White Ribbon Panel Discusses Rape

In the midst of a week devoted to stopping violence against women, organizers came together last night for a more academic approach. “Nature vs. Nurture: A Panel Discussion on the Origins of Male Violence” was held in front of about sixty men and women last night to accompany the white ribbon campaign. Among them, in jacket and tie, were over a dozen members of the Phoenix final club.

“Those of you who have done work with male violence know the nature versus nurture argument comes up all the time. But it’s always brought up to end debate,” said Gordon W. Braxton, a prevention specialist in the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response. “Today we want to use it as a conversation starter. To ask if this is the case, what can we then do?”

The panel was equally divided along this nature-nurture line. Both biology professor David A. Haig and anthropology professor Richard W. Wrangham—the author of “Demonic Males”—primarily cited nature as the source of male violence. Though Wrangham stressed that its being natural should not be an excuse.

“I tend to agree on the feminist line that every man is a potential rapist because men are a member of a species that have a certain pattern,” Wrangham said.

Social constraints are then crucial to preventing this male violence.

“The reason we are presented here with civilized men behaving well is because we live in a society with important constraints applied through education, through upbringing,” Wrangham said.

Haig also noted the importance of judicial restraints to help combat this violence. Yet Braxton, at the end of the night, stressed moving beyond the legal realm.

“We often move to policy, sanctions for bad behaviors, incentives for good things. But most of us as individuals don’t have a lot of influence in policy,” Braxton said. “There ought to be social sanctions and social incentives.”

The other two panelists, C. Shawn McGuffey, professor of sociology at Boston College, and Craig Norberg-Bohm, coordinator for Men’s Initiative for Jane Doe, Inc., were more in the nurture camp.

“We have to learn how to kill, how to take power,” Norberg-Bohm said.

These speakers emphasized the importance of child-raising, while acknowledging the difficulty in overcoming a “boys will be boys” mentality.

McGuffey discussed an experiment in which a baby dressed in blue was described as “strong” and “alert.” The exact same baby was then dressed in pink and was described by the same people as “cute” and “delicate.” And the baby was accordingly treated differently, thrown up in the air when dressed in blue and coddled when dressed in pink.

“From birth we start this socialization process,” McGuffey said.

While the night may have ended in an explanatory and pragmatic way, it began on a much more sobering note. Harvard University Police Department detectives and sergeant warned the audience to always be careful and to always watch your drink as there have been recent incidents off-campus involving date rape drugs.

The message of the night, reiterated by the event’s supporters, HUPD, the FDO and Harvard Athletics: “See something, say something.”

—Staff writer Rachel A. Stark can be reached at rstark@fas.harvard.edu.