When a sexual assault took place on the property of a fraternity’s University of Maine chapter in 2010, did the fraternity’s international parent organization bear any responsibility for the crime?
That’s a question pending before the justices of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court right now as they consider the case of a sexual assault victim who is seeking to hold Delta Tau Delta Fraternity Inc., the international organization with a chapter at the University of Maine, liable for the 2010 sexual assault.
Legally, this case could be an uphill battle for the sexual assault victim given that the Indiana Supreme Court in two cases over the past year has released two parent fraternity organizations — including Delta Tau Delta, but not the local chapters — from liability in alleged hazing incidents at Wabash College. But there’s at least one question related to the assault that should be settled: The victim is not at fault for her own sexual assault.
During oral arguments before the court Wednesday, Justice Donald Alexander noted that fraternity houses carry distinct reputations as spots with raucous parties and excessive drinking. He asked the attorney representing the sexual assault victim: “Doesn’t your client assume some assumption of risk?”
When a female college student attends a frat party, she might assume some risk of witnessing raucous behavior. She might assume some risk of being pressured into consuming more JELL-O shots than she desires. And, yes, due to the presence of alcohol, she might assume an elevated risk of being forced into a precarious sexual situation.
But it’s important to rule out the next logical leap from such a statement — that she bears some blame for being sexually assaulted because she was in a situation that made it more likely she would be the victim of such an assault.
Sexual assault is never the fault of the victim. No matter the situation — a young woman in college attending a frat party, a woman wearing a short skirt, a woman attending a get-together at a friend’s home — a woman has the basic right to expect she will not be sexually violated.
Of course, there’s no denying the role alcohol plays in sexual assault. Research has consistently found that, in about a half of sexual assault cases, the perpetrator has been drinking, the victim has been drinking, or both have. That said, the other half of sexual assaults, by extension, don’t involve alcohol, and nowhere near all occasions with alcohol involve sexual assault. Alcohol is not responsible for sexual assault. The perpetrator always is.
Alexander, during Maine Supreme Judicial Court arguments, didn’t necessarily ask a preposterous question. (He asked about an “assumption of risk,” not an assumption of liability.) But the question, ultimately, is wholly irrelevant to the case at hand.
The sexual assault victim is asking the court to settle the question of whether an international fraternity shares some responsibility for what happened to her at the fraternity’s University of Maine chapter. The case does not hinge on the level of risk to which the victim was subjected or of which she was aware.
That an assault happened under circumstances in which it was more likely to happen doesn’t make the perpetrator — or the fraternity’s parent organization, depending on the findings of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court — any less guilty of the offense.
