Frat Suggests Taking Feminist Students on a "Raping Trip"
This year, the American fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon chartered its first "colony" in the U.K. at Edinburgh University. The American frat bros brought much across the pond to their Scottish brothers: "dignity," "honor," stories about famed DKE George W. Bush, and rape jokes.
The Edinburgh student paper, The Student, obtained the official minutes from DKE meetings over the last year and published snippets of them this week. Apparently, DKE bros were so proud of the jokes they made about raping "feminists" that they actually wrote them into the minutes. The Student reports:
A DKE-AS meeting on 4 March 2014 discussed "Feminists" as a full agenda item; the other two agenda items were "Matters from the eBoard" and "Any other business." According to the minutes, during discussion of the "Feminists" agenda item, a member of the fraternity suggested organising a game of paintball between DKE-AS and FemSoc [the student feminist society] to "calm the waters." When the ex-president vetoed the proposal, the proposer responded: "How are we going to rape them?"
A second member then said: "Let's go to Montenegro, for a raping trip."
A member of the fraternity also joked that a female EUSA [the student association] official had raped his friend in Palm Beach, Florida. Another member responded: "She didn't need a strap-on!"
Good stuff, you should write it down.
While frat bros joking about rape is far from surprising—DKE's chapter at Yale was responsible for that hilarious "No means yes, yes means anal" chant—according to The Student, Edinburgh DKEs were allegedly putting together a program to take advantage of drunk women. The paper reports:
A source within the fraternity told The Student that members had also discussed planning and rolling out a free "service" called "Phone a Deke," whereby women not wishing to walk home unaccompanied following nights out could enlist a DKE-AS member to walk them home. According to the source, members joked about taking advantage of the women, some of whom would be intoxicated and vulnerable following a night of alcohol consumption. These alleged conversations are not recorded in the minutes.
No disciplinary action has been taken against DKE yet, but a University spokesman told the Huffington Post, "We are treating this matter extremely seriously."
FemSoc condemned the jokes recorded in DKE's minutes in a Facebook post:
FemSoc condemns in the strongest terms the abhorrent misogynistic and transphobic behaviour and statements made by the DKE frat. We hope the university will join us in standing up against sexism and take disciplinary action against students involved in the frat. ...
The fact that this type of behaviour is acceptable to a group of students, and that it was even recorded in official minutes, is a clear example of how rampant sexism and misogyny exists in our everyday surroundings, and we must fight it.
[Campus photo via The Student]