Fraternity Gang Rape
Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus
This widely acclaimed and meticulously documented volume illustrates, in painstaking and disturbing detail, the nature of fraternity gang rape. Drawing on interviews with both victims and fraternity members, Peggy Reeves Sanday reconstructs daily life in the fraternity, highlighting the role played by pornography, male bonding, and degrading, often grotesque, initiation and hazing rituals.
In a substantial new introduction and afterword, Sanday updates the incidences of fraternity gang rape on college campuses today, highlighting such recent cases as that of Duke University and others in the headlines. Sanday also explores the nature of hazing at sororities on campus and how Greek life in general contributes to a culture which promotes the exploitation and sexual degradation of women on campus. More broadly, Sanday examines the nature of campus life today and the possibility of creating a rape-free campus culture.
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Reviews
"A classic. Fraternity Gang Rape is a fascinating analysis of how all-male groups such as fraternities or athletic teams may create a rape culture where behavior occurs that few individuals acting alone would perpetrate. The new introduction and afterword shed light on how this pernicious problem continues today, insightfully illuminating the complicity of society in the failure of accountability for acquaintance rape." ~ Mary P. Koss,co-editor of No Safe Haven
"Powerfully moving and analytically provocative. . . . If the college or university at which AJS readers teach has a fraternity or sorority system, this book will be useful in understanding the way those organizations not only construct the gender relations between women and men on campus but also provide a map of male domination that members can take with them for the rest of their lives." ~ Michael S. Kimmel, American Journal of Sociology
"A powerful and important book." ~ Contemporary Psychology
"Sanday draws a chilling picture of fraternity society, its debasement of women and the way it creates a looking-glass world in which gang rape can be considered normal behavior and the pressure of group-think it powerful." ~ The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Full of insights . . . an important contribution . . . written in accessible prose and ideal for course use." ~ Women's Review of Books
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