Protecting the Party

It was a typical Saturday night at the house on Park Street where the Union College men’s hockey team goes after games to unwind and party. Sébastien Gingras, a 6-foot-1 defenseman, noticed a classmate hovering around a young woman who looked unsteady.

Mr. Gingras watched them. “She was a freshman, and this was a guy from outside the team who had the reputation of trying to get girls when they were drunk,” he says. After a while, “the guy was sitting next to her on a couch, trying to get her to leave.” So Mr. Gingras, a junior, asked one of his teammates to call the guy over to distract him while Mr. Gingras checked the young woman’s ID and walked her back to her dorm.

Hanging out, drinking, and hooking up are for many students just a part of life in college. They’re also a common backdrop for sexual assault. As many as four in five campus assaults involve drinking, studies have found. Plenty of those cases hinge on whether a woman was drunk or incapacitated, and therefore unable to give consent.

Messages about preventing sexual assault now come at students from many directions: campus and federal officials, the news media, their peers. And what students are hearing has started to influence their behavior. They’re paying more attention, and they’re looking out for one another.

That’s precisely what President Obama’s new campaign, “It’s On Us,” is asking them to do: “to intervene if we see someone in a risky situation.” Union College, with 2,250 undergraduates, enlisted its popular hockey team, which won last year’s Division I national championship, to sign the campaign’s pledge and encourage others to take seriously the goal of protecting students.

People here think it’s working. “We’re hearing from more students concerned about what they are seeing or hearing,” says Amanda E. Tommell-Sandy, assistant director of the counseling center. “We are seeing more students sharing that they have intervened.”

Deciding when a friend is having fun and when it’s time to step in can be tricky. Students here and elsewhere are fumbling a bit in new roles—ordering a man talking with a tipsy woman to leave a party, or seeing a drunk couple together and calling campus security. “No college has all of the right solutions yet,” says Shayna Han, a senior at Union who helped start the college’s Committee on Consent Education and Awareness this year.

Players on the men’s hockey team at Union College, champion of the NCAA’s Division I, were among the first students on the campus to go through training on “bystander intervention.”

The idea on many campuses is that intervention, not drinking less, is the solution. None of the students The Chronicle spoke with talked about scaling back their own drinking to avoid becoming too aggressive or vulnerable. Administrators responsible for sexual-assault prevention feel that they can’t say much about alcohol, even though it is a common element in many incidents. If they counsel students to limit consumption, they fear, young women who drink and are assaulted will be blamed, and will blame themselves, perhaps not reporting the attacks.

By monitoring their friends—a practice many colleges now promote—students can watch for both threatening conduct and vulnerability to predators and opportunists. That way, students let one another drink to excess while lowering the risk of assault.

“I am the mom of my group,” explains Brianna, a sophomore here who asked that her last name not be used. “Last year I literally pulled my friend away from a guy because they were both too intoxicated.” Her friend appreciated her judgment, Brianna says. “She knew I was completely sober, so she trusted me.”

Wrenching stories of sexual assault have rocked many campuses in the past couple of years, sparking protests and scrutiny. Many alleged victims have filed federal complaints about the way their colleges handled their reports.

While Union hasn’t had a case go public—the college received five formal reports of sexual assault in 2013—the topic has provoked a lot of discussion.

Sydney Giller, a junior at Union College, talked with classmates on the men’s lacrosse team during a workshop by the student-led Committee on Consent Education and Awareness. One player said, “You should have consent before you go out and party and get drunk, instead of waking up the next day and regretting it.”

“I knew we had an opportunity with our hockey team,” says Jim McLaughlin, the athletic director. The team attended a half-day workshop in September on bystander intervention. Next in line are the women’s hockey team and the men’s and women’s basketball and swim teams.

“We are tough, bold women, and we would have the confidence to step into a bad situation,” says Christine Valente, captain of the women’s hockey team.

Athletes aren’t the only ones getting involved. Ms. Han and a few classmates formed their group to talk frankly about sexual consent. In November, members wrote slogans on men’s and women’s underwear and hung them outside the student center. “Ask before unwrapping” said a pair of panties. “I like butts,” someone wrote in pink marker on a men’s pair. “But … I ask before I touch.”

Organizers are holding workshops with sports teams, fraternities, and sororities. But they don’t preach or try to give students all the answers. On a recent Thursday evening, the men’s lacrosse team packed into a dorm’s common area, where the group’s presenters, all women, tried to draw the athletes out. What does consent mean? How does sexual assault affect men? How do stereotypes of masculinity play into the problem?

“You should have consent before you go out and party and get drunk, instead of waking up the next day and regretting it,” one player said. “As a team, I want to win a national championship,” offered another. “I don’t want another player going out and touching a woman who doesn’t want to be touched and undermining our success.” Every time someone spoke up, the women tossed out packets of Sweet Tarts or Reese’s Pieces.

After such presentations, students sometimes approach members of the consent group, says Ms. Han, to say they’ve been applying its lessons. “I was having sex,” a student might report, “and I asked for consent!”

Women at Union say they do two things to keep themselves and their friends safe from sexual assault. They never walk alone after dark, and they go to parties in groups. Some also bring their own alcohol—keeping their drinks covered and close at hand. Campus safety officers taught three self-defense classes this fall, and the Theta Delta Chi fraternity offered to buy women a new kind of nail polish that is supposed to change colors to detect the presence of common date-rape drugs.

Relatively few sexual assaults on college campuses, however, involve strangers, weapons, overwhelming physical force, or date-rape drugs, experts say. The most common substance consumed by victims is alcohol.

“There is this notion of the predator out there, and those people definitely exist,” says Steve Leavitt, dean of students at Union. “But we haven’t seen them in any of our judicial cases.” A more common scenario, he says, involves students drinking, and something going wrong.

Like many colleges, Union has tried to control the flow of alcohol. Under new rules this year, fraternity parties must serve bottled water. The familiar red Solo cups are banned—all beer must be distributed in cans—and Union limits the number of cans at each party. It is more difficult to slip something into a can than a cup, and the lack of cups restricts drinking games.

Students at Union College hang out near the “hockey house,” where players go after games to unwind and party.

Still, students can load up on alcohol before parties. Heavy drinking is common here, just as it is on many campuses. What has changed, students say, is how closely they watch out for their drunken friends.

At Sigma Chi, one of Union’s biggest fraternities, students party in the basement, with a big American flag painted on the wall and a beat-up wooden stage for the DJ. Brothers step in if a woman complains of aggressive behavior, says Ben Nadareski, the chapter’s president.

This year a female student accused a classmate looking to join Sigma Chi of offensive conduct after a night of partying (Mr. Nadareski declined to offer specifics). She reported the incident to her resident assistant, and the college disciplined the student. Because of privacy law, Union didn’t tell Sigma Chi about the violation, but the fraternity rejected the student as a brother, saying it didn’t want someone like that among its 90 members.

For the most part, women here say they feel safe at frat houses. Meghan, a senior who asked that her last name not be used, remembers being at a party last year without her closest friends. “I got really, really drunk,” she says.

A fraternity brother took her up to his bedroom, Meghan says, propped her up on her side in his bed, and locked the door so no one could bother her. “I woke up with a cup of water next to the bed,” she says, “and a text saying: ‘I’m in the chapter room downstairs. When you wake up, come and get me.’ ”

Meghan was grateful, she says. “I have a lot of somebodies around to help me.”

So when do friends step in for one another? The new emphasis on bystander intervention may be making some students a little overzealous.

Elizabeth Murad, a junior at Union, says one of her friends was drinking heavily at a party one night and made out with a guy they didn’t know well. “After a while I asked her, ‘Are you OK?’ ” says Ms. Murad. The friend said yes but added that she didn’t want things to go any further.

As Ms. Murad called her over to a group of girlfriends, a male classmate who had witnessed the interaction yelled at the young man. “He said the guy shouldn’t even be talking to her when she’s drunk,” says Ms. Murad. “It’s good he was looking out for her, but she can do what she wants. He was being out of line about it, and he got kicked out.”

One student was worried when his roommate brought a woman back to their dorm room after both had been drinking. “He wondered if he could be seen as part of the problem if he ignored it,” says Marcus S. Hotaling, director of counseling. So he called campus safety. Officers knocked on the door, and both students responded that they were there willingly.

The culture of looking out for one another means making judgments for your classmates, or at least asking. Mr. Gingras, the hockey player, is an RA in what he calls the biggest party dorm. This fall he saw a couple stumbling down the hall. He pulled the young woman aside and asked, “Are you feeling comfortable?”

She said she wasn’t sure if she wanted to go into a room with the man. “If you put yourself in there,” Mr. Gingras says he told her, “you have to have a clear understanding with him.” She went into the room, he says, came out, and explained to the RA that she’d told the guy she didn’t want to sleep with him yet.

While students watch for signs of trouble, some men are monitoring their own behavior. They want to avoid situations they’ve heard about in which men think sex is consensual, but their partners say otherwise. In some cases, the women have had enough to drink that they don’t remember what happened.

It’s not worth the risk that your partner is not in control of her actions, one hockey player said at a team dinner last month. “A drunk girl holds your life in her hands.”

All the discussion of sexual assault here has heightened awareness while also stoking fear. “It’s made everyone a lot more paranoid,” one student says, “avoiding the gray area at all costs.”

Women notice how sensitive some men have become about appearing inappropriate or aggressive. While that may mean less spontaneity, young women feel more protected—even when they want to party hard.

“This weekend a kid was trying to dance with me,” says Meghan, the senior who was safely tucked in at the frat house. “He asked only once, and I decided not to.” Still, with lessons about consent and respect in his head, his conscience seems to have weighed on him.

The next day he sent her 30 text messages. All of them said, “I’m sorry.”