Jane Doe (Jane Doe is not the actual name of the victim, but is used in place of it to ensure her safety) draws her third cigarette from the box of Marlboro cigarettes on the table between us. The box looks light.
“Hope you don’t mind (if I smoke),” she had texted me before I arrived at Maude’s Classic Cafe for our interview. “Had a rough day.”
Jane has endured more than her fair share of rough days. During high school, a year into her first serious relationship, her boyfriend raped her. She woke up to find him inside of her, thrusting away at her limp body without her consent. Disoriented, she informed him she had been asleep and emphasized what he had done was rape.
“What are you going to do,” she recalls him saying, “Call the police?”
Their relationship spiraled downward after that. There was emotional and physical abuse, forced oral sex that ended abruptly in episodes of vomiting and tears. When Jane finally mustered the courage to end things before starting college at UF, he threatened to kill himself and on one occasion cryptically suggested murder.
College was supposed to be a place to renew, but the trauma clung to her like a wet cloth. She self-medicated with drugs and alcohol and self-harmed when those weren’t enough. The Counseling & Wellness Center helped, but understaffing meant infrequent visits. Above all else, her wounds needed time to heal.
College should have provided that time, but Jane would soon learn UF’s rigorous admissions process was a poor filter for the sexually abusive.
One night, she and some friends decided to hang out at a UF fraternity. It got late, and her friends left one by one, until she was alone. A brother she knew well, to whom she had opened up about her history of assault, offered to let her sleep in his room rather than pay for an Uber home. She was tired but skeptical.
“I really don’t want to have sex,” she remembers messaging back.
He said that was fine, and she could just sleep, but she was insistent, saying, “I want to be clear. I don’t want to have sex with you.” Again, he said that was OK.
As soon as she entered his room, though, he began kissing her. Again, she pressed her point saying, “I don’t want to have sex.” He began to undress her when she said, “I told you, I don’t want to have sex.” Regardless, he continued.
Frightened, exhausted and incredulous that someone with knowledge of her trauma could so flagrantly violate her trust, Jane relented. He raped her.
Sadly, in my ongoing investigation into sexual assaults and fraternity culture at UF, Jane’s story is commonplace, emblematic of a systemic problem fraternities, UF and society have done too little to address.
According to a The Tab UF investigation published in September, 33 percent of all reported sexual assaults on campus occur at fraternity houses, excluding unreported assaults (of which a Washington Post analysis of UF suggests there are many) and assaults reported from off-campus fraternity houses, the dorms and apartments of fraternity members and UF Health Shands Hospital.
Whether for presence of alcohol, increased social and sexual interactions or some other factor, fraternities seem to be hotbeds for sexual misconduct, despite providing a perfect opportunity for vast, mandatory group education as tight-knit organizations accountable to university standards.
So what are we doing wrong?
A representative from UF Greek Affairs office told me every Greek-affiliated student must take a sexual assault education module, but in my interviews with fraternity members, its effects barely register.
“I don’t think there’s anything. At least that I remember,” Pi Lamda Phi Fraternity brother Jared Blinderman told me via text in response to whether he received any sexual assault education in his fraternity.
This module is administered once to each member over a four year period, and re-emphasized only once each semester during a risk education event given in compliance with UF Greek standards. The content and medium of that event varies by fraternity.
To Jane, this just doesn’t go far enough to paint a clear picture of consent for these men.
“The thing is, it’s their world view,” she said with the tacit knowledge of experience. “How is one seminar going to change a guy’s world view?”
Champe Barton is a UF economics and psychology senior. His column appears on Fridays.
