Sigma Chi Suspended at Minnesota State - Mankato

exlurker · #1 05-08-2007, 01:34 PM

Sigma Chi HQ has suspended the chapter at Minnesota State – Mankato for 45 days, and an investigation is underway. The Mankato paper has an article, and indicates that there will be a follow-up story tomorrow:

http://www.mankatofreepress.com/loca...yword=topstory

LaneSig · #2 05-08-2007, 03:13 PM

Here is a statement from our website:

http://web.sigmachi.org/wps/portal/!...ankato+Release

exlurker · #3 05-09-2007, 01:48 AM

A CBS station has an article on its site with a few more details about the alleged incident that's being investigated:

http://wcco.com/topstories/local_story_128230156.html

ladygreek · #4 05-09-2007, 02:41 AM

Waiting for this to hit the major daily newspapers in the Twin Cities.

ETA: I should have read ahead, but then I don't listen to the evening news. And when I do it is not WCCO--the most conservative of our news stations. But if it happened on Sat., I am still surprised it hasn't hit the daily newspapers, which I do read.

GeekyPenguin · #5 05-09-2007, 08:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ladygreek

Waiting for this to hit the major daily newspapers in the Twin Cities.

ETA: I should have read ahead, but then I don't listen to the evening news. And when I do it is not WCCO--the most conservative of our news stations. But if it happened on Sat., I am still surprised it hasn't hit the daily newspapers, which I do read.

I haven't seen anything in the papers either and I watch KARE's evening news pretty regularly and it hasn't been on there.

cheerfulgreek · #6 05-09-2007, 09:02 PM

The question I have is what was a 16 year old girl doing at a fraternity house at 1am in the 1st place? Did her parents even know where she was?

exlurker · #7 05-09-2007, 11:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GeekyPenguin

I haven't seen anything in the papers either and I watch KARE's evening news pretty regularly and it hasn't been on there.

GeekyPenguin and ladygreek: I don't know about coverage in the local paper, but I just checked KARE's site out of curiosity because GP mentioned it. The story -- Associated Press is credited -- is on KARE's site. I guess that doesn't necessarily mean they'd bother broadcasting it, but it's there.

http://www.kare11.com/news/ts_articl...storyid=253336

OR you could go to just http://www.kare11.com and scroll around their contents list.

LaneSig · #8 05-10-2007, 08:42 AM

If this did happen, here are the Sigma Chi risk management rules that have been broken:

1 - No unregistered parties.

2 - All parties are required to have a security guard.

3- Everyone entering the party is required to show an id and be issued a wrist badge for drinking priviledges or non-drinkers.

I am confused about where the party took place. I have heard that is was a Sigma Chi party. I have also heard that it was a party at a house that several Sigma Chis lived in.

mnphigam · #9 05-10-2007, 12:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

The question I have is what was a 16 year old girl doing at a fraternity house at 1am in the 1st place? Did her parents even know where she was?

Please tell me you're not saying this is the parents' fault..... her parents probably didn't know where she was because she lied to them (although it is Mankato so who knows?).

Siggy_lxvi · #10 05-22-2007, 09:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The article

However, police said they are considering several charges, including furnishing alcohol to a minor, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, use of a minor in a sexual performance, solicitation of a child to engage in sexual conduct and possession of pornographic work involving a minor.

First off, these charges don't sound like things you and I would normally think of as "Sexual Assault" (forcible sexual contact). I've become rather cynical of late with the news business, and this looks like someone playing off the Duke Lacrosse thing and the whole "won't somebody think of the childruuun!" thing.

Ok, boys and girls, time for Cynical Siggy's Story Time!

Sounds to me like the girl involved had a friend who had graduated from her High School and was now at MSUM. This friend (either a female friend or a boyfriend) knows of a party, or possibly just an informal get-together, that's going on one weekend and tells her to come. The girl goes and has a few drinks. Some people start playing drinking games and she joins in. The game eventually turns into "I never" or "Truth or Dare" and the girl is probably fairly gone by this point (she's sixteen and has been playing drinking games with college kids, who may not even know how old she is, all night). Well, since it's truth or dare, things tend to escalate quickly, and someone at a college party always has a camera. Possibly even a video camera. At some point the girl gets dared to do something biological to the guy she's been making out with all night. The video camera has been on long enough that no one is even paying attention to it by this point, and the amateur videographer gets some well-shot footage of the event.

The party breaks up and everybody goes home. The girl may or may not have wound up spending the night with her male friend from the party, but whatever happens, winds up going to school on Monday and telling all her friends about the great party she went to that weekend. One of her friends, or just someone eavesdropping, gossips about her to someone who's a bit more of a goody-two-shoes than is probably good and blabs to someone in the high school administration, who calls the police (teachers are mandatory reporters on anything even remotely sounding like abuse, which to some people, a sixteen-year-old having sex or giving a BJ is).

The local news gets ahold of the story and runs like mad, and the damage is:

A teenage girl gets her reputation smeared all over town (Mankato is small enough that everyone's going to know who it was whether the news station "protects her identity" or not) over something that would barely have raised comment if she had been in college, or even if she had just been more careful about who was around when she told people.
A teenage boy gets sent to jail, probably forcibly sodomized, permanently stigmatized, and required to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life because he got a little bit of action from a teenage girl and they just happened not to be on the same side of the magic birthday.
Another teenage boy goes to jail for "possession of child pornography" and possibly "manufacturing child pornography," almost certainly gets forcibly sodomized (repeatedly) and is lucky if he gets out of jail alive, and has to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life because he was holding a video camera at the wrong party.
A fraternity chapter loses its charter because 1/4 of its 23 members were at the wrong party, whether they were involved in the planning of the party, lived in the house where the party was held, or even knew this particular girl was at the party or not. (1/4 of the chapter membership is often all it takes to have any happening considered "a chapter function.")
A national fraternity gets sued because 6 guys from a 23-man chapter were at a party where something happened that made the news.

This is all purely speculative, but I've been friends with too many prosecutors and too many police officers - and met far too many reporters - to believe that my cynical story is any further from the truth than the local news report of a "sexual assault at a fraternity house" which makes a really flashy headline.

KyleMcGuire1983 · #11 05-22-2007, 02:25 PM

Yeah it's bull but most of the post 1990s Risk Reduction Policies are BS.

Fall 2005 we had a party at our house and 6 random GDI dudes went home with a freshman girl they found at our party....they gang raped her. The bastards are sitting in jail now because we provided photos of the party to the cops....but we wound up dry until Fall 2006 because the criminals met their victim AT our house.

Could you imagine a bar or nightclub getting sued for being the venue a predator met their victim at? Of course not. But we're Greek so we're held to higher standards than that of normal people.

My sympathies to Sigma Chi.

Tom Earp · #12 05-22-2007, 06:11 PM

Agree 100 %. We as Greeks while supposedly held to higher standards are still just people with funny letters attatched to our names!

AGDee · #13 05-22-2007, 08:49 PM

We, as Greeks, claim to hold ourselves to higher ideals. Part of our Purpose says "To possess high ideals". We have Men of Principle, Better Man programs, etc. We are selective with our membership. We have the opportunity to police ourselves and we need to do that if we want to avoid scrutiny from the outside.

KyleMcGuire1983 · #14 05-23-2007, 03:21 AM

Well we claim to hold ourselves to higher standards and the outside world DOES hold us to higher standards.....but not because they respect us.

The Outsiders (GDIs, media, etc) don't like us because they see one of us and they see a "sorority slut" or a "frat boy date rapist jock"....the people who picked on them as kids. It's ridiculous but it's true and I don't need to hear some politically correct explanation about how we deserve to be treated harsher than "The Football House" or "The Baseball House" or 4H or whatever.

The fact is that we take the kicks and never get the glory that most other organizatons get. We don't get celebrated for winning NCAA championships even though our alumni donate entire buildings to our schools and we commit to more community outreach than the average campus drunk. I'm not trying to whine, I'm just being real....and I can handle it.....because I do everyday and so do all the rest of you.

to quote Hyman Roth from The Godfather Part II: "This is the business we chose."