Want to eliminate the scourge of frat culture? Lower the drinking age.

An explosive article published last week in Rolling Stone details the horrific saga of a University of Virginia woman who was gang-raped at a fraternity party, and subsequently found that her efforts to bring the attackers to justice only resulted in further suffering. The expose is the latest addition to a growing body of discourse on campus sexual assaults, a subject of furious recent debate, especially following California's passage of so-called affirmative consent legislation.

Highlighted by the article is a sorely under-acknowledged contributor to the culture of sexual predation in higher education: the dominance of Greek life. To counteract this, policy-makers can make a deceptively simple fix: lower the drinking age.

The individual whose story Rolling Stone recounted was assaulted after being asked to a fraternity party by an upperclassman. There, she ambled down to a dark basement, where scores of fellow freshmen women were plied with alcoholic beverages of dubious provenance. For anyone even remotely familiar with how social life operates on large college campuses, this should be an easily recognizable tableaux. The woman was then led into a private room under false pretenses, where a group of men did their despicable deed, egging one another on in some sort of depraved Greek initiation ritual.

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On campuses where fraternities have come to monopolize the social scene, unschooled freshmen often have no choice but to trek out to predatory zones to have a night out with friends. Students aged 18 to 20 cannot legally consume alcohol in safe, regulated establishments, such as a club or bar, so frequently expose themselves to these dangerous environments in which overzealous male upperclassmen dictate the terms of socialization.

And while university police might occasionally hand out a token citation to an especially rambunctious frat brother, underage drinking laws generally go totally unenforced — otherwise officers would be arresting an entire campus worth of students every Friday night.

One worthy step toward undercutting the stranglehold that fraternities enjoy on campus social life would be to simply lower the drinking age. Most people of common sense understand that it is absolutely ridiculous to bar 20-year-old adults from consuming alcohol; they are going to find ways to consume it anyway, as should be their right. This absurd predicament only causes them legal peril, while encouraging harmful binge drinking.

Too many college administrators, however, have been resistant to recognizing what everyone knows is plainly true: that college students want to get together and drink, maybe even act a little irresponsibly, and that this is OK. They should be allowed to do this without threat of police reprisal.

Unfortunately, lowering the drinking age to conform with basic logic and reason would require an act of Congress, a body that has repeatedly proven itself incapable of acting in accordance with logic and reason. So, reform on this score will require individual administrators taking initiative. Many have already done so: in 2008, more than 100 college presidents from some of the nation's top-flight institutions called for changing alcohol laws.

Regrettably, pressure groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) stridently oppose the idea. Who are lawmakers more likely to appease — pleasure-seeking college students or grief-stricken parents? These groups seldom adopt realistic attitudes toward mitigating the potential downsides of alcohol consumption, and instead demand that students completely abstain. Against all evidence, MADD advocates that police vigorously enforce underage drinking laws as a strategy to lessen alcohol-related risk. If this is a group taken seriously by politicians and law enforcement, we have a long ways to go, and students (especially females) will suffer needlessly as a consequence.

College students ought to have the ability to enjoy themselves in spaces where the threat of sexual manipulation isn't ever-present. This requires making available opportunities to consume alcohol in healthy, transparent environments. Fraternities provide just the opposite, and scolds like MADD who insist on sticking their heads in the sand only perpetuate the problem of sexual violence.

The constituency for reducing the drinking age isn't politically powerful, sadly; they don't hire lobbyists. The status quo will likely continue unimpeded.

Strengthening mechanisms for enforcement may have some salutary effect on campus sexual assaults, but there must also be concomitant cultural shifts if true progress is to be made. The current drinking age is one huge barrier to attaining any such progress.

Editor's note: On Dec. 5 Rolling Stone announced that "new information" about the original story had come to light showing "discrepancies" in the victim's account. The magazine said "our trust in her was misplaced." Read more here.