Google “Georgia Tech” on Wednesday and the top items have “rapebait” in the headline.
That made-up word has been stirring controversy since an email sent by a Tech student to members of his fraternity recently escaped into the wide domain of the Internet. The missive purports to explain how to bed a woman with the aid of alcohol.
Tech has grappled for years with its image as a bastion for men, and this email likely hasn’t helped. Tech President G.P. “Bud” Peterson called it an “unfortunate situation” and said the university was taking “strong action to make sure this doesn’t happen again.” The national office of the Phi Kappa Tau Fraternity called the email “extremely inappropriate” and said the Atlanta chapter had suspended both the undergraduate and itself.
The email offers a how-to guide for men on the prowl — the seven “Es” of “hooking up.” It starts with the “encounter” and ends with “expunge,” as in, “send them out of your room and on their way out when you are finished.” It advises that, if any of the strategies fail, “go get more alcohol.”
The writer warns “no raping,” but signs off with this incendiary line: “In luring the rapebait.”
Tech has not released the author’s identity, saying his privacy is protected under federal law.
The email has been the talk of the Tech campus, eliciting outrage from leaders such as Nicholas Picon, the undergraduate student body president. Among those he’s discussed it with, he said, “the general response has been, ‘this is inappropriate;’ a lot of outrage. … This behavior doesn’t belong on Tech’s campus.”
Picon, who is studying aerospace engineering and computer science and belongs to a different fraternity, said the email is “not representative at all” of Tech frat life.
A copy of the email obtained by Channel 2 Action News indicates it was originally sent to fraternity email accounts for “pledges” and “actives” on Sept. 10.
Tech spokesman Matt Nagel said the institute learned about it eight days later. He said he believed a fraternity brother reported it to the dean of students.
It’s unclear if the institute will sanction the student. The incident is still being investigated. Said Peterson, the Tech president, “The young man clearly wasn’t thinking straight, and it’s an email he clearly should never have sent.”
Jennifer Bivins, the president and CEO of the Georgia Network to End Sexual Assault, read a copy of the email forwarded by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and said she was “horrified.”
“The fact that anybody felt bold enough to actually put it out in an email to colleagues and friends really raises it to the next level,” Bivins said. “I don’t think he thought it was a joke. I think he thought he was helping his brothers out by giving them pointers on how to have sex with someone who doesn’t want it.”
Bivins said statistics show that, from October 2010 to September 2011, there were 17,000 victims of sexual violence in Georgia, and most of them were from 16 to 24 years old. Three quarters of the incidents involved alcohol. She said Tech — which has an undergraduate enrollment that is two-thirds male, though nearly four in 10 of this year’s freshmen are female — should send a public message by sanctioning the student quickly “because the longer this goes on, the less people think it’s a big deal.”
Brooke McDaniel, a 2012 Tech graduate who lives in Atlanta, called the email “appalling” and “gross.”
“You want to think it’s a lone case,” she said.
Staff writers Alexis Stevens and Kristina Torres contributed to this article.
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