“Fuck who you must.” That was the advice delivered to a room of cheering men before a fraternity party at USC last November. A video, which documented the speech and the party that followed, was viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube and Total Frat Move before completely disappearing from the Internet (along with any mention of the company that professionally produced it) in the days before this article was published.

This story examines the culture of aggressive philandering displayed above, and the dominant culture that allowed that video to remain on YouTube undisputed, unchallenged, and unspoken about by anyone, including USC officials who repeatedly refused to comment on the video’s existence. It also suggests several solutions.

In a series of wide-ranging questions for this article, I asked USC’s Media Relations Department: “How does the university respond to such disturbing details [in the video]? What was the reaction in the Provost’s office and what if any action took place when the video was made public several months ago? Has USC punished anyone in connection with the video?” Those questions were explicitly ignored.

Last month, results were released from of one of the largest college sexual assault studies ever undertaken. Sponsored by the American Association of Universities, 150,000 students at 27 universities including USC and every Ivy League school (except Princeton) participated.

Dr. Ainsley Carry, the Vice Provost of Student Affairs, announced the findings in a conference call with USC’s media organizations.

“We are within the national averages on everything,” he said. “We are not an outlier on any side of the points I will mention here today.”

Except for one of the largest segments of the study: the prevalence of sexual assault, defined by the study as nonconsensual penetration or sexual touching. At USC, 29.7 percent of female respondents reported being sexually assaulted since enrollment. Contrary to Carry’s statement that USC is “well within the national averages,” USC had the second highest rate of sexual assault for undergraduate women among the 27 participating universities.

The national average was 23.1%, and to say USC isn’t an outlier is at best misreading the data, and at worst completely dishonest.

This is not a post-crisis story. It is the story of an ongoing epidemic of sexual assault at USC. Francesca Bessey, who graduated from USC and now works at USC’s Center for Women and Men, which provides therapy services for victims of gender-based violence, summarized the progress this way in recent Facebook post:

“At USC, we have seen change, most of it hard fought for and won by students. We’ve seen policy updates, better investigations and training of our campus security staff. With student help, clinicians at our crisis and advocacy center have launched an amazing outreach program on sexual and gender-based harm. But sexual assault is still happening at an alarming rate in campus communities.”

Any rate of sexual assault on a campus is too high, especially when it is supported by backwards-looking administrative policies that seek to minimize financial damage to the institutions that stand to lose money and prestige from forcefully confronting these crimes. Nowhere are these policies more present than at the USC, where a misleading reading of survey results is only the latest milestone in a tradition of ignorance.

Take, for instance, the 121-member California Delta chapter of Phi Kappa Psi, the host of the party where a fur-clad man told a room of nearly 100 people, “Fuck who you must.” They provided Neon Tommy with the following statement:

After 15 minutes of Google searching, I had more questions. First, I was able to access the video of the party until October 25, 2015, almost 11 months after Dalton said it was removed from YouTube.

Second, Dalton said the individual, whom several people familiar with the fraternity identified as Alec Fisher, was never affiliated with the chapter and had been banned from attending any future chapter events.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Fisher has been in Phi Psi at USC since August of 2013, and for at least a year was the budget manager of the entire chapter.

Fisher also began his speech by saying, “Sons of Phi Psi, my brothers…”

I called back Dalton and asked him to clarify the details. He said:

“The man in the video is Austin Fisher. He is Alec’s twin brother. He has never gone to USC and is not affiliated with Phi Psi. The video has been taken down since November to my knowledge.”

-Duke Dalton, President of Phi Kappa Psi, October 28, 2015

Still from USC Sorority Bid Day “The Running,” removed from YouTube on Sunday, October 25.

Austin Fisher did not respond to several requests for comment about the video. In another video released this September and produced by the same company that made the video of the Phi Psi party, the Fisher brothers appeared again.

Titled “The Running,” the video captured this year’s “Bid Day,” an annual event in USC’s Greek system where women who participated in rush are told which sorority selected them and run the several blocks from campus to USC’s Greek Row. At one point, someone in the video refers to the day as “the running of the bitches.” The video also disappeared from Youtube on Oct. 25, 2015, the same day the video from Phi Psi’s party vanished.

As for Dalton denying the video’s existence on Youtube for the last ten months, denial is the norm when it comes to dealing with sexual violence at USC. One frat’s actions are a single piece in a much larger puzzle.

Inside this complex web of organizational failure lies a deep, dark form of cultural bankruptcy that minimizes accountability at the institutional and individual level. It’s a “go with the flow,” “that’s the way it has always been,” “our organization will survive this” approach to sexual assault. It permeates universities, it breathes in fraternities and sororities, and it flourishes because of its deep roots in our culture. And it has to stop.

College serial rapists are perpetrators of sexual assault or rape who are guilty of more than one offense during their college years. A substantial body of research, pioneered by David Lisak, a nationally recognized forensic consultant and clinical psychologist who trains law enforcement agencies and universities on sexual assault cases, suggests over 90% of college rapists are serial in nature. Each offender in college commits six rapes on average.

Lisak explained to me why that matters for campuses seeking to tackle the problem:

“There is no question that serial offenders are a very significant part of the problem,” Lisak said “There are sex offenders in universities, and some people in universities are still really quite resistant to acknowledging that.”

SEE ALSO: The Price of Sex At USC

Including administrators at USC. When he was asked about serial offenders during the AAU conference call, Dr. Carry said, “We don’t have a special intervention for repeat offenders, other than that when we get these reports, we take them all seriously. When we receive multiple reports on an individual student, we will intervene.”

Administrators like Carry, as Lisak observed in an earlier interview with The Star Phoenix, “think of rapists as the guy with the ski mask and a knife who jumps out of the bushes.”

That USC is not targeting serial offenders is just plain abysmal, considering the approach is central to President Obama’s Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault. At a conference at Dartmouth University last fall, a member of that task force told several hundred college administrators, “We know that the majority of rapes are committed by serial rapists, and those folks are very unlikely to be reached by any prevention messages that we’re going to be sending out or education about rape…”

The problem begins with a failure to recognize the prevalence of sexual assaulters and serial offenders. It continues through financial and emotional costs to victims. The huge dollar figures faced by survivors begs the question: why should so many victims have to face that cost? Moreover, what can schools do to make sure that cost doesn’t become an unbearable burden?

I interviewed Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan who coauthored the book Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality. She explained that universities “are always juggling solvency, a moral vision of community and ethics, and a search for status.” In short, when confronted with the dual interests of protecting the bottom line and seeing to the needs of students don’t align, universities face a dilemma.

Which is totally bizarre when it comes to sexual assault. University brands suffer exponentially more if sexual assaults are mishandled and avoided instead of tackled head-on. Recently, the University of Oregon’s credibiilty took a big hit when it turned over a student’s private counseling records to its lawyers. The lawyers were defending the school from a lawsuit filed by the very same student alleging that U of O violated Title IX by recruiting a basketball player with a known history of sexual assault, who then assaulted the student. The basketball player was a serial offender.

Lisak said that the financial juggling act performed by universities is mind-boggling.

“I feel like a broken record sometimes,” he began. “What’s the moral cost of not taking responsibility for this and showing the rest of society that you can really take this on as a community?”

Dr. Astrid Heger, the executive director of the Violence Intervention Program at the LAC/USC Medical Center, and a professor of clinical pediatrics at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, put it this way: “We all want to be in denial that this happens on any campus, and the USC family is no different than any campus in the United States. They don’t want to deal with this as a growing problem.”

Dealing with sexual assault as a growing problem is long overdue. Universities, particularly USC, can tackle the issue head-on in the following ways.

Pull the sheet off the lawsuit boogieman.

Universities seeking to avoid costly lawsuits frequently cite the mishandling of false accusations that open them to serious legal damage as a reason for treading carefully in sexual assault investigations, especially if they humiliate the accused or cause them to go through unnecessary and burdensome processes.

Heger said it doesn’t have to be that complicated.

“There is always a paranoia about lawsuits when it comes to interpersonal violence on campus,” she began. If schools adopt a zero-tolerance, aggressive response policy, she continued, “I don’t think you need to be afraid of lawsuits if you have done the education and intervention that you need to do.

Armstrong explained why universities are often afraid to adopt this policy.

“The presidents believe this stuff, but at the same time they have a general counsel hired to look out for the bottom line, and they get very, very talented, sophisticated lawyers whose job is to protect the university’s financial interests.”

But a review of the data shows that universities might be overly paranoid of being sued for mishandling false accusations: a National Sexual Violence Resource Center study shows false accusations are rare, making up just 2–8 percent of cases. That’s less than the percentage of people on death row, 10 percent, who have been exonerated since 1973. Moreover, statistics for false accusations often include survivors who drop their case for any reason, including to avoid social stigma, or because of mishandling from their administration in the first place.

Add to that the mounting pile of lawsuits from victims who assert that colleges pressure them not to pursue the case, and the evidence for overcoming lawsuit paranoia from false accusation cases becomes overwhelming.

In fact, a slew of recent events shows that schools should be more afraid of lawsuits from accusers than they should be from the falsely accused. The University of San Diego is facing a lawsuit from a woman who, according to her lawyer, alleges the school told her if she reported being raped to the police, they wouldn’t help her. Arizona State University, which is on the list of schools being investigated by the Department of Education for Title IX violations, recently settled two lawsuits filed by victims, one for over $850,000, and one that alleged the school’s police didn’t give her a rape kit after she was attacked.

2. Lower the cost of reporting crimes for victims.

In the AAU survey, only 60% of students said they believed USC would take it “very” or “extremely” seriously if a report of their assault was made to campus officials. Of the students who chose not to report a crime, 65% did so because they didn’t think it was serious enough. In the conference call, Dr. Carry called these “mixed results.”

Project Callisto, a mobile-friendly web service, aims to change that. Despite USC’s dismal results on reporting, they flatly ignored our request for comments on signing the school up for the service. Callisto works by giving participating schools their own website, where students can upload testimony, including photographs as evidence, and then choose whether to send the report to their administration, or directly to the police through their mobile phone. Everything is confidential until the reporter decides he or she doesn’t want it to be, removing the pressure of in-person reporting. Schools like the University of San Francisco and the Pomona have already signed up for the project, and some schools, like UMass Amherst, Amherst College, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College and Hampshire College, have developed similar resources that connect students to survivor-support services.*

Web-based reporting removes a primary disincentive for sexual assault reporting, which is the fear of being the only accuser, or using evidence that will be called into question. Callisto, which can contact authorities “only if another person uploads evidence about the same assailant” (assuming the accuser chooses not to request contacting authorities initially), makes victims feel more comfortable and protected when they report, and in doing so, experts like UCLA Professor Michael Chwe say it will encourage more victims to come out of the woodwork.

Despite poor reporting numbers detailed in the AAU survey, USC didn’t respond to the following question:

“Project Callisto is a mobile app where schools who sign up receive their own website where students can upload testimony, including photographs as evidence, and then choose whether to send the report to their administration, or directly to the police Would USC consider signing up for this service a priority for addressing sexual assault reporting?”

In a statement emailed to me by USC Media relations, attributed to David Carlisle, the deputy chief of USC Department of Public Safety, Carlisle promoted a totally different service, declining to address Project Callisto at all:

“DPS recommends all members of the campus community download the LiveSafe free mobile app because it allows users to initiate contact with DPS for emergencies and/or to report suspicious behaviors or activity….”

My response pointing out that an app for calling the police is substantially different than an app for anonymously reporting sexual assault received no follow-up. As it turned out, Carlisle’s “statement” wasn’t a statement at all: it was mostly copied word-for-word from USC’s webpage announcing the LiveSafe app.

You can voice your support for Project Callisto directly to DPS through their online feedback form, which is available here.

The story that begins with University paranoia and their desperate need to increase reporting numbers now turns to adjudicating the slim number of cases that do result in justice for victims. For survivors who make it this far in the process, many are often disappointed by soft and arbitrary punishment regimes, born out of the same institutional fear of losing prestige that leads many universities to hesitate investigating cases in the first place.

3. Increase the Cost of Committing a Sexual Assault

The Center for Public Integrity won a Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for its work on sexual assault, in which it detailed several horror stories where students who were found guilty were given mind-blowingly lax punishments. At Indiana University, one student’s assaulter was suspended from classes a semester — a summer semester — which he wasn’t planning to attend anyways. Between 2003 and 2008, 130 schools that received taxpayer money to combat sexual assault only expelled between 10–25% of men who were already found responsible for sexual assault. The rest received minor penalties, which ranged from apology letters to community service to virtually unenforceable “social probation.”

In the last five years, 41% of colleges haven’t investigated a single sexual assault case.

The axis on which this grisly world turns — serial offenders who make up a large part of the problem — is yet again unacknowledged by universities who just can’t come to grips with the fact that their campus, like everyone else’s, might contain some despicable people.

Lisak admits that “Universities are in a tough position.” But in his words, “Even universities that are really trying to do the right thing are facing really serious challenges. Put yourselves in the shoes of somebody who is adjudicating this: if you’ve got pretty tentative evidence, how secure do you feel in sanctioning that student with something like an expulsion?”

But the Center for Public Integrity also charged that freebie punishments leave a school open to a Title IX violation, citing the law’s requirements that if a school determines an accused student to be guilty, they must end the hostile environment experienced by the victim, prevent the assault from occurring again, and restore the victim’s life. Part of preventing the assault from occurring again is, in the case of some schools sued by victims, making sure a rapist is removed from campus when they commit their first offense. If victims sue and a known offender is still on campus, like the anonymous woman who sued the University of Oregon for recruiting a basketball player with a known history of sexual assault, they have an even better case.

Those punishments have to increase. Again from Heger: “…If that is investigated and you meet that standard, there needs to be an obligatory response the school has established of the consequences to the assailant.” When I asked if she was aware of a minimum punishment system at USC, she responded, “I don’t think they do…”

I asked USC the same question, and they again declined to answer. A review of the USC student conduct code reveals there are no minimum punishments for sexual assault. Section E.8.V of SCampus, the conduct code, outlines punishments ranging from a “warning” or “probation” to expulsion.

My question: “Does USC have a minimum punishment standard for students found to have committed sexual assault? If not, would USC support one?”

In another “statement” emailed to me and attributed to Kegan Allee, Interim Director and Title IX Coordinator, which again turned out to be a mostly word-for-word restatement of parts of section E.8.V, Allee declined to say whether USC would support a mandatory minimum punishment standard for sexual assault. She merely referred us back to SCampus which, of course, contains nothing of the sort.

“Schools that overlook this paradigm are failing their female students,” said Colby Bruno, a managing partner at the Victim Rights Law Center, in an interview with the Center for Public Integrity. “Giving someone a deferred suspension is like giving someone carte blanche to do it again.”

According to section E.8.V of SCampus, a deferred suspension is one of the possible sanctions a student may face for committing a sexual assault at USC.

The story continues. Even if survivors of sexual assault report a crime, overcome administrative obstacles, and achieve a punishment for their attacker sufficient to protect them in the future, they often suffer continuing, severe psychological, financial, and emotional consequences, which USC should remedy in a big way.

4. Help Victims Alleviate the severe cost of being sexually assaulted.

Along with immense emotional and physical toll of being a sexual assault survivor, victims often face financial difficulties stemming from lost tuition, the cost of legal representation, and much more. In one 1998 study, done by the Utah Coalition Against Sexual Assault, the cost to a rape victim was estimated to be $110,000 over his or her lifetime.

Utah Coalition Against Sexual Assault.

Working with the statistic that one in five women will be sexually assaulted before she graduates, and accounting for a 2003 CDC study that revealed victims of sexual assault face an average medical bill of $2,000, even the conservative assumption that one in 50 victims drops out mid-semester puts the total cost of sexual assault at $2 billion per graduating college seniors, per year.

A 2014 report by the Obama administration put the cost of a single sexual assault anywhere between $87,000 and $240,000. Keep in mind — 79% of the financial burden of victimhood is from decreased quality of life.

At USC, when students enroll in classes they automatically receive tuition refund insurance, which, unless they choose to opt out, pays for their tuition if they unexpectedly drop out due to a medical emergency. What about students who drop out due to psychological and post-traumatic stress following an assault?

“If you have somebody that comes forward, you evaluate, and they say, I need to be out of the school…” Dr. Heger began. “…We need to accommodate that, and if they have paid their tuition in advance, I think the university has a responsibility to refund it.”

Currently, USC does not refund tuition for students who drop out from psychological trauma following an assault. Again, USC officials ignored my question regarding if they would consider extending that service.

I asked: Would USC consider extending this service to students who drop out due to psychological and post traumatic stress following an assault?

I wasn’t even given a statement. North-Hager referred me to the insurance company, which predictably has no opinion or expertise on whether USC, one of its many clients, should consider extending the service to victims of sexual assault.

The story of struggle faced by victims and survivors at every stage of the process, and the failure to make progress with USC in making that process easier, takes a few last turns. First and foremost: what about those who aren’t yet victims, but who use reports of past crimes to guide their decisions on avoiding unsafe environments?

5. Report more than the Clery Act.

The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act, or “Clery Act” for short, is a federal law passed in 1990 requiring the public disclosure of data on crimes committed on or near every university, public or private, in the United States.

In October of 2013, USC admitted that 13 sexual assaults that should have been reported were kept under wraps in both its 2010 and 2011 Clery reports. The omissions were discovered by a 2013 internal audit. In 2014, USC was also one of 55 schools put under investigation by the Department of Education for possible Title IX violations regarding sexual assault and harassment.

But even when universities do fork over all the data, which USC has a documented history of not doing, how useful is it?

In USC’s 2015 Annual Security Report, released just a few weeks ago pursuant to the Clery Act, the only specifications for a location of a crime like “forcible sex offense” are whether it occurred “On Campus,” in “Student Housing,” “Noncampus,” “Public Property,” or “LAPD.” Fraternity houses are classified not as student housing, but as “noncampus.” Unsurprisingly, most sexual assaults occurred in “noncampus” settings in 2012, 2013, and 2014:

Suppose a member of a specific fraternity is found to have committed sexual assault, and punished accordingly. Following the crime, the Department of Public Safety details the crime, but leaves out the identity of the house — Greek or residential — despite experts who say knowing that information might protect women who would otherwise go there in the future.

“There has to be a way of saying “the such and such” frat has had complaints against it. If I were a co-ed at SC, I would want to know that,” Heger said. But she was quick to point out that an effort like that can be largely student-driven, and often times is. Speaking along the same lines, Lisak said at every campus he visits, “The information starts flowing in seconds” when he asks students about the sexual assault hotspots to avoid. He said for all their resources, universities have done a pretty poor job using that information.

Currently, USC shies away from reporting the fraternities where students have been found to commit sexual assault. This was perhaps the only question USC gave a straightforward answer to. In a statement from Deputy Chief Carlisle (which doesn’t appear to have been lifted from a USC website), he said the only time fraternity and sorority houses are left out of public reporting is “in cases where an investigation could be compromised, or a victim/suspect’s identity would be inappropriately revealed through the release of that information.”

Most of the time, DPS construes a reason as to why publicly reporting the fraternity or sorority can compromise the investigation, and most students don’t find out the name of the fraternity until the members move out and the letters come down.

But as long as the “fuck who you must” mentality pervades fraternity parties, and as long as Universities view sexual assaults as things that must be handled, minimized, and avoided to prevent lawsuits, the policy solutions will always be insufficient, second-best responses. Instead, we’ve got to rip rape culture to shreds.

A culture of zero tolerance and ramped-up punishments for sexual offenses, plastered on admissions pamphlets and rigorously enforced, is necessary. A culture where women are warned about dangerous places and encouraged to report crimes through innovative technologies that make them feel safer is another giant leap. A culture where victims aren’t plunged into debt for dropping out is monumental.

And all of that, when embraced by USC, will send a powerful message that says, “We know the cost of sexual assault is high. And we are doing everything in our power — not because we have to but because we want to — to make that cost as low as possible, not to us, but to you.”

But the message — and the culture, for that matter — must also take a stand against disturbing statistical data about the bastion of social institutions on many college campuses, and certainly at USC: fraternities.

“I have a chart…somewhere in the appendix, that basically showed that the more high status a frat is, the more creepy girls rated it,” Hernandez told to me on the phone.

The charts (there are two of them, published on the last page of his study) are even more eerie than he remembers. As part of the survey, women and men were asked to rank each fraternity by number, with 1 going to the “top house” and 22 going to “the bottom house.” The women respondents were also asked to name how many “sexually aggressive experiences” they encountered at each house, which Sean labeled “creepiness frequency.”