Rabiger University Hosts "Men Can Stop Rape" Presentation to Lopsided Turnout

I stumbled across this article online and the headline immediately caught my eye. Just last week, Radford University, a public university in Virginia that has an enrollment of less than 10,000, held a public event called, “Reimaging Consent: How Healthy Masculinity Can Prevent Rape.” The event was held in part to help kick off Women's History Month. One of the presentations during the event was Men Can Stop Rape, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that seeks to mobilize men “to use their strength for creating cultures free from violence, especially men’s violence against women." Though this was a public event, according to the article, Greek life at the University assisted in making it happen, with both the Panhellenic and Interfraternity Councils raising money to sponsor it. 

According to Radford University's Wikipedia page, the school has a wide variety of Greek Life and its popularity is ever growing. This in mind, along with the fact that this was a Greek-life sponsored event, one might think that this would be a great opportunity to raise awareness of sexual assault on college campuses for both men and women. This, however, was not the case. There was only around 1 man to every 10 women in attendance. This is most likely due to the fact that for members of all 7 sororities (each with around 80 members) it was a mandated event, yet the Interfraternity only mandated that 8-10 men from each of the 12 fraternities be present.

After receiving hundreds of calls and emails expressing outrage about the lack of male turnout, the Panhellenic Council President stated, “The women saw it as a really important topic, (but) the men were just thinking in terms of it being, (well), another speaker.” This quote really stood out to me for several reasons. One, I really think it speaks truth about how sexual assault is looked at through a gendered lens. Women are predominantly the victims of sexual assault, and we have been told over and over again that we are the ones who have to be careful and we are the ones who need to avoid such assault. In contrast, and I don’t want to generalize, but I feel as though for the majority of men, they don’t think about sexual assault on the same level as women do. Before a night out they don’t have to think about keeping their guard up about that kind of attack. It seems as though the Interfraternity council didn’t think to label this presentation as a big deal, maybe because it’s hard to connect with a cause that, for the most part, doesn’t always affect you. In my opinion, however, I think they were missing the entire point of the presentation. The Interfraternity Council President called it a “lack of communication,” but it makes me question exactly how they were missing the importance of this event, especially this particular presentation, in which men were the target audience.


This leads me to think back to conversations we’ve had in class, especially when we discussed things we as women inherently do or have been told to do to “avoid” sexual assault, such as not listening to music while walking alone at night, keeping pepper spray, or always being with a friend during a night out. It also made me think of the time we talked about schools or Universities implementing a mandated course on Gender and Violence for all students. Even looking at the make-up of our own class, we can see that there are many more women than men. I think it would be great for more men to get involved, but it makes me ask the question, why aren’t they seemingly more inclined to in the first place?


http://college.usatoday.com/2016/03/10/men-can-stop-rape-event-at-radford-u-mostly-missing-one-thing-men/