Trigger Warning: This article mentions sexual assault.
At the first Old K party I went to, an all-campus, I sauntered up to the counter, where the hosts were serving beer, with the Xs on my hands fully visible. I wanted to pretend I was bolder than I really felt; like most freshmen I’ve met here, I’ll admit I don’t have a lot of experience with alcohol.
“Under?” the girl pouring asked me in a tone of obligation and vague apathy. I nodded. “Drink it fast,” she said. “And put it down, doesn’t matter where, if Campo shows up.”
In the corner near the trash cans, directly next to the bar, two or three other freshmen girls stood with beers in their hands. They looked, above anything else, paranoid. After a long, awkward moment in which we made eye contact, the smallest of the three tipped her head back and downed the entire solo cup.
“They can’t catch you with beer if you chug it,” she said, “and, anyway, I want to get back and dance.” From what I’ve seen, this isn’t an uncommon mentality. The fear that at any moment Campus Safety might show up, catch you red-handed with a cup of cheap Keystone, and kick you out is real if you’re an anxious, perfectionist first-year (and, especially if you’re an anxious, perfectionist, first-year girl). The easy solution is to never hold a beer in your hand for more than .5 seconds.
This is a problem. Campus Safety, the organization on campus that exists to keep students safe, places some of the most vulnerable students here into more compromising situations than they would’ve gotten into otherwise. Unlike sipping a drink offhandedly for an hour—which, in full honesty, will definitely have a much higher probability of ending in a Campus Safety interrogation and eviction than the alternative—chugging beer can get one drunk much faster and much more heavily, and for lightweight first-years with limited experience, this can be truly dangerous.
Statistically, the beginning of the fall semester until roughly Thanksgiving break is the most high-risk of any period in the year concerning sexual assault, so much so that it’s earned the nickname of “the Red Zone.” According to one study conducted at CU Boulder, more than 70% of the sexual assaults that occur on college campuses in any given year happen during this Red Zone period, and more than 65% of those assaults happen to first-year students. It’s well-known that situations involving drinking, especially high-risk drinking, cause the rates of sexual misconduct and abuse to skyrocket. The fact, then, that Campus Safety inadvertently pressures this already vulnerable group of uncertain freshmen girls into binge drinking, even if it’s in an effort to protect them, needs to be changed. Instead of discouraging underage drinking or encouraging safer underage drinking, Campus Safety’s party raids increase the likelihood of a much more dangerous phenomenon than mere underage drinking: assault and rape.
I won’t pretend I’m an expert, and I don’t know what alternative could be proposed to Campus Safety instead of their current policy. I do, however, know that I’ve seen this trend commonly and consistently at the parties I’ve attended and that it’s not okay.