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Originally Posted by ASTalumna06
I agree with both you and Kevin and believe that bystander intervention is a major issue.
However, I think it can be especially challenging in this day and age to speak up. It's difficult enough potentially becoming the outcast (or worse) within your organization, but imagine the pressure when you could potentially bring down the entire Greek system at your school and ruin your org's reputation on a national level. I think that social media has a huge effect on this; it drags out the issue beyond a short newspaper article, and students don't want to be on the receiving end of threats. I know of a sorority woman who reported that she was sexually assaulted by a member of a fraternity, and she was bullied mercilessly online by her sisters, brothers of the fraternity, and others for months on end.
Nowadays, these things can get so out of hand that a simple brushing off of one's shoulders simply isn't enough.
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Social media exacerbates all of this. Education and training has to start before they even arrive at college. My sister and I are constantly pounding it into my niece and nephew's heads that what they post can and will come back to haunt them. They both have hopes of eventually being D1 athletes, so it's especially important for them to be aware. I teach middle schoolers. Every day, I'm appalled by the taunting, bullying and flat-out inappropriate stuff they'll post to each other with no parental intervention. We have a large population of parents who think they have no right to monitor what their 14 year olds are posting online - kids whose frontal lobes aren't close to being developed and need guidance about how to do the right thing. I have parents tell me they "just can't" take their kids' phones out of their bedrooms at night. I always reply, "Well, that's the biggest time they're posting all this crap - late at night when you're not paying attention." I've had parents just look at me, helpless. I want to yell, "You pay for that phone. You own it; not your child. Be an adult."
Training and education should be a continuous part of every GLO's programming. Additionally, as others have mentioned, too many chapters have a culture of seeing how many members they can gain with thousands of Instagram followers instead of recruiting for quality. It should be more important to be a good person who genuinely respects all cultures, ethnicities and sexual orientations rather than someone who can be the chapter's controversial celebrity. I honestly can't even imagine what gets said sometimes in a culture like Alabama's. While the university has been recently committed to improving racial relations on campus and recognizes it has far to go, the historic culture combined with being in the deep South can often cause the worst of the worse to rise to the top. My brother in law coaches high school girls in elite club soccer and sends all of them on to play college soccer. He had a player a few years ago who went to Alabama but elected to transfer to another school and soccer program after a year because she told him she simply couldn't handle the racial slurs she heard on a daily basis anymore. (Not slurs directed toward her but simply language that was part of so many students' everyday conversation.) Having grown up in the West in a very diverse population in her school, community and teammates, she experienced culture shock, and she decided it hurt her humanity too much to be immersed in it. Before anyone from Alabama flames me, I know not everyone is like that, and as I said, the university is trying to change. But incidents that go viral nationally like Ms. Barber's video don't do much to change the perception of both the university and the GLOs there. It's sad because I personally know young women who are in chapters at Alabama and doing wonderful things for their philanthropies and their communities.
