Author: Closing College Fraternities Can Help Stop Sexual Assaults

Published: Monday, September 25, 2017 - 3:31pm
Updated: Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - 11:20am
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Vanessa Grigoriadis

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced on Friday that the Trump administration is officially rescinding Obama-era guidelines that were aimed at helping victims of sexual assaults on college campuses.

The Obama administration issued guidance to colleges and universities in 2011 that changed the way schools should handle sexual assaults under Title IX, a federal law that prohibits discrimination based on sex. That also includes sexual harassment.

DeVos has said that the Obama-era guidelines, which lowered the burden of proof for sexual assault cases, went too far. She says it denied due process to the accused.

This announcement has sparked debate among those who say that universities turned a blind eye to sexual assaults on campus and its victims for too long, and those, like DeVos, who say that there still needs to be a fair process for the accused.

But the issue of how to address sexual assaults on campus goes beyond the aftermath? 

One author thinks that universities can do more to stop sexual assaults before they happen. Vanessa Grigoriadis says there’s one way thing university’s could do to address the problem of sexual assault on campuses: close the frats.

She’s the author of the book "Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power and Consent on Campus." For the book, she went back to her alma mater, Wesleyan University, to report on the link between fraternities and sexual assaults there.

Now this is certainly a controversial argument, but Grigoriadis says there’s no separating the off-campus, unsupervised partying that goes on at frats all over the country and the problem of sexual assault on campus.

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