Stark – one comment on the idea above that training some girls will just shift the attacks over to the untrained ones.
If the campus rapists are predatory serial offenders, then yes I see how that individual risk reduction would not result in an aggregate risk reduction.
If the JAMA study is correct about the non-serial thing, then that probably isn’t a concern.
Pat – agree that what appears to be effective may not seem fair or politically correct. Since training girls to protect themselves is most likely the ticket.
Harvestmoon, a lot of the Canada training is in how to recognize and get out of dangerous situations before they get out of hand. Also, it should not be overlooked that practicing the techniques, including the verbal techniques, is invaluable in helping young women not to panic and freeze when they are in danger. Women are socialized to go along and be nice, but young women can practice ways to recognize when it’s time to stop being nice and start yelling and kicking.
One of the things the training does is it has the young women explicitly think over their sexual goals and expectations. This, again, helps them recognize when they are beginning to be in a situation they have decided they don’t want to be in.
Bottom line-- it seems to work, at least in the study we know about.
I’ve said it before, but this attitude frustrates me to no end.
A handful of college presidents/provosts have gotten themselves in hot water recently for daring to say that sexual assaults are correlated with victims being drunk,* and so therefore it might be helpful in not being victimized if students didn’t, you know, get drunk.
Cue immediate charges of victim-blaming and the like.
Yes, I know that victim-blaming is a real thing, and it’s pernicious and toxic, and there are real potential dangers here with this approach. But the perfect should not become the enemy of the good—and getting an imperfect start is a way to buy time to let more comprehensive but also more time- and effort-intensive approaches take root.
So as long as this doesn’t become the end of things, yes, by all means, do what we can right now, and if that’s training women** in behaviors that help them avoid victimization, let’s do it.
Yes, and perpetrators even more so, I know. I’m just talking about the one side of things here, though.
** It’d also be good for men to be taught the same skills, but I understand that getting things started is a numbers-driven thing, and women are more at risk, so that makes sense as the place to start.
There should probably be some analysis to which groups of teens (and college students too) commit the most and the least rape. Is it more associated with privilege? poverty? team sports? fatherless homes? religion? race? IQ?urban/suburban/rural? east/west/north/south? liberal/conservative? educated/low education? parental alcoholism or drug use? recent immigrant (and from where) or long time american roots? Set political correctness aside and let the chips fall where they may. Each of these groups might need to be approached in a somewhat different manner. At foundation I would think that frank sex ed at an early age that includes age appropriate messages regarding sexual boundaries is a step in the right direction. I thought the cartoons someone posted earlier were easy enough for all ages to understand and appreciate. Teens are expert and tuning out information. Remember the “This is your brain on drugs” ads and the “Just Say No”?? Use focus groups to see what gets through.
I honestly do not think our daughter’s generation has any problem advocating for themselves, setting limits or being assertive. Butler’s book was written almost 25 years ago. I think she was addressing women who are now in their 40’s and 50’s who might have been raised by mothers, such as my own, who chose a more traditional route rather than a career. But don’t kid yourself - even those mothers pushed their girls to be different than themselves and to take advantage of the opportunities that were opening up for women in the workplace.
I am just having a hard time connecting self-advocacy and limit-setting to a situation that basically comes down to physical prowess. You could put D or I up against any man intellectually and we would more than hold our own. Put either one of us up against a man physically and we lose hands down. We can be as assertive as we want but when push comes to shove, brute strength wins. There are just innate biological differences that put many women at a severe disadvantage.
I think the Canadian effort is admirable and it might very well be effective for some women, especially those with physical stature. If nothing else it raises awareness.
@CF re: your post #2142. Yes I understand but I thought what was different about the Canadian program was the inclusion of the self-defense training. The colleges usually include all the other things you mention in sexual assault awareness seminars during orientation and throughout the first semester of freshman year.
I didn’t think the typical program included practice. And I didn’t think the typical program was as long as the non- physical part of the Canadian program, either. That’s the impression I got from the Canadian paper; it wasn’t that they compared the typical training to the typical training plus physical self-defense training. Rather, they compared the typical program to a completely new kind of program they developed that included self- defense and a lot more new stuff. But who knows which part of the training made a difference.
“What do you think society should do with young guys so they don’t rape?”
Stark – we should do whatever is proven to work. But I’m not aware of anything in particular that has been proven to work well. Are you?
Sure we need to change society/culture and educate people and change attitudes/behavior. But how does one do that exactly?
In the interim, I’ll try to get my daughter the kind of training from the Canadian study before she starts college. I also will do what I can to keep her from getting blitzed out drunk during first semester. And I won’t spend any time doing due diligence on her college’s title ix processes.
@northwesty, you may remember…it took Edison how many tries to get a lightbulb to work? Was it 10,0000 tries?
You try thngs. That is how you figure out what works.
Education. Bystander programs. We start educating at younger ages. We train our kids how to behave.
We are going to have to punish some guys.
I notice when there is a highway patrolman waiting at the side of a freeway, drivers slow down.
Did you get blitzed out drunk at college?
A friend of mine’s son just graduated from San Diego State. He told his father there are guys that try to get women blitzed so they can have sex with them. And then he told his father guys dn’t really have to do that. There are willing women. Yet some guys still will try to get women blitzed.
HM: It sounded to me more like assertiveness training than physical defense training. The WashPo stories linked to earlier in this thread and other stories included women who wanted to say No but did not and then just went along with it, and some who froze up and were victimized. Helping women understand dangerous situations and how to overcome their fear of saying no will help in some situations. But you are correct that it would not help in situations in which the man seeks to physically overpower the woman.
Similar training for men would help as well - what are the situations in which they may be committing assault even if they don’t think it is.
It is very positive to see something that is working - at least in this one study in Canada.
As to 10-11 year olds, most boys that age are too young to ever think they would be in a situation where they might commit sexual assault. I think 13-15 is a key time. Seems like starting too young would end up like DARE in which kids seem to get it in 5th grade but it has no impact on their drinking or drug use once they get to HS.
I’ve known therapists that work specifically with criminal SA perpetrators. A teen class or a course will probably not help with these guys. Many have deep childhood trauma often including their own sexual victimization. When they start therapy they are angry, self-justified and feel zero empathy for their victims. It takes patience skill and compassion to help them move past their defenses to where they can grieve their own wounds. And that’s where some ability to feel for others starts.
It makes me think that a piece that’s probably missing in education programs would be empathy. Can that, should it be addressed in the class room? Ideally it’s taught at home. But that doesn’t always happen.
Then there are budding alcoholics, drug addictions and other psychological disorders which simply preclude much empathy. All that to say you can only do so much and that there will unfortunately always exist some ambient rate of SA.
“I honestly do not think our daughter’s generation has any problem advocating for themselves, setting limits or being assertive…I am just having a hard time connecting self-advocacy and limit-setting to a situation that basically comes down to physical prowess.”
I see enormous problems in this area among young women, and because of those problems, it doesn’t come down to physical prowess. I have no doubt that some attacks involve a man holding a woman down and overpowering her, but it’s not the typical story of college sexual assault. (I have zero cases where that’s the alleged victim’s version of events.) It’s much more common, in my experience, to hear a story from a woman that goes, “He exploited my vulnerabilities,” whatever those may be. I was too drunk to make good decisions and he should have realized it; I said no earlier in the evening and he shouldn’t have made another pass later; I could have gotten up and left his dorm room, but for whatever reason I did not.
We’ve talked about several women in this thread who were never hit, never threatened, never pinned – they froze, they gave up, some never said no in the first place (hence the shift to “yes means yes”). The Canadian study shows that teaching women better ways to handle these situations works to stop rape. A lot of would-be rapists can be deterred with screaming or even getting up and going home; you don’t need to beat them in a fistfight.
Surveys show that many of these situations involve a young man who thinks that what he is doing is not rape, even if he is incorrect. Screaming or slapping him makes him aware that it IS – and that you’re the kind of person who’s going to make him pay. Evil predators will keep going after that point; a drunk boy who was making dumb choices will stop.
Consider that many of these assaults happen in college dorms. Help is literally less than 10 feet away and will come running if they hear a cry for help. Many of these incidents are extra heartbreaking because they happen in situations where help was so nearby.
There’s no reason to think that male and female Canadian college students are any stronger or weaker on average than American students. If you can train girls to not freeze up, the Canada study says two thirds of the rapes won’t happen. TWO THIRDS!!!
I now realize that the self-defense training that one of my daughters received at school may not have really been the best kind. It was more of the stranger rape type of self-defense class. More relevant would be the class that teaches her how to identify that the attacker is most likely to be a friend and classmate, and that teaches her to loudly yell “STOP RAPING ME!!”.
Or maybe just a firm STOP…especially if it’s a guy that a woman has been climbing all over all evening but really the issue isn’t women learning to fight back against some knife wielding guy that jumps out from behind a tree, it’s about become assertive, learning to say no, making decisions quickly and all those sorts of things and frankly as I said on another thread another day about this very thing, it’s all good “stuff” for women to teach themselves to do.
One of the three plaintiffs in the case against UC Berkeley is a good example. There were four undergrads from a student political club crashing in one bed. At one point the boy next to her began to massage the plaintiff’s rear end and thighs. This continued for 30+ minutes while she was awake but “frozen.” She didn’t roll over, or get out of bed, or tell him to stop, or kick backwards, or waken one of her other friends (in the same bed!), etc. The plaintiff states that this experience, and university’s lack of response to it, was so traumatizing that her grades fell, she had to switch to an easier major, she was unable to complete her assignments, etc.
None of that had to happen. But this young woman did not know how to say, “Quit it, buddy.” Surely we can fix that.
At work we yearly have to go through sexual harassment avoidance training. It’s a series of videos with common scenarios where managers or employees could run afoul. These are relative to California AB 1825. You are quizzed at the end of each section. For example, you may need to identify if the scenario is in the green, yellow or red zone in terms of appropriateness versus possibly being interpreted as harassment. Perhaps something similar could be brought to bear for college orientations. (Or do they do this already??)
If the Canadians have come up with a 12 hour program that has the potential to reduce campus rape by 2/3rds, I don’t think anyone would argue with giving it a try. But I must admit to some skepticism with these types of headlines – and I am usually the eternal optimist. I am just not confident that one can alter the individual reactions of women faced with a stressful situation in that short amount of time. Risk assessment and role playing can be valuable, but behavior modification is a long term endeavor. Human behavior is pretty complicated.
My own view is that when alcohol is involved, which is most often the scenario in the cases we discuss, all bets are off. Perception is altered and decision making is impaired. Intoxication impairs nearly every aspect of information processing and the ability to interpret situational cues. Not sure that much of anything these kids have learned through sexual assault awareness programs can even be recalled, less put into practice. I think a meaningful solution to reducing campus rape has to include some element of monitoring alcohol consumption especially for those first year students. Universities don’t like this approach because it is such a monumental challenge.
but really the issue isn’t women learning to fight back against some knife wielding guy that jumps out from behind a tree, it’s about become assertive, learning to say no, making decisions quickly and all those sorts of things and frankly as I said on another thread another day about this very thing, it’s all good “stuff” for women to teach themselves to do.