While members of the Phoenix and a member of the Spee made themselves available to be interviewed for this story, members and presidents of most of Harvard’s remaining male final clubs—the Porcellian, the A.D., the Fly, the Fox, the Delphic, and the Owl—declined or did not respond to requests for comment.

Ad Board Secretary John “Jay” Ellison says he does not believe that final clubs are uniquely responsible for sexual assaults that happen on campus.

“I wouldn’t say the clubs, the fraternities or the sororities are the nexus of all our problems,” he says. “We’ve had problems from a Heaven and Hell party, from the Mather Lather, from the 80s dance.”

Instead, he says, places where students drink heavily may predict where sexual assaults will take place.

An average of 20 to 30 cases of sexual assault a year are reported to administrators, House officers, and specialists at OSAPR and University Health Services, and administrators say that the vast majority of them involve alcohol.

Phoenix president Byron T. Lichtenstein ’11 says he believes that the clubs are tied to the issue of sexual assault because the College depends on them to host parties for undergraduates.

“The clubs are a social space, and until Harvard has more social spaces there’s always going to be an association between the final clubs and being afraid of sexual assault,” he says.

PREVENTATIVE MEASURES

OSAPR Prevention Specialist Seth D. Avakian, who spends much of his time training men to be aware of and responsive to sexual assault, says that many final club members have become actively involved in improving safety at their clubs.

“The overwhelming majority of the guys in final clubs want to be able to throw a fun party where people don’t get hurt,” Avakian writes in an e-mailed statement.

Lichtenstein says that the club generally keeps upstairs bedroom doors locked, in part to prevent members from having sex in them, and members are fined if they bring non-family members upstairs.

Lichtenstein, who works with OSAPR and conducts Sex Signals training for freshmen, says that the club mandates that all drinks be poured out in the open and into empty glasses. Two Phoenix members participate in DAPA, he says.

But Lichtenstein notes that there is little consistency in prevention efforts from club to club.

Unlike some other final clubs, the Spee does not bar women from certain parts of their multi-million dollar buildings, according to Undergraduate Council President Johnny F. Bowman ’11, a member of the club.

“Women in the club are allowed everywhere men are, so there are no secret spaces,” he writes in an e-mailed statement. “Other things like the culture of the club and our membership are the strongest preventative measures but are the least tangible.”