Content warning: This story discusses sexual assault at length. If you need to talk to someone, RAINN’s 24-hour National Sexual Assault Hotline can be reached at 1-800-656-4673.
Most people are surprised to learn that Kenyon, the small liberal arts college where I went to school, has Greek life. But it does—there are presently four active fraternities and four active sororities on campus—and I went to frat parties regularly my freshman year, as seduced by the unlimited alcohol as any other former high-school wallflower. As a sophomore, I made fewer appearances—and they were mainly to steal the frats’ pizza—but by my junior year, I wasn’t going at all.
This wasn’t only because the thrill of sticky surfaces and red-faced poli-sci majors had faded, but because I trained to become a Sexual Misconduct Advisor at the start of that year, soon learning that the overwhelming majority of assaults, rapes, and other boundary-crossing situations that people would call our anonymous, student-run hotline to discuss took place in fraternities.
Do frats, and the men who join them, have a monopoly on predatory behavior on campus? Absolutely not. But a 2007 study found that frat brothers are three times more likely to rape than other male students; and in a 2025 survey at Cornell University—where seven fraternity brothers have been accused of drugging and gang-raping a 20-year-old student (and sorority member herself) in 2024—roughly one in three women reported experiencing sexual assault during their time at the school.
All this raises a familiar question: How much more data do we need before universities and colleges begin to seriously explore banning fraternities altogether? (Some institutions, like Amherst, Williams, and Middlebury, took that step long ago.) I’ve been an 18-year-old shivering outside a frat house in high heels and an insufficient coat, waiting eagerly to enter a space where the odds of reemerging entirely unharmed were not, and never would be, in my favor—though I was one of the lucky ones. I’ve also been a college senior talking to 18-year-olds who waited in the same frat-party lines and weren’t so lucky.
Yes, of course: #notallmen and #notallfratguys. I wish every young pledge could be trusted to make sure a too-drunk girl got home safely, as a group from Delta Kappa Epsilon once did for me when I overserved myself at a champagne formal. When I hear the letters DKE, though, I don’t think about that small act of care, or about my former DKE-brother friend who has devoted his adult life to working for deeply worthy causes. I think instead about the DKEs at Yale who were made to chant “No means yes, yes means anal” in 2010. And sexual assault isn’t the only danger fomented by Greek life. When I hear the words “pledge week,” I don’t picture good-natured bonding through stupid challenges; I think of the 18-year-old Northern Arizona University student found dead earlier this year after a Delta Tau Delta fraternity rush event.
