“Be careful, that’s the rape frat,” a friend casually commented after I mentioned the fraternity party I was attending that night.
This was 2013. I was 19, having temporarily swapped London’s City University for the University of North Carolina (UNC). The “rape frat” was the site of an alleged assault months earlier; a party was nevertheless still happening that evening.
That throwaway comment hadn’t crossed my mind in years, but conversations this week about rape on US university campuses brought it back to me.
This month, a former Cornell University student, identified in court filings as Jane Doe, sued the university and seven members of its Chi Phi fraternity. She alleges the men drugged and gang-raped her at the chapter house in October 2024, when she was 20. Her lawyer says Cornell expelled two of the seven and gave the others lesser sanctions, such as suspensions, workshops or essays. All of the men identified in the lawsuit have denied the allegations that have been made against them. Cornell says the chapter remains barred from campus.
Fraternities and sororities have never been part of British university culture, despite an ill-fated Channel 4 attempt to start a sorority in 2011, presumably assuming what student life lacked was Greek letters, organised fun in HMOs and a weirdly elitist system of making friends.
At UNC, I quickly saw one reason they were popular – as a vehicle for accessing alcohol. By 19, I was familiar with the textures of boozy British student life: sticky nightclub floors, dry ice machines, £1 vodka shots and mandated fancy dress on a random Tuesday night.
But in America, where only over-21s can buy alcohol, I became a child again. Nightlife options were limited. I could chance it at a bar with my dodgy fake ID or attend a frat party, where the alcohol flowed freely, presumably supplied by the older bros who were able to buy booze legally. The promise of free alcohol, without having to present my embarrassing fake ID, was difficult to resist.
One of the university’s numerous frat houses was guaranteed to throw a party most nights of the week. They were extraordinary: sprawling mansions with dance floors, ice luges and keg stands. The catch? Girls could walk through the door unconditionally. Boys needed to belong to a fraternity, befriend someone who did, or otherwise persuade the doorman – usually the frat bro who drew the short straw – that they deserved admission.
The weird power dynamic you’re probably imagining is spot on: you’re welcome as long as you don’t block the hosts’ chances of sleeping with someone.
So, we went. We drank from red cups and ice luges, danced on tables and gawked at the spectacle of Greek life.
UNC draws the majority of its students from North Carolina; many I spoke to had never left the state, let alone the country. One girl I met in a communal dorm bathroom told me she found busy frat parties overwhelming. She felt adrift in Chapel Hill, a town of about 62,000 people which seemed sprawling and hedonistic compared to her quiet mountain hometown.
I found it difficult to relate. Years of naff student nights, festivals and holidays in Magaluf and Kavos had given me enough street smarts to navigate getting drunk around other drunk people. I knew it was best to avoid the “jungle juice” – a suspicious-looking red or orange drink sometimes served in a bin (yes, an actual bin!) at frat parties. I knew charming strangers did not always mean well. I understood the need to keep track of my friends.
None of this, of course, made me invulnerable to assault. But over several years, I had already accumulated experiences that a girl from a small town would be expected to process quickly in a much stranger environment.
This is the greatest contradiction of America’s university culture: students are adults, but not adult enough to buy a beer in a bar. Young people want to drink alcohol and young women are funnelled into frat houses to find it.
While the fraternity parties raged on, a movement calling out the mishandling of sexual assault on campus was quietly building momentum.
Andrea Pino, a fellow student, was raped by a stranger in 2012. With no name for her perpetrator and no witnesses, she filled out an anonymous report and disclosed a “personal trauma” to her academic advisor, who dismissed her claims.
Pino didn’t keep quiet, though; she wrote about her experiences and, unsatisfied with the response from the university, co-founded End Rape on Campus, a nationwide student activist movement devoted to pressuring educational institutions to take action.
Pino got in touch with former student Annie Clark, a fellow survivor of on-campus sexual assault. Together with other students, the two filed a federal complaint against UNC with the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, leading to an investigation into the university’s handling of reported rapes.
In 2020, UNC was fined $1.5m (£1.1m) by the Department of Education for violations of the Clery Act, the federal law requiring universities to report campus crime.
At the time I was at UNC, I was aware of heightened conversations around sexual assault on campus, and went to a session on sex and consent put on in my college dormitory. I attended with two male British imports. I remember one saying, in disbelief as we left: “Do we really need to be reminded that ‘no means no’?”
The answer might not be the same for every male student. But sadly, whatever the courts decide in the Cornell case, it’s something more young men need to be taught.
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