Today TPD carries my article on the campus rape debate: “Not Just a Rape Culture: The University’s Rape System.” I argue that our increasing tendency to think about all social problems through the lens of “culture,” while it can be the right approach in many contexts, can also be counterproductive, and has become extremely so in the case of campus rape. In particular, our talk about “culture” often represents a flight from politics. We chant that “politics is downstream from culture.” As a result, we miss the fact that politics is part of culture, and some of our cultural problems are political problems that require political solutions.

Let’s set aside for a moment our debates over “rape culture.” The transfer of responsibility for rape cases from police to universities, coupled with the universities’ fear of bad publicity and (even more) their fear of angering the Greek organizations that build their donation and student recruitment bases, has resulted in the creation of what I call in my article a “rape system” – a system, protected by a powerful coalition of forces, whose effect is to protect rapists and ensure they will not be prosecuted.

Once we think in terms of a “rape system,” we can move beyond fruitless debates over “culture” and develop tangible plans to do something. In my article I propose that the prosecutors’ office recruit someone with experience taking on organized crime to lead the creation of a special unit dedicated to handling rape cases. Such a latter-day Eliot Ness would have the credibility to change the political dynamic, putting the rape system on the defensive.

This solution is “cultural” in the sense that it is less about money and power than it is about credibility and plausibility. The goal is to make the dean with the frightened young woman in his office feel a sense of duty to urge her to go to the police; today, thanks to the structure of the rape system, he is more likely to feel a sense of duty not to do so. But this cultural solution is a political solution, in that it uses political action as the primary arena for reform. Law and justice are in this sense as “cultural” as arts and entertainment.