinstein's company would be a lion's den for aspiring young women. Weinstein, after all, is the kingpin behind raunch-fests like "Grindhouse," "Dirty Girl," "Sin City," and "Zack and Miri Make a Porno." It doesn't take an investigative reporter to suspect that a person whose wares were the objectification and exploitation of women might not be averse to the objectification and exploitation of women in the workplace. Think of it this way: normal employers couldn't show many of Weinstein's movies in their offices without creating what sexual harassment lawyers call a "hostile work environment." But for Weinstein and the women who worked with him, those movies were the work environment.
Weinsten did not survive as a prolific sexual predator by stealth. Rather, he thrived thanks to what The New Yorker termed a "culture of complicity" in Hollywood.
There are two approaches to fighting sexual assault. The first and most obvious method is to hunt, expose, and terminate predators one by one after they have already claimed their prey. But a more proactive, if less satisfying, approach is to modify the habitats where predators like Weinstein thrive.
Indeed, America's college campuses, where there is an epidemic of sexual violence, is one such habitat that is in sore need of modification.
By now, any college official who is interested in providing a safe educational environment for aspiring young women knows two things. The first is that sexual assaults are occurring at an alarming rate on American campuses. If you sent your daughter to an American college this year, there is a one in five chance that she will be sexually assaulted during her time there. (By comparison, if you sent your son to war in Iraq, the odds that he would be killed or wounded were about one in fifty.)
The second thing they should know is that one of the most significant predictors of sexual assault in college is the presence of heavy drinking. 80% of campus sexual assaults involve alcohol and, not surprisingly, college environments with less drinking also have far fewer sexual assaults than those with more. Sexual violence is seven times more common at "party schools" such as Syracuse and Penn State than "stone cold sober schools" like BYU and Brooklyn College.
These statistics are not new--studies in the 1990s showed that sexual violence is more common at schools where there is more binge drinking. They are also not surprising--drunkenness and risky sexual venturing have become more readily associated with the college experience than academics. Even eight in ten college students themselves agree that less alcohol would prevent sexual assaults.
Bureaucrats are often accused of paying lip service to problems without finding solutions, and when it comes to campus sexual assault, America's public officials--those charged with giving aspiring young women a safe place to learn--have been in rare form. Thus far, politicians and experts have compiled volumes of statistics and organized no shortage of task forces, yet they continue to treat sexual assault as a conundrum without a solution. In January, 2014, President Obama created a task force to address college sexual assault. Three years later, the task force issued a report that it gushingly dedicated to the courageous sexual assault survivors who were "agents of change." The task force then reported data that proved not much has changed at all. It didn't inspire confidence that change was on the horizon, either: a section shamefully mistitled "Prevention Programs That Work" does not even mention the schools that keep their rates of binge-drinking and sexual assaults low.
The report did warmly embrace colleges who used token awareness programs to counter sexual assaults. Since 1999, the federal government has thrown more than $131 million at such programs. But the programs have treated sexual assaults as if they occur in a vacuum and, not surprisingly, they haven't worked. The Department of Justice reviewed such programs in 2007 and lamented that "despite the link between substance use and sexual assault, it appears that few sexual assault prevention and/or risk reduction programs address the relationship."
Those colleges that have tried to lower alcohol consumption have done so with laughable half-measures that are doomed to failure. Indiana University banned hard liquor at frat parties. Stanford limits the size of alcohol bottles. (If only one could lose weight by eating ice cream in smaller dishes.) Michigan began "self-policing" their fraternities by sending its bravest--and certainly least popular--students to patrol frat houses in bright orange shirts, asking drunk partiers to please get off the roof. Meanwhile, in June, 2016, more than 35 universities began earning fortunes by selling beer at football games. At the University of Maine, my alma mater, there is a pub in the middle of campus, and the school anthem--taught to every student on their first day of college--is a drinking song.
Sadly, America's pesky culture of sensitivity, not ignorance, is giving predators a habitat to thrive in. Fear of being seen as blaming victims and excusing perpetrators has chilled a long-overdue discussion about the connection between alcohol and sexual violence. As one famous victim of sexual assault rebuked her assailant: "Alcohol is not an excuse. Is it a factor? Yes. But alcohol was not the one who stripped me, fingered me, had my head dragging against the ground, with me almost fully naked."
She was right. Drunkenness cannot be a shield for perpetrators or a sword against victims. But such concerns didn't stop Americans from nearly halving alcohol-related traffic deaths by waging an aggressive and multi-faceted campaign against drunk driving. If such a campaign against sexual violence on college campuses is going to happen, it will have to begin with a recognition that America's beloved alcohol is playing a major role.
College officials do a shameful disservice to America's daughters if they let political correctness impede progress. One frustrated writer interviewed experts who confessed that they were reluctant to advise college girls to protect themselves from sexual predators by not drinking. She wrote:
[W]e are failing to let women know that when they render themselves defenseless, terrible things can be done to them. Young women are getting a distorted message that their right to match men drink for drink is a feminist issue. The real feminist message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you will attract the kinds of people who, shall we say, don’t have your best interest at heart. That’s not blaming the victim; that’s trying to prevent more victims.Sexual assault is endemic to college campuses not because the problem is concealed, but because a culture of complicity exists. Officials know that binge drinking and sexual assaults go hand-in-hand, yet they remain willfully mired in the brainstorming phase of their response, grasping for more convenient solutions to the problem and refusing to take anything but the most tepid measures to fight their colleges' binge-drinking cultures. But the most effective treatments for America's rape culture would be a healthy does of some good, old-fashioned Victorian prudishness, and a resurrection of progressive temperance.
It is high time that booze gets some bad publicity. Microbreweries and country singers alike have successfully portrayed America's favorite drug as not only acceptable but downright wholesome. A discussion about the connection between alcohol and sexual assault would be a good start at giving alcohol the bad reputation that it has earned.
The colleges that give sexual predators an environment to thrive deserve some bad publicity too. Perhaps we could begin by abolishing the phrase "party schools" from our vocabularies--a euphemism that is more likely to invite than deter young people.
Perhaps "hotbeds of sexual violence" would be a more apt substitute.
_________________________________________________________________
Further Reading and Other Perspectives:
In 2015, CNN aired a documentary about campus rapes called The Hunting Ground which, interestingly, Harvey Weinstein helped fund. One of the main arguments in the documentary is that 8% of college men commit 90% of the sexual assaults, so purging those predators from college campuses is an effective way to address the problem. The documentary has received some criticism for the data that premises its argument and how it portrayed accused predators.
