When words lose their meaning…google it.
@roethlisburger, isn’t @jonri’s point that institutions (private and probably public) can and do have their own rules for dealing with alleged misconduct separate from criminal law? I don’t think it matters whether her specific analogies fit well. I think it is pretty clear that college tribunals aren’t strong on procedural protections. What may be different is that the universities, by virtue of Title IX, have been told that they must have their own rules and procedures to keep students safe.
My initial post was a response to @VeryHappy’s statement, which does not seem to be the best strategy:
If punishing the accused is the objective (as opposed to other things that might in some cases be better for a student who said she was sexually assaulted / raped / forced to engaged in non-consensual sex), the parent of such a student ought to want her to pursue both university tribunals with public disclosure and criminal charges. Again, either the student discloses things in the university hearing that harm his defense in criminal court or he clams up in the university proceeding and receives a more serious punishment there. I take @Hanna’s point that it would be confusing to try to handled the university and the criminal process sequentially and further that there is no obvious advantage to doing so. Maybe the student allows the criminal case to go away after the accused is punished by the university.
I think @Hanna’s examples in her last paragraph show how mind-numbingly complex this is, which contributes to a low rate of punishment. How is a court or a university tribunal going to decide whether permission was or wasn’t given for a certain period or act within an otherwise agreed session of consensual sex? The permission may have never been directly vocalized and certainly was not recorded even if it were. In some cases, where past behavior has been bad, it may be easier to make a judgment but between to students both of whom seem otherwise nice, it may be very hard to make a judgment. In my own work, it is easy to find people who passionately express strong feelings about a subject and feel aggrieved when their view is somewhat delusional. Their passion and strong beliefs often make them persuasive. Without access to others who know the situation, they may actually be persuasive. Yet, what they are asserting is not factually correct. In these kinds of sexual assault cases, people who passionately believe their own line may both be persuasive and hard to detect as liars.
“people who passionately believe their own line may both be persuasive and hard to detect as liars.”
I don’t even consider them liars in most of these cases. Being wrong about the facts is different from lying about the facts (which means deliberately deceiving others when you know the truth). People remember the same events differently.
You mean like every word ever? Like how language changes over time? Like how “happy” once meant “lucky” or how “gay” once meant “happy”? Google it.
Yes. Sometimes it is ok when words lose their meaning and sometimes not. In this case I don’t think it is a positive thing and contributes to confusion.
It should have been extraordinarily obvious what she meant. If that wasn’t to you, it might indicate a serious problem.
I don’t think a young lawyer at the SEC could get his or her bosses to sign off on a trial if his or her evidence consisted solely of the uncorroborated testimony of a single witness, which is what many, maybe most of these college rape allegations come down to.
All those young whippersnappers should listen to you (and stay off your lawn) then!
If a woman has been raped and bears physical signs of it, such as bruising and DNA, she is surrendering her most valuable evidence if she doesn’t go to the police and get a rape kit done.
Of course, we all know that doing so is a horrible experience, no matter how kind the examiners, and that the immediate understandable reaction of many victims is the opposite, and that having a positive rape kit is no guarantee of conviction. But without that kind of physical evidence it obviously becomes more unlikely.
To me that seems like the main reason to go to the police/hospital immediately. Whether or not one also chooses to go to the school authorities.
There is an inherent contradiction between the PC and hookup culture on most campuses today.
Update: Stanford has fired the lawyer for speaking to the NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/sports/stanford-lawyer-sexual-assault-accusations.html
Maybe not…but the single witness could file a FINRA arbitration hearing against the broker and brokerage firm and would get a hearing. Moreover, if the allegations included losses above a certain amount, the claim would be on the broker’s record for the next 10 years.
But an accused rapist can transfer from school to school without the second college having any knowledge that the student was accused of rape.
Really awful that they characterize criticism, echoed by others, as “not having faith in the system” and then using that excuse to fire someone. Someone who was working for half of their usual pay too.
Many jurisdictions have an extensive backlog of rape kits. I know two young women who have had a rape kit done after they were raped by an assailant they could identify, and they reported the situation to the police. Neither case has resulted in a criminal charge.
I work in a university. Rape on the college campuses does occur, and it is a very serious problem. The cases that I have been informed about (many more than the two above) have not resulted from withdrawal of consent in the middle of an action, nor from a misunderstanding, nor from a false accusation, nor from an overly loose usage of the word “rape.” They are actual rapes. And essentially nothing has been done about them, not even under the relatively weak “preponderance of the evidence” rules suggested to Title IX officers in the “Dear Colleague” letter.
I think it is important for CC posters to be aware that other people on the forum may have close friends or relatives who have been raped. Unquestionably. And where no charges have been filed, despite reports to the police. My closest lifelong friend was raped at age 16 outside her suburban home by an armed assailant who was never caught. Some of my students have been raped by assailants they knew and identified, but nothing much has happened. In one case, the students were shifted to separate sections of a course, but that was all.
Brokers and firms protect themselves from false accusations in FINRA cases using extensive documentation. Let’s imagine what that would look like in this context:
College girl: let’s Netflix …
College boy: just get this 40 page agreement notarized. My attorney charged $600 per hr, but specializes in this area of law.
College girl: this one notary advertises 24/7 availability
College boy: activities within the scope of the agreement need to be videotaped as an official record in the event of arbitration.