After an investigation by the administration, UPenn decided to revoke recognition of the fraternity. They felt there was enough evidence to warrant a campus death penalty. Indeed, the administration was so concerned by what they found that they considered individual internal punishment for the students involved.
However, they did not go to the police. They did not have the fraternity members who were accused of the gang rape arrested. This happened during a period of time where there was an upswing in the reported gang rapes on college campuses and elsewhere.
In the New York Times in 1983, a lawyer who was a member of the New York Family Violence Board wrote about how the law dealt with rapes where the victim was drunk or drugged (and with the assumption that the crime involved a man raping a woman), "When lack of consent is based on physical incapacity, mental incapacity or mental defect, the male can win acquittal by proving that he was unaware of the victim's incapacity to consent." This led to many men being found innocent by pleading they were unaware. And, in New York, the previous sexual history of the victim could be used in court, with defense attorneys often aggressively questioning women on the stand.
Even in 1987, "in courtrooms nationwide, many women still find that their legal claims and credibility or character are being judged on the basis of factors that seem to many legal experts and feminists to be antiquated, irrelevant and prejudicial: the company they keep, their sexual mores and how they walk, talk, dress and handle their emotions." When it came to date rape, a sex crimes prosecutor said, "Little things work against [the victim], like the fact that she invited the guy in for a cup of coffee or for a nightcap, or even went to his place. There is then the presumption that she wouldn't be there unless it was a sexual encounter.''
The same thing went if a woman went to a party where there was heavy drinking and drug use. And that's not getting into the horror of laws that essentially allowed a man to get away with raping his wife.
No, obviously, rape was not just a problem in the 1980s. But something was going on in the 1980s, and that was that women were coming out of the battles for equality in the 1960s and 1970s to assert a place in American society that upended the gender hierarchy. For instance, between 1970 and 1988, the proportion of young women attending college went from 26.3 percent to 36.8 percent.
Susan Faludi's classic book Backlash traced how the media and politicians, including President Ronald Reagan, reacted against the feminist movement's successes. I'm not saying that movies like Porky's (one of the top-grossing films of 1982) caused anyone to rape or sexually assault a woman. But I am saying that the message of the time was that men were being emasculated by the feminist movement and needed to assert dominance (and many, many men thought this was utter garbage). Now when we hear incels and MRAs say these kinds of things, it's laughable. It was mainstream in the 1980s.
I was there in the 1980s, a young man coming of age. I went for a short period to an elite college, Tulane, with the privileged sons of privileged families. I heard stories about assaults and rapes of incapacitated women, all of which were presented as if "she was asking for it." I don't want to make this about me, but, as someone whose hero was Alan Alda, who actively campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, I thought it was all disgusting. And it was one of the major reasons I left Tulane. I had amazing friends and professors who changed my life, but I couldn't stand the coked-up, pampered jerks who debased anyone not like them, including my roommate, who was a member of the fraternity banned from campus, the DKE, same as Brett Kavanaugh up at Yale during the same time.
You can't understand the Kavanaugh allegations unless you understand the way rape and sexual assault was still dealt with and thought of then. Let me explain this with an example.
In 1981, in the TV sitcom Facts of Life, one of the high school girls, Natalie, is attacked and almost raped on her way home from a costume party. Her PTSD from the event is played for laughs, as she refuses to go outside from fear. Offered tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert, Natalie at first is excited and then says, "Sorry, I can't go. I just remembered that I'm no longer allowing myself to experience joy or laughter." The laugh track surged.
She is eventually convinced to go to a self-defense class, where the instructor, a male, accuses Natalie of having brought on the attack herself. He asks her, "Was it night time when the attack happened?" and "Did you ask someone to walk with you?" and "Did you stick to a well lighted path?" and "Were you carrying a purse?" before showing her all the things in her purse she should have used as weapons. Natalie concludes that she should have left the party by herself and she should have done more to defend herself.
In 1981, in one of the most popular shows on TV, the message was that women were to blame for their sexual assault.
