There are renewed calls to ask a question American colleges have heard before: Why not get rid of fraternities?The question is back amid the uproa
There are renewed calls to ask a question American colleges have heard before: Why not get rid of fraternities?
The question is back amid the uproar at Cornell over allegations that a female student was drugged and gang-raped at a Chi Phi fraternity house in 2024. The allegations are being litigated and investigated; no criminal charges had been filed as of early October 2026. Cornell shut down the chapter, students have protested, and the university has commissioned an independent review of its handling of sexual misconduct.
Calls to abolish fraternities are not new. Dartmouth’s own historical archive documents repeated efforts between 1978 and 2000 to abolish its fraternity system. A 1994 petition specifically cited sexual assault and intimidation of minorities among the reasons. The fraternities survived those campaigns.
Now watch what happens when the conversation moves from telling women how to stay safe to restricting an environment controlled largely by men.
Suddenly restriction itself becomes the problem.
1. 🏠 “You can’t just get rid of fraternities.”
Why not examine that possibility?
That isn’t the same as saying every fraternity member commits sexual violence. It is asking whether institutions associated with recurring harms should be structurally changed, restricted, suspended or, if reforms continually fail, eliminated.
Cornell has been reforming fraternity life for years. Previous measures included restrictions on hard liquor, live-in advisers and anti-hazing rules. Yet serious misconduct has continued to surface.
Meanwhile, federal research has identified frequent attendance at fraternity parties as a risk factor associated with incapacitated sexual assault among college women.
So asking whether fraternity houses themselves belong in a prevention conversation is hardly an irrational leap.
2. 🚶🏾♀️ Women have already been restricted
We just gave women’s restrictions nicer names.
Safety advice.
Precautions.
Being careful.
Using common sense.
Look at what the federal Office on Women’s Health tells female college students in its campus sexual-assault safety guidance: go to parties with friends, arrive and leave together, meet new people in public, monitor alcohol intake, maintain control of your drink, remain aware of your surroundings, avoid headphones while walking alone, stay in lighted areas at night, arrange escorts and have a plan for getting home. The same guidance correctly states that responsibility for assault belongs to the person committing it.
Read that list again as a description of freedom.
Women are being taught how much planning is necessary to move through environments where somebody might sexually assault them.
3. 🌙 Women restrict where we go at night
Don’t walk there alone.
Don’t take that shortcut.
Stay in the light.
Call campus security for an escort.
Wait for somebody to walk with you.
There is a strange linguistic magic that happens here.
When a woman avoids part of her own campus because she fears male violence, society calls that safety.
If somebody proposes restricting male access to a particular environment in order to improve women’s safety, suddenly we recognize the loss of freedom.
Women lost freedom too. We simply became accustomed to it.
4. 🍹 Women restrict what we drink
Watch your drink.
Don’t leave it unattended.
Don’t accept a drink you didn’t see prepared.
Know how much you have consumed.
Women pass these instructions from woman to woman because drink tampering and incapacitated sexual assault are real.
Federal campus guidance includes keeping control of one’s drink and monitoring alcohol consumption.
Again, the woman becomes the security system.
5. 🎉 Women restrict where we socialize
Go with friends.
Stay with friends.
Leave with friends.
Don’t go upstairs.
Don’t get separated.
Don’t stay after everyone else leaves.
Don’t go to that party.
The National Institute of Justice’s campus research found that more than half of the sexual assaults examined occurred on weekends, more than half occurred between midnight and 6 a.m., and frequent fraternity-party attendance was associated with incapacitated sexual assault.
Yet one of our most familiar responses remains:
Women, modify your participation.
6. 👭🏾 Women organize ourselves into informal security teams
Women have developed our own infrastructure.
Text me when you get home.
Share your location.
Watch my drink.
Come to the bathroom with me.
Don’t let me leave with him.
Call me so I can pretend there is an emergency.
Women sometimes laugh about these rituals because they are so ordinary.
Underneath the humor is an extraordinary amount of unpaid safety labor.
7. 🚗 Women restrict how we travel
Women think about which parking garage to use.
Which train car feels safer.
Where to sit on the bus.
Whether the rideshare license plate matches.
Whether to tell someone the driver’s information.
Whether to travel alone at all.
Those calculations consume time, money and freedom.
They are restrictions.
8. 🇮🇳 And yes, India has used female-only transportation
The answer to your question is yes.
India has a long history of women-reserved transportation arrangements, and Delhi has recently expanded the idea rather than abandoning it.
In August 2026, Delhi rolled out 56 dedicated women-only electric bus services, including Ladies Special and University Ladies Special routes during morning and evening peak periods. The services also include women police personnel or Home Guards and panic buttons linked to the Delhi Police emergency system.
That is a fundamentally different intervention.
It does not tell a woman:
Stay home because travel is dangerous.
It says:
We will change the transportation environment so women can travel.
The distinction is enormous.
Women’s separation in that situation is being used to expand female mobility, not reduce it.
9. 🚌 Sometimes a female boundary gives women MORE freedom
This turns one common assumption upside down.
Separation does not automatically mean women have lost access.
Sometimes a female-only provision is precisely what allows women to participate.
A woman who will not board a crowded mixed-sex bus because she expects harassment may board a women-only bus.
A woman who avoids transportation after a certain hour may travel when she has a safer option.
A woman who avoids a facility because she cannot obtain privacy from males may use it when female privacy is restored.
A boundary can expand women’s world.
10. 🚫 But propose restricting males and listen to the language change
Now we hear about inconvenience.
Access.
Exclusion.
Fairness.
Collective punishment.
Whether every man presents a danger.
But women were never required to prove that every man would assault us before being told not to walk alone.
Women were never required to prove that every party contained a predator before being told to watch our drinks.
Women were never required to prove that every parking garage contained a rapist before being told to avoid one after dark.
Women’s restrictions have routinely been justified by possibility and risk.
Restrictions affecting males are often expected to survive an entirely different level of philosophical scrutiny.
11. ⚖️ “But most men don’t do this.”
Most women don’t get attacked every time they walk alone either.
Yet women are still advised to take precautions.
This is where the conversation repeatedly gets pulled away from women’s safety.
The question becomes whether restricting males would be unfair to males rather than whether a particular boundary would materially improve women’s safety.
Women have heard enough prevention strategies that begin with:
Women should…
We are allowed to ask what happens when the sentence begins somewhere else.
12. 🏫 Fraternity houses are an excellent test case
Nobody has to claim that every fraternity man is a rapist.
That is not how institutional risk assessment works.
If particular environments repeatedly generate concerns involving sexual assault, incapacitation, hazing, alcohol abuse or other serious harms, institutions can examine the environment, not merely wait for another identifiable Exception Man to emerge.
Research does not support reducing all campus sexual violence to fraternities. Sexual violence occurs outside Greek life as well. But fraternity-related environments have appeared repeatedly enough in the research that treating the setting as irrelevant would make little sense.
The prevention question becomes:
What would we change if women’s safety were the starting point rather than the limitation placed on every proposed solution?
13. 🔄 We keep restricting the potential victim instead of the environment
There is the pattern.
Danger after dark?
Women, stay inside.
Risk at parties?
Women, watch your drinks.
Risk walking alone?
Women, find an escort.
Risk while traveling?
Women, plan differently.
Risk in a particular social environment?
Women, don’t go there.
Then someone proposes:
Change the environment.
Restrict access.
Close the house.
Remove the organization.
Create a female-only option.
And suddenly restriction itself becomes morally alarming.
14. 🚨 Women should recognize this pattern when it appears again
Society has had generations of practice transferring the practical burden of male violence onto women.
That makes the transfer feel normal.
A new vocabulary does not change the underlying question.
A new theory about which particular males women should fear does not change it either.
Women should remain very cautious of any framework that promises safety by identifying a narrower category of dangerous males while simultaneously asking women to surrender more boundaries, privacy or freedom.
That is the Exception Man problem all over again:
Find the special kind of male responsible for violence.
Reassure everyone about the males outside the category.
Return to teaching women how to navigate the remaining danger.
No.
15. ✊🏾 Women have accommodated male violence long enough
We accommodated it when we changed our routes.
We accommodated it when we stopped walking alone.
We accommodated it when we held our drinks all night.
We accommodated it when we traveled in groups.
We accommodated it when we stopped wearing headphones.
We accommodated it when we paid for the cab instead of walking.
We accommodated it when we avoided the party.
We accommodated it when we stayed home.
We accommodated it when mothers gave daughters the same warnings their mothers gave them.
That burden has been so consistently placed on women that women’s lost freedom became almost invisible.
“For generations, society has responded to male violence by restricting women’s movement and calling it safety. Ask men to surrender some access for women’s safety, and suddenly everyone remembers that restrictions cost people something.”
Women already knew.
We have been paying the cost.
Women’s safety does not become less worthy of protection merely because protecting it occasionally requires something from men.
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