Content warning: This article discusses sexual assault.
Every woman knows a victim. No man knows a perpetrator. It is recognised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) that violence against women remains one of the world’s most persistent human rights crises. This fact has somehow been widely rejected by the catchphrase “not all men”. Your male friend claims over a pint that his “biggest fear” is being falsely accused of assault. The boys sitting next to you on the DART jeer about how “they can’t even touch women nowadays”. Men everywhere react to rape statistics with abject defence instead of concern for the crime. The phrase “it’s not all men” has diluted the comments of awareness campaigns trying to encourage empathy in men instead of outrage. But how can we be shocked by this when it is this type of rhetoric that creeps out of our screens and into the vocabulary of male organised groups? Male violence is a pandemic, and organisational support facilitates the spread.
From fraternities in the US to Irish rugby teams, male-oriented university groups foster hypermasculine ideology without even knowing it. They mould their members into what high-performing men “should” be and neglect essential conversations surrounding what happens when competition turns into aggression. Many misogynistic attitudes are generational, passed down from father to son, but when your wide-eyed, sweet son joins a rugby team of teens riddled with pent-up anger or a football team where the initiation is to spike a girl’s drink, this pressure to conform often crumbles him. Toxicity is not limited to men’s societies, but when one population group is responsible for 80 per cent of crime, it is not outrageous to suggest that damaging attitudes should be monitored and regulated early on in clubs organised exclusively for them.
Jokes turn into pranks. Pranks turn into abuse. When no one calls out the first sign of toxicity, it multiplies and bounces off those surrounding it. Fraternities, sports teams and other societies can become a cesspit for violence; an epicentre of sexism. The recent Cornell rape case shows the importance of intervention and criminalisation. Seven men commit a heinous crime against a woman, ruining her life as she knew it, and they walk the streets to this day. One perpetrator is a medical student, a few of them played on the rugby team. They don’t stand out on the street. They are not supernatural entities; they are men brought up in a system where we tolerate gender-based violence, where aggression on the field blurs into aggression with your mates and where you face no repercussions beyond essay writing after you physically and emotionally destroy one of your female peers. No one in the group chat where the men boasted about their crime said to stop; this was a community of violence. The Cornell case rampaged the media but it is not long till the news outlets quiet down about it, and its even sooner that the next rape case broadcasts, and the next. This cycle of abuse is on a loop and is powered by colleges and institutions that ignore warning signs that transgress into crimes.
It is easy for us to claim these events are a foreign concept to us, but we all know Ireland isn’t a woman’s haven. When an assault is punished with less severity than the use of AI, we begin to doubt overall consideration for female safety. Earlier this year, students protested the alleged mistreatment of a UCD rape victim who, two years following the attack, became aware of a circulated photograph of her taken after the attack. Her assailant was not charged nor suspended. This is one of many rape and sexual assault cases in this country which reinstates the notion that rape is an alienated violent crime that is not treated with the same seriousness as any other. When a woman is murdered and there is photographic evidence of said murder, it is not a far fetched reality for the accused to be incarcerated, but when there is photographic evidence of a violent sexual assault, the concept of mere expulsion is apparently obscene. People humanise the accused, emphasising their sportsmanship or claiming they were raised wrong. They are somewhat protected by the media. The world becomes one large fraternity.
When sexual assault is treated differently to other violent crimes, perpetrators walk right into dignified jobs which allow them to abuse their power. This is why use of vocabulary and protocol is extremely important when dealing with such cases. The Trinity Dignity Respect and Consent Policy is well intended but minimises the crime of rape by decorating protocols with passive vocabulary. It outlines that nonconsensual sexual conduct ‘may amount to criminal offence’ instead of promising all possible prosecution. It claims that no student should suffer under victimisation, that no student should feel worse after reporting an assault, yet this is a reality that is seemingly not upheld by institutions and universities globally. Consent is an important topic of conversation, but documents like these create the illusion that a sexual assault is the same as inappropriate commentary, something that can be healed through a mediation service. It belittles the crime and the victim. It shrinks the severity of the crime when it is imperative that sexual crimes are regarded with utmost seriousness in these institutions.
Fraternity means brotherhood; wouldn’t you call out your family? Silence is violence. Just because you are a passive abuser does not mean the latter adjective does not apply. Just because you don’t add a comment when your best mate on the football team makes a gross sexual remark about a woman does not mean you are an exception to the system — you uphold it. Whether it is an under 16s GAA team, an over 21s rugby squad or a men’s debating team, we cannot pinpoint exactly when sexism brews in male groups. What we can do is intervene when we first spot it. What we can do is end it before it begins.
