University of Chicago…
The survey questions were not about the last 12 months but the whole time a student was at the school.
These numbers are high. Very high.
Here is my entire post @“Cardinal Fang” It seems obviously clear. The first block quote was my quote of another poster’s thoughts.
I don’t ascribe views posters have not expressed to that poster, and I would appreciate the same curtesy
Stark – a 3% chance of rape for your daughter at UM per year is astronomical. 3% per year is actually the stat that I’ve thrown around (which many disagree with) for the incidence levels in prison and the Congo!!! So let me ask you, in your gut do you really think UM was such a dangerous place to send your kid to?
I don’t think you were oblivious or a bad parent. So how to explain these rape stats and how good parents like Stark (and me) are OK shipping their daughter off to school each year? My guess is that it comes back/down to the data and the labels and the language being attached to varying behaviors.
When you think about prison or the Congo, you’re likely thinking about the most typically thought of version of rape – forcible penetration of an orifice by a P. You can’t see it from the UM survey data, but my guess is that P in O rape is a minority portion of the rape incidents. I think that many campus incidents on campus are finger in O. I don’t think that many of the Congo or prison rapes are finger in O incidents.
I don’t know what to think about that distinction. Fingers clearly meet the legal definition of rape. As a heterosexual male, I don’t get the appeal of cop-ing that kind of a feel without permission. I have no understanding of how these incidents would typically occur. Is it heavy petting where the guy goes further than permitted and then it is stopped by the victim? I also have no idea how the victim might feel about that kind of incident as compared to other types of rape.
But I think that is what is going on in the numbers and is an explanation of how Stark could feel that UM is not the same thing as prison/Congo. For example, in the Tulane/Loyola survey, more than half of the rapes reported by the author were for incidents where the victim specifically said she had NOT been raped. I’ve been wondering what could account for such a huge but seemingly illogical aspect of that data.
Thoughts?
Ohiodad, the “jerk hitting on you too aggressively” was the guy who raped the woman after she said no repeatedly. That was the context of Hanna’s statement: that when he started “unbuttoning her blouse” to remove her clothes (the too-aggressive hitting-on), she should have done something other than freeze up. But she froze up, and he raped her.
It may not have been the intent of your statement-- I don’t think it was. However, it was the context of the statements you were responding too, and that’s what I was trying to point out: the too-aggressive hitting-on that you were talking about ended up in a rape, and somehow that fact got minimized, after successive comments, to a mere “affront.”
My primary objection is that you cut out the post in between @hanna’s and my own, and then cut the language out of my post that made it obvious I was responding to @dfbdfb, and not commenting on the story in the Washington Post. But enough.
I’m sorry, @Ohiodad51. I didn’t mean that you thought that a rape was a mere “affront.” I never thought that’s what you believed. I’m sorry that I quoted you in a way that indicated otherwise. It’s my fault for not being clear.
I don’t know that it’s clear that they (Sulkowicz’s actions) were gender harassment (and thus under Title IX), though. Some other sort of harassment? Quite possibly, but I don’t know New York’s laws on that at all.
The 3 percent number is an approximation of forced, the threat of force and some types of incapacitated nonconsensual sex.
@northwesty, I think your questions are legit. They are good questions.
What is going on in the Congo is not the same as to what is going on at UMich and other schools. But what is going on at these schools is still rape.
These are acquaintance rapes. This 3 percent of goings on at these schools are not acceptable. My mind does have a hard time getting around these numbers and I worked with numbers for a living.
Speaking for myself, I tended to think of rape as some stranger beating the crap out of somebody. At least I used to think this way. A friend’s daughter was raped at a school. Kind of changed everything for me.
Where I live, there is something like 1 rape per 10,000 females a year. My daughter probably did have close to a 12 percent chance of being raped at UMich. I had no idea when I sent her. My daughter was in a sorority. She lived in a house with several females. Guys did forcefully try to break into her house while she was in the house. People freaked out. She freaked out. My daughter is pretty strong. She is not a wimp but she freaked out. Her boyfriend stopped the guys. The guys were eventually caught and arrested. Who knows what would have happened if the boyfriend wasn’t there? Nothing good.
Was my daughter safe at Mich? I don’t think so. I was worried when I sent her to Mich.
Others can judge the risk.
“when a woman is raped and in her stress she doesn’t know how to fight back”
But she isn’t freezing from being raped. She is freezing from him taking her sweater off. This then progresses to a totally preventable rape. I don’t think seeing your child covered in blood is, or ought to be, parallel to a college classmate taking your sweater off. If both those situations are equally terrifying, then something has gone haywire along the line.
Hanna, Hanna, Hanna, the brain does what it does. We don’t always have control of our brain. We just don’t.
"This then progresses to a totally preventable rape. "
IF the victim is 100% sober and IF the victim realizes what is happening.
IT IS TERRIFYING, especially if you aren’t “schooled in the ways of the world”, TO HAVE SOMEONE START TAKING YOUR CLOTHES OFF WITHOUT ASKING. IT IS ASSAULT.
My first thought was "this guy is taking my clothes off, what the hell is his problem? He just kissed me forcibly and I did not respond at all with kissing him back or anything at all (I was too drunk to say anything). YET HE IS TAKING MY SWEATER OFF. It becomes like a third person event.
It strikes me as extremely questionable that seeing your child covered in blood and having someone you do not know well, or know in a friendship capacity, taking off your clothes without your assistance or asking are not equivalent. I think maybe you need to look at whether you or us are haywire.
“It makes me squeamish that some young people get sexually involved when they do not have the ability to make mature decisions about their actions.”
I was almost raped before I knew I was “sexually involved” - I guess him taking my clothes off after pushing his way into my room without my permission or invitation was me “choosing to be sexually involved”.
I thought a guy was nice enough to walk me home after I had been drinking, after we had talked a bit, totally non-romantically or even remotely anything other than “what classes are you taking?”. Yes, I probably thought “hey, this is an Ivy League school, and I didn’t even kiss him or vice versa, he’s just walking me home, what a nice guy!”.
He pushed his way into my room, I was not trained to not open my door when someone walked you to your door. You go in your room, and they leave (but he didn’t). There was not even anything to say goodbye to, no kissing or banter or “let’s see each other again”.
Why do some people think that campus rape is all about “she let it go too far”? I would say more cases are about substance abuse and assuming people are reasonable and civil human beings.
On the other hand, programs that train both men and women not to drink too much, not to take drugs to much, not to do either without having “safe friends” available to help you out, not to let ANYONE in your dorm room under any circumstances (yet how can that be accomplished?), not to go out at night alone, etc. etc., have been shown to decrease campus rape statistics, even while educating the students to report sexual assaults.
In my case, I was drinking alone for pretty much the first time, and almost died from the amount I drank. I have warned my children to eat while they drink, when they are old enough, and try to drink from a bottle or can they open. The “unmeasured cups of grain punch” were what almost killed me (and almost made me a rape victim).
That it was preventable (if it was) doesn’t make it not a rape. And in any case, one’s reason can’t instruct one’s emotions. My knowing I shouldn’t be afraid doesn’t make me unafraid, because my reasoning wasn’t causing the fear in the first place: it’s a different place in the brain, not accessible to reason.
@“Cardinal Fang” thanks for the post and I appreciate the clarification. No worries.
“Hanna, Hanna, Hanna, the brain does what it does. We don’t always have control of our brain. We just don’t.”
Really, people can learn to get up and walk away when someone is mistreating or disrespecting them. It takes education. It takes ownership of their body. It takes self-esteem. But it does not take any special brain function. We can do better by our young women so that they do not passively sit by in these situations.
“one’s reason can’t instruct one’s emotions.”
I don’t expect it to instruct one’s emotions. I expect it to instruct one’s behavior. Feel scared and walk away. We can teach it. Young people can learn it. Heck, people can learn how to respond and protect themselves if they are ON FIRE. Someone just has to show them how.
Yes, totally agree with you Hanna. Plus it’s behavior that will help them in so many ways as they enter the workforce and really need those skills.
I am all for education. Education will help people. Men and women. I believe we will have fewer rapes with education.
There are times when the brain is going to shut down and we should respect this too…because it is real.
If we listen to strories from educated people, trained people, some of these people suffered and their brains shut down. They froze. They couldn’t control this. They just froze.
@Hanna, there are bright people on CC who were attacked and they said they froze. They didn’t freeze as a strategy. They just froze.
Tell that to my hands on the brake levers, when I’m facing a steep loose downhill. My reason knows that going faster down that steep hill is safer, but it is unable to instruct my hands away from the behavior of braking so I don’t go so fast. I don’t think that reason can always overcome emotions and the actions the emotions prompt. And I have the scars to prove it.
However I do agree that educating and role-playing with young women will help them in intimate situations.
This is all true, @Hanna—but you seem to be assuming that (a) everyone can and will have access to such education and development of self-esteem, (b) such education can ever be comprehensive enough that people won’t hit anything they’re unprepared for later on, and, perhaps biggest, (c) such education will always take hold.
Given my experiences trying to teach students something as straightforward as the technical difference between the consonant sounds at the ends of the words sun and sung, I’m very, very skeptical of (c) at the very least.
We don’t have to assume any of those three to think that offering rape prevention education to young college women is a good idea.