Rape culture and the ordinary men who sustain it

The allegations surrounding a Cornell University fraternity house offer a disturbing entry point into a much larger problem. A former student has alleged that she was sexually assaulted by multiple members of the university’s Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2024. Her lawsuit describes a night during which at least seven male students sexually assaulted her, while messages in a group chat titled “Chi Phi Actives” discussed the incident as it was happening. One message asked whether the “shop” was still open, followed by a response that it was.

The significance of the Cornell case lies beyond the question of what ultimately happened at the frat house. The more difficult question is what happens around sexual violence before, during, and after an act takes place. How does a group of people become sufficiently accustomed to degrading behaviour that intervention fails to occur? How does a social environment turn something that should provoke immediate alarm into something that can be discussed casually, privately, and collectively?

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Sexual violence is not confined to the individual who commits it. It exists within social environments, and those environments can either make harmful behaviour harder to carry out or easier to normalise.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that nearly one in three women worldwide has experienced physical and/or sexual violence during their lifetime. These numbers span countries, cultures, economic classes, and educational backgrounds. Sexual violence therefore cannot reasonably be understood only as the behaviour of an abnormal fringe. Its persistence at this scale points to social conditions that repeatedly allow it to occur. One of those conditions is the behaviour of everyone surrounding the perpetrator.

Sexual violence can become easier to commit when friends excuse predatory behaviour, peers treat sexual humiliation as entertainment, or when people who witness something disturbing decide that intervening would create an uncomfortable social situation. None of these behaviours carries the same responsibility as committing the assault. But, together, they create an environment in which assault can take place and remain unchallenged.

This is what many term “rape culture,” which describes social attitudes and behaviours that normalise, excuse, or minimise sexual violence. It can appear in jokes, conversations, peer pressure, victim-blaming, institutional responses, and the informal rules governing social groups. Most importantly, rape culture can operate without people consciously identifying themselves as participants in it. A person can consider himself completely opposed to rape while laughing at a sexually degrading joke, remaining silent when a friend behaves coercively, or dismissing another person’s discomfort because confronting it would make the group uncomfortable. This contradiction is particularly important when considering spaces populated by highly educated young men.

Cornell University, for instance, attracts students who have demonstrated extraordinary academic ability. Yet, academic intelligence offers no default protection against moral conformity. Someone can be extraordinarily capable of solving complex mathematical, scientific, or economic problems while still accepting the social norms of the people around him. The traditionally “masculine” setting of a fraternity house adds another layer to this, as groups can fundamentally alter individual behaviour. A person who might recognise that something is wrong in private may fall silent if speaking up comes with the risks of embarrassment, exclusion, or ridicule. This is especially relevant in environments where masculinity is closely associated with sexual experience, dominance, competition, and loyalty to male peers. When maintaining one’s position within a group becomes more important than challenging the group’s behaviour, silence becomes socially convenient.

There is a tendency to divide people into perpetrators and everyone else, as though every person who did not commit the assault occupies the same moral category. Reality is a little more nuanced. Someone who actively assists an assault is different from someone who watches it happen, and both are different from someone who hears about it afterwards. Yet, the common thread is that the behaviour of people surrounding an incident can influence whether harmful conduct is challenged or reinforced.

The Cornell allegations are disturbing partly because of the number of people (57 male students) allegedly connected to the group chat. Their individual knowledge, involvement, and responsibility will have to be established through evidence, and membership in a group chat cannot itself establish that someone witnessed or participated in a crime. Yet the broader image remains significant: a large social network surrounding an alleged assault creates a question about collective responsibility that extends beyond the courtroom. If people can see degrading behaviour developing around them and repeatedly choose silence, it becomes part of the environment in which such behaviour can continue.

Ultimately, male responsibility has to become broader than criminal responsibility. That is, men do not need to be guilty of a crime to have a responsibility to challenge the culture around them. They should question the language used by their friends, intervene when someone is clearly vulnerable, refuse to participate in degrading conversations, and make it socially difficult for predatory behaviour to be treated as normal.

Men play a critical role in determining what happens among themselves, particularly in private spaces where women may not be present to challenge what is being said or done regarding them. Not all men are criminals. But all men have a choice in terms of whether they will make the social world around them more or less tolerant of predatory behaviour.

Maisha Islam Monamee is a contributor to The Daily Star.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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