Though the school’s announcement never mentions a connection, Stanford’s new rules are nearly certainly meant to cut down on sexual assault.
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Stanford reports the policy change, which is effective immediately, comes “from an outgrowth of dialogue that has been taking place among students, faculty and staff since March, when President John Hennessy and Provost John Etchemendy wrote to students and called on the community to generate solutions that meaningfully change the campus culture around alcohol”. Stanford law professor Michele Landis Dauber, a leader of the recall campaign against the judge who handled Turner’s case, went so far as to argue it “makes students less safe by incentivizing pre-gaming and heavy drinking in private rooms” rather than drinking socially at an event on campus.
“Our focus is on the high risk of the rapid consumption of hard alcohol”, said Ralph Castro, director of the Office of Alcohol Policy and Education, in a Stanford news release. It also allows us the ability to provide uniformity in a policy that will impact all undergraduate students without banning a substance that is legal for a segment of the student population to use responsibly. Although 92 percent of Stanford students voted against banning hard alcohol, Stanford chose to enact the new policies anyway. He instead forced Turner to get drug and alcohol treatment. But I digress. And I wouldn’t know.
Turner, a former Stanford student, was convicted earlier this year of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman outside a fraternity house. The alcohol must be in its original container, to prevent students from simply subdividing a large bottle of alcohol into several smaller containers.
“It does not emanate from the Brock Turner case”, university spokeswoman Lisa Lapin said on Tuesday.
Now, with the implementation of this new policy, Stanford University has been accused of engaging in victim-blaming (Turner’s victim was severely intoxicated at the time of her attack), and tacitly siding with Turner’s argument that alcohol explains and mitigates his actions. “The University is especially concerned about the misuse of distilled alcohol products (“hard alcohol”), and the dangers that arise from that misuse”.
The timing of the new ban makes it impossible not to connect the university’s efforts to curb the unsafe behavior it alleges stems from binge drinking and alcohol abuse on campus to the controversial rape case that rocked the university not even two months ago. Straight shots of hard alcohol are never allowed at any party.
The new policy, which limits alcohol containers to those smaller than 750 mL, is actually aimed not just at curbing consumption on campus, but at reducing the “outlet density” of stores near campus that sell hard alcohol, officials said.
Critics of the policy say it is an inappropriate way to tackle a growing epidemic of sexual assault, in a country where one in five women will be raped or sexually assaulted during their time on campus.
Lapin, the campus spokeswoman, says the concern over high-risk drinking at Stanford goes back “many months”.
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Meanwhile, the judge who gained infamy in the Brock Turner case has made headlines again. It would have been his first key decision in a sex crime case since he sentenced Turner in June.
