Analysis On Fraternities And Rape On Campus

The first main sociological question in the "Fraternities and Rape on Campus" study performed by Patricia Yancey Martin and Robert A. Hummer was, "What characteristics do fraternities have that make them prone to objectification of women and more likely to commit gang rape on college campuses and why fraternities encourage the sexual coercion of women.

According to Martin and Hummer (1989: 459), "fraternities are vitally concerned - more than anything else - with masculinity (cf. Kanin 1967)." This sets the paradigm that they will look into. The paradigm they look from is the eyes of a fraternity's typically nature and values and actions they take part in to decipher what really takes place in order to understand the fraternity's view as the ideal brother. It helps the reader understand how the fraternity culture differs from mainstream culture. The paradigm is expanded by also talking to sororities, non-Greeks, administration and alumni. Martin and Hummer lay out the social constructs of fraternities to help shape the study.

Martin and Hummer's study is using the inductive path of knowledge. They took observations and general ideas such as the concept of fraternity members committing gang rape. After "an alleged gang rape at Florida State University," and allowed them to build an empirical generalization based on the incident by looking at and analyzing newspaper articles about the case. According to Martin and Hummer (1989: 459) also were able to gather more observations by talking to Greek students, non-Green students, university administration and alumni who advise.

After they gathered information about fraternities, they put a social construct behind it. They were able to put the "Social Construct of Men and Masculinity" with the observations they collected from the interviews with their subjects. Fraternities, according to Martin and Hummer (1989: 459-460) tend to value men who "stresses competition, athleticism, dominance, winning, conflict, wealth, material passions, willingness to drink alcohol and sexual prowess vis-Ðo-vis women." Reporting the findings allowed Martin and Hummer to place a set of core values associated with the fraternity, and find theories and constructs to go with it to help further develop understanding. They also looked at the types of values that fraternities look down upon including: "'wimpishness', effeminacy, and homosexuality."

By establishing a set core of values, they were able to further in developing a closer hypothesis on why fraternities are more likely to view women as a commodity. By that Martin and Hummer (1989: 463) mean that "fraternities use women for their benefit, as bait for new members, servers of brother's needs, and as sexual prey." This is a pattern they saw in fraternities that added to their idea that fraternities are more likely to commit acts that could lead to gang rape. They also noticed a pattern of cohesiveness among fraternities.

Martin and Hummer also discovered that "secrecy is a priority value and practice in fraternities, partly because full-fledged membership is premised on it. Secrecy is also a boundary-maintaining mechanism, demarcating i-group from out-group, us from them.". According to their study (1989: 461), "loyalty is a fraternity preoccupation" and that "members are