sexual assault on campus resposne - Rachel Mabie Written Portion on the Armstrong 2009 reading Sexual Assault on Campus Armstrong Elizabeth 2009 Sexual

Rachel Mabie Written Portion on the Armstrong 2009 reading: “Sexual Assault on Campus” Armstrong, Elizabeth. 2009. Sexual Assault on Campus: A Multilevel, Integrated Approach to Party Rape. New York, NY: McGraw Hill. 1. Central Arguments/Ideas: A. Identify and summarize key themes and ideas advanced in the reading. This articles explains why colleges and universities are dangerous places for women in regards to sexual assault. It attempts to answer this question through data and specific instances on college campuses. Throughout the reading, Armstrong actually identifies how individual, organizational, and interactional forces on college campuses lead to sexual assault. These forces are what help explain the ways in which sexual assault happens often as a result of our gendered society. These three forces combined are how we explain sexual assault in these college settings. Alcohol is a topic that is very prominent in the college setting, making the circumstances and responses to sexual assault often times different than instances of sexual assault that do not take place on campus. B. How and why are these relevant issues? The focus of “Sexual Assault on Campus” pinpoints and elaborates on topics that pertain to our generation and all of us that are currently in college. This article is extremely important and discusses the reasons behind many instances of sexual assault that many of us here at Denison have heard of or even experienced. How this is a socially relevant issue: the article addresses current problems that people of our generation, especially in college, need to be educated on to understand the patterns and routines of sexual assault. Why this is a relevant issue: People are unaware of the circumstances of sexual assault on campus, especially with regards to the extremely gendered circumstances of the college social scene. 2. Competing Perspectives A. Identify and describe the perspectives on the central issues presented in the reading. This article is very constructionalist, saying that the way that college is structured throughout the country, and the current ways that college students party create specific instances and circumstances that lead to sexual assault. While this article speaks mostly about the women that are socially inscribed into organizations that involved Greek life with homogeneous student bodies, other types of colleges do exist around the country, providing different perspectives (non-Greek schools; schools with more diversity). An important perspective that was not addressed in the reading is the levels of sexual assault at colleges that are not in the US, for those universities differ in social structure because most do not have Greek life, generating different gender patterns and different social scenes. The three levels that lend to sexual assault are different perspectives that all come together to identify how Armstrong makes a very constructionist argument.