TPC-Journal-V5-Issue3

The Professional Counselor /Volume 5, Issue 3 355 student deaths, 97,000 sexual assaults, 400,000 acts of alcohol-related unprotected sex and 100,000 incidences of being too intoxicated to know if sex was consensual (Hingson, Zha, & Weitzman, 2009). Further, it has been found that 50% of men who commit rape on college campuses were drinking at the time of the offense (Cole, 2006), and women who drink on college campuses are more likely to be the victim of a sexual assault (McCauley, Calhoun, & Gidycz, 2010). The literature provides that college students who are members of the Greek community are at greater risk for experiencing negative consequences from heavy drinking (LaBrie, Kenney, Mirza, & Lac, 2011; Nguyen, Walters, Rinker, Wyatt, & DeJong, 2011; Soule, Barnett, & Moorhouse, 2015). Fraternity and sorority membership has been positively associated with driving after drinking (LaBrie et al., 2011) and owning a fake ID (Nguyen et al., 2011). Fraternity and sorority members reported that they were twice as likely as non-Greek college students to engage in sex with someone without getting consent and were one and a half times more likely to forget what they did or where they were after drinking (Soule et al., 2015). In fact, sorority members who binge drink are significantly more likely to be injured, drive under the influence of alcohol, be sexually victimized and engage in unwanted sex than non-Greek female binge drinkers (Ragsdale et al., 2012). Given that Greek membership and binge drinking are correlated with more severe negative consequences and that fraternity and sorority members report more peer pressure to drink (Knee & Neighbors, 2002; Young, Morales, McCabe, Boyd, & D’Arcy, 2005), it is important to consider the effect of the type of housing on college student drinking behaviors. Alcohol-Free University Housing Because of the influence of the Greek housing environment on drinking norms, interventions at the residential level have been cited as a strategy for reducing risky drinking levels (Borsari et al., 2009). But what happens when alcohol-free policies are implemented? Do levels of risky drinking decrease? Examining alcohol-free Greek housing in general provides a mixed picture of results. First, at colleges that only allow dry housing, students are significantly less likely to drink alcohol than students at wet schools (29.1% abstainers at dry schools versus 16.1% abstainers at wet schools). But when examining only those students who report drinking while attending colleges that ban alcohol, their drinking patterns do not differ from drinkers at non-ban schools (Wechsler, Lee, Gledhill-Hoyt, & Nelson, 2001). Overall, there are lower rates of secondhand effects of alcohol use (e.g., insults, serious arguments, property damage, interrupted sleep) at schools where alcohol is banned. In residences where both alcohol and smoking are banned, there are lower levels of drinking, but not in residences where only alcohol is banned. Wechsler, Lee, Nelson, and Lee (2001) concluded that this type of substance-free residence may help protect those students who were not heavy drinkers in high school from becoming engaged in episodic drinking in college, but it does not lower drinking levels among those who did drink heavily in high school. It appears that students who are not heavy drinkers in high school are more likely to choose substance-free housing in college. Colleges also have attempted to establish alcohol-free events as a means of decreasing alcohol use on campus. Wei, Barnett, and Clark (2010) found that during the semester that was surveyed, less than half of the students (43.9%) attended an alcohol-free party. However, for students who attended both alcohol and alcohol-free parties, their level of alcohol consumption and intoxication was lower on the nights of the alcohol-free events versus their typical drinking nights. In another study, it was found that students drank less on days they attended alcohol-free programming than when they went to other events where alcohol was present, drinking 41% fewer drinks on the evenings of late-night planned activities (Patrick, Maggs, & Osgood, 2010).