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THE ROLE OF INSTITUTIONAL DISCOURSES IN THE PERPETUATION AND PROPAGATION OF RAPE CULTURE ON AN AMERICAN CAMPUS by KRISTINE JOY ENGLE FOLCHERT B.Sc., Iowa State University, 2004 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Women’s and Gender Studies) THE UNIVERSTIY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) August 2008 © Kristine Joy Engle Folchert, 2008 Abstract Rape cultures in the United States facilitate acts of rape by influencing perpetrators’, community members’, and women who survive rapes’ beliefs about sexual assault and its consequences. While much of the previous research on rape in university settings has focused on individual attitudes and behaviors, as well as developing education and prevention campaigns, this research examined institutional influences on rape culture in the context of football teams. Using a feminist poststructuralist theoretical lens, an examination of newspaper articles, press releases, reports, and court documents from December 2001 to December 2007 was conducted to reveal prominent and counter discourses following a series of rapes and civil lawsuits at the University of Colorado. The research findings illustrated how community members’ adoption of institutional discourses discrediting the women who survived rape and denying the existence of and responsibility for rape culture could be facilitated by specific promotional strategies. Strategies of continually qualifying the women who survived rapes’ reports, administrators claiming ‘victimhood,’ and denying that actions by individual members of the athletic department could be linked to a rape culture made the University’s discourse more palatable to some community members who included residents of Boulder, Colorado and CU students, staff, faculty, and administrators. According to feminist poststructuralist theory, subjects continually construct their identities and belief systems by accepting and rejecting the discourses surrounding them. When community members incorporate rape-supportive discourses from the University into their subjectivities, rape culture has been propagated. ii Table of Contents Abstract ii Table of contents iii Table of figures vi Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1.0. Introduction 1 1.1. Brief overview of the CU case 3 1.2. Rationale for examining the CU case 4 1.3. Purpose of the Study 6 1.4. A note on language 7 1.5. Conclusion 9 Review of the Literature 10 2.0. Introduction 10 2.1. Theoretical framework 10 2.1.a. Feminist poststructuralist theory 10 2.1.a.i. Language, discourse, and subjectivity 11 2.1.a.ii. Limitations to feminist poststructuralist theory 13 2.1.b. Contributing aspects of institutional ethnography 14 2.1.c. Intersectionality theory 16 2.2. Rape culture 18 2.2.a. Definition and description of rape culture 18 2.2.b. Sport masculinity theories 20 2.2.b.i. Conceptualizing football hypermasculinity 20 2.2.b.ii. Sense of entitlement 23 2.2.c. The influence of all-male peer support groups 24 2.2.c.i. All-male peer group model 25 2.2.c.ii.Ways in which all-male peer support groups further rape culture 26 2.3. Contributions to the literature 27 Methodology 30 3.0. Introduction 30 3.1. Examining my role in creating this research 30 3.2. Justification for discourse analysis 32 3.3. Data collection methods 33 3.4. Strengths and weaknesses of the texts collected 34 3.4.a. Newspaper articles 34 3.4.b. Court depositions and decisions 38 3.4.c. CU press releases 40 iii 3.4.d. The Independent Investigative Commission report 40 3.5. Data analysis 42 3.6. Research limitations 44 Findings and Discussion 47 4.0. Introduction 47 4.1. Chronology of events 48 4.1.a. The perceived importance of CU football recruiting 49 4.1.b. The December 7th, 2001 party 49 4.1.c. The scandal 51 4.1.d. The outcome of the civil suits 54 4.2. Rape culture in CU football 56 4.2.a. Lack of effective communication 56 4.2.b. The role of unofficial recruiting policies in fostering rape culture 58 4.2.c. Coaches’ reactions to sexual harassment and assault 62 4.3. Examining CU’s discourses and promotional strategies 67 4.3.a. Discourses in the data 68 4.3.b. The relative power of discourses 70 4.3.c. Discrediting discourses 75 4.3.c.i. Characteristics of credibility 76 4.3.c.ii. Consistently qualifying Simpson’s argument 79 4.3.c.iii.Claiming victimhood 82 4.3.c.iv.How the discrediting discourse facilitated the perpetuation and propagation of rape culture 85 4.3.d. Denying the existence of and the responsibility for rape culture 87 4.3.d.i. Scrutinizing and minimizing Simpson’s account of her rape 88 4.3.d.ii. Individualizing and disregarding University member wrongdoings 91 4.3.d.iii.How the denying discourse facilitated the perpetuation and propagation of rape culture 93 Conclusions and Recommendations 96 5.0. Introduction 96 5.1. Existence of a rape culture 96 5.2. Perpetuating and propagating a rape culture 99 5.3. Theoretical and methodological implications 102 5.4. Practical recommendations 106 5.4.a. Policy changes, implementation, and enforcement 107 5.4.b. Comprehensive approach to halting rape culture’s perpetuation and propagation 109 5.4.b.i. Critiquing the institutional structure and culture 110 5.4.b.ii. Take sexual assault and harassment seriously 111 5.4.b.ii.a. Offender punishments 113 5.4.b.ii.b. Educational campaigns 114 5.5. Future research recommendations 115 5.6. Concluding remarks 118 iv References 119 Appendices 133 Appendix A: List of codes 134 Appendix B: Sexual harassment policy 138 Appendix C: The Action Plan 144 v Table of Figures Figure 1: Diagram of discourses 70 Figure 2: Figure of demographics 72 vi Acknowledgements Conducting this research has been a challenging and fulfilling process for me. I first want to thank and acknowledge my partner Ben, without whom this would not have been possible. Thank you for your willingness to relocate, all of your hard work supporting us during this time, and your continual encouragement and patience which keeps me going. Thanks to my son Evan for giving me a break from work and a connection to life outside of school. You both have grounded and motivated me through this process. I also want to thank my supervisor, Dr. Wendy Frisby, for her enthusiasm in my research project and her work in helping me craft this document. I appreciate her endless suggestions which made this thesis much more lucid, concise, and thought out. Thank you Dr. Brian Wilson, my second committee member, for giving me an alternate perspective and challenging me to think through theoretical and methodological problems. I also want to thank my third reader, Dr. Olena Hankivsky, for suggesting directions to take my research in and giving me some tools to work out theoretical problems I had along the way. I also need to thank my friends and fellow Women’s and Gender Studies graduate students for their roles in helping my work along. Thanks to Jane for listening, supporting, and helping me deal with the stress. Thanks to Jane, Jenny, and Gemma for editing my conference papers and early versions of my thesis chapters. Also, thanks to the babysitters Fiona and Micah, Jane, Eunkyung, Manola, and Jenny, for allowing Ben and I to escape parenthood for an evening every once in a while. And of course, my family, who provided emotional and financial support when we were in need. Thanks for convincing us to come home or go on vacation, even when we were really busy, it allowed us to recharge and keep going. vii Chapter One Introduction 1.0 Introduction Rape is a prevalent occurrence on college campuses in the United States as revealed in a report on the sexual victimization of college women (Fisher, Cullen & Turner, 2000), which found that 27.7 female students in 1,000 were raped during the seven-month time period of their study. Moreover, since some of the women experienced multiple encounters with rape, there was a rate of 35.3 attempted and completed rapes per 1,000 female students. If this figure is broadened to incorporate an actual calendar year and the numbers of female students on university campuses, there could be upwards of 350 incidents of attempted and completed rapes for every 10,000 female students (p. 11). Similarly, a study conducted by Koss (1997) found in a sample of 3,187 female university student participants, 207 women reported to researchers 353 instances of completed rape, 533 attempted rapes, 837 episodes of sexual coercion, and 2,024 experiences of unwanted sexual contact (p. 60). From these numbers Koss calculated “a victimization rate of 38/1,000 women during a six-month period” (p. 61). With staggering statistics such as these, it is important to research the reasons why there is a high prevalence of rape in university settings. In this study I examine rape on the University of Colorado (CU) campus. A report in 2001 from the FBI Uniform Crime Statistics showed there were 34.1 reported rapes per 100,000 residents in Boulder, Colorado not counting the number committed in the CU residence halls (Butler, 2004a). More specific to CU, 11 sexual assaults were reported in 2002, 23 in 2003, and 19 in 2004 and these numbers excluded any reports determined to be unfounded by investigators (Crime Reports, n.d.). It should be noted that when police declare reported rapes to be unfounded, they mean that the police could not find, did not want to find, or did not want to 1 believe that there was enough evidence to go to trial.

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