EDIT: The Wrong Solution

Scroll through just about any social media website right now and you’ll find picture after picture of girls wearing their new Greek letters. It’s sorority bid season at most colleges that do spring recruitment, and the new sorority women are, of course, excited to show off their letters.

But it is not all fun and games. Recently, sexual assault on campus has been thrust into the spotlight, and it has been shown that sexual assault is most likely to happen at the residences of sorority women’s counterparts: fraternity houses.

A study done in 2007 that was financed by the U.S. Department of Justice shows that women who frequent fraternity parties are more likely to be sexually assaulted than those who do not. Other studies have shown that men in fraternities are more likely to have committed rape than non-Greek men. It’s a scary climate if you are a woman, fostered by the heavy drinking done at these parties, women’s unfamiliarity in their environment, and, of course, the power imbalance that is created when men host a party on their own turf.

In an article published Jan. 19, Martha McKinnon, a University of Michigan sophomore and member of the Delta Gamma sorority, told The New York Times about the unequal gender relations at these parties.

“It pushes us into the fraternities,” she said. “The whole social scene is embedded in the fraternity house, and it makes us dependent on them. I find this a dangerous scenario.”

While of course students have options of what to do on the weekends, at most schools, fraternity parties rule the weekend night scene. Many college students are under 21, and the free alcohol offered at fraternity parties does not discriminate with age.

Ashley Alessandra, a freshman at the George Washington University, confirmed this.

“It’s what we know,” she told the Times. “We go to a frat.”

Although Rolling Stone’s article about “Jackie,” the student who told the magazine she was gang-raped at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the University of Virginia, was discredited, the article reignited the necessary conversation about sexual assault at fraternity houses. At UVA, fraternities have set new limits on how they serve alcohol, including requiring at least one member to be sober during parties and disallowing the ever-popular punch.

While this is certainly a step in the right direction, it is not enough. Some have advocated lowering the drinking age so that there would be more variety as to where and how college students drink. Others including Antonia Abbey, a professor at Wayne State University, say that sexual assaults are not unique to fraternity parties, and that universities should crack down on all drinking, regardless of venue.

But one very different solution has been gaining traction: why not allow sororities to have parties at their own houses?

Simple answer: they can’t. There is a ban on having alcohol in sorority houses, due to a policy instated by each of the 26 National Panhellenic Conference sororities to preserve a more placid living environment with lower insurance premiums. Sororities pay less on insurance than fraternities do, and accidents involving alcohol are a factor that accounts for that disparity.

Julie Johnson, an officer at the National Panhellenic Conference told the Times the ban is in place to ensure women’s safety and comply with drinking-age laws. And Kyle Pendleton, the director of harm reduction and education for Zeta Tau Alpha, told the Times that because sorority houses tend to be less conducive to hosting large numbers of people, sororities are more likely and better suited to hold events with alcohol at outside venues with trained bartenders, proper security measures and liability insurance.

But if the ban is ever to be lifted, there could be great benefits. Allowing alcohol in sorority houses would give women, not just members of the sorority, an option to attend a Greek party that women control. It’s a sentiment that is echoed by many women, including Dania Roach, a senior at George Washington.

“I would definitely feel safer at a sorority party,” she told the Times. “It’s the home-court advantage.”

However, maybe this is a misguided attempt to change things. Sexual assaults in Greek life are not going to stop until attitudes toward rape culture change. Sexism in Greek life and college in general is a huge problem, and there are so many things that schools could be doing to curtail this, through education or providing resources — and this isn’t really one of them.

There is a warped sense of power that fraternity men have when they let women into their house for a party. Sororities’ being able to have alcohol does shift the power and change the dynamic, but the problem is bigger than this.

Should sororities be able to have alcohol in their houses? Yes, because it will foster equality, but not because it will eradicate the problem of sexual assault on campus.