@Demosthenes49, you can replace my words rapist and victim with accused and accuser if you want. Doesn’t change my arguments. 
Filing fees? I am talking legal fees… All the legal fees. 
If the schools can’t handle cases as you wish… The filing fees are going to be chump change.
I didn’t ask you about a school’s ability to act.
@dstark: It does, though. If you start with a presumption of guilt it’s easy to justify punishment. We all want to punish rapists. If you start from a position of uncertainty, however, not only are you likely to be more objective but you’re likely to be more careful. It’s a lot harder to justify default punishment against the only potentially guilty.
As for legal fees, it varies. You don’t need legal representation to file in family court. They’re quite used to pro se litigants there. The more complicated a case you want to bring (such as for damages), the more likely you are to need a lawyer. That can be expensive or it can be inexpensive or free, depending on who represents you.
Also, you did ask about a school’s ability to act. Specifically, you asked whether schools had rights. I presume you were talking about the right to do something? I’m not sure how schools’ rights would be relevant otherwise.
@Demosthenes49, You are the rule maker. You don’t want schools, or should I say amateurs, to decide cases.
So…
“Do you think Stanford should not have the right to ban the swimmer accused of rape and other criminal acts from campus?”
I don’t want to put words in your mouth.
@dstark: I have no other answer than that it’s quite complicated. The school has a contractual obligation to each student. If it’s a state school it has additional, constitutional requirements. If it takes federal funding it has obligations under the various applicable federal laws. There is no blanket rule that applies in all instances.
nevermind…
I’m starting from the assumption that there are rapists. Your plan lets them stay on campus. The other two Vandebilt rapists, the ones that haven’t been tried yet: you are fine with those upstanding citizens staying on vanderbilt’s campus.
@dstark: I haven’t looked into it from the contractual side yet so I don’t know whether I think Stanford behaved appropriately. I’m not trying to avoid your question, I simply don’t want to give an answer that relies on considerations I haven’t made. I looked into the criminal stuff, but that’s much simpler than the contractual stuff.
@“Cardinal Fang”: My plan does not necessarily let them stay on campus, though of course it will let some through. So would your plan, for that matter. My plan only stops them from being kicked off campus by the school. It doesn’t stop courts from providing protective orders or lawmakers from enacting legislation. People who don’t go to college are far more likely to be raped than people who are in college. How come the criminal justice system is good enough for one group but not the other?
I am going to prepare for family court now.
I’m not starting with a presumption of guilt. I’m saying that after the school investigates and determines guilt, they can throw the rapist out. I know that the school doesn’t have all the powers the legal system has. In particular, they can’t incarcerate someone. But they have the right to make the campus safer for non-rapists by throwing the rapists out, and that’s what they should do.
@dstark: I’m not entirely sure what you mean by that. I hope you don’t actually have to go to court.
@“Cardinal Fang”: I’m not so much worried about the after-the-fact powers as I am for the process powers. That is to say, I’m not concerned that they can’t incarcerate someone, I’m concerned that they can’t subpoena someone. Imagine if people hadn’t come forward with text messages in one of the cases previously mentioned (I think it was the Occidental case but they’re starting to blur in my memory). A defense attorney could subpoena all text records. The accused in a college proceeding can’t.
Working on a woefully incomplete record is a really good way to make bad decisions. I see no reason that schools should have the power to ruin someone’s life based on their necessarily shoddy amateur detective work. The potential incidental gains offered by a school adjudication are greatly outweighed by their capacity for harm.
I don’t contend that there is no room for improvement in the processes and procedures of the college tribunals. I think we all looked at the Amherst case linked in another thread and agreed there were problems. But @Demosthenes49 you make it all seem so easy when you write:
And yet for decades women have not been getting justice when they go to the police with a sexual assault claim. They tell us that and statistics back them up. Rape is one of the most underreported crimes for good reason. So if we really want to point a finger at a system that is not working, I would start with the criminal justice system when it comes to processing rape cases.
I do agree with you when you say:
I don’t think any of these things assist women. Prosecutors do want to win cases so don’t prosecute ones that they think might be difficult. Problems with proof are inherent with rape so most are difficult cases. Police do want to close files and many women report they are faced with skepticism and little support when they go to the police. People just want these cases to “go away”.
@HarvestMoon1: We do not punish criminals to assist victims. Punishing criminals can’t assist victims both because more is involved than just the victim’s feelings and because no punishment can make the victim unvictimized. I agree with you that the criminal justice system could use some work. What no one has explained is why a group of inexperienced, untrained, relatively powerless amateurs with conflicts of interest can do a better job.
Just dipping my toe back into this thread a little bit. I currently work with and around a large number of criminal prosecutors. Many of you don’t seem to get that a lot of these people are in that job because they feel it is important, serious work. As @demonsthenes49 will tell you, many of the good ones, and most felony prosecutors in large cities are good lawyers, can make far more money on the other side of the fence. But they do what they do in part because they feel they have an obligation. Just like diversity coordinators and women’s rights activists on campuses. The difference is that the prosecutors can’t change the rules they have to play under because current political thought says that we should brand more men as rapists or sexual predators. To think that these people are not interested in putting rapists away evinces a real fundamental misunderstanding of the criminal system.
I think there is a real failure to appreciate the impact of the burden of proof on these grey area cases. Sure, in the sex with a 2 year old or unconscious female example it doesn’t matter, which presumably is why we keep seeing those situations posited on this thread. But in the case of two college kids having drunk sex that one regrets later it matters a whole lot. Why else do you think the OCR has been so adamant on insisting on changing the burden of proof to preponderance of the evidence? Heck, OCR launched an investigation against Harvard and Princeton, two of the very few school that could deal with the threats of litigation and loss of funding that OCR uses to press its policy points, because they wanted to use the standard of proof they used for academic fraud cases, clear and convincing evidence. You think that was done on a whim?
You can only believe such a thing if you think leaving rapists on campus is harmless, and you ignore the harm to a victim, future victims of the rapist who is left on campus, and future victims of other rapists who see that rape goes unpunished and they can rape with impunity, as rapists have been doing on campus for decades.
This is a fine solution if you don’t think there is a problem with campus rape, and all those women in all those surveys are lying.
Demosthenes, should an employer be allowed to fire someone because they believe he raped someone? Why does your reasoning not apply to them?
@“Cardinal Fang”: I’ve already said twice that there are plenty of ways not involving colleges to keep accused persons away from accusers. This is the third time, and the last time, I intend to say it.
How do restraining orders work on small campuses? What if they are in the same major? Does he get to stay on campus until he is convicted of rape?
Assuming that she accused immediately after the rape and he was eventually convicted, how long would that take? It was 19 months for the Vanderbilt rapists.
@“Cardinal Fang” : Restraining orders work exactly how you’d expect. They can require a certain distance, require a person not to enter certain places, require no contact, etc. If they’re in the same classes, too bad. The restrained person has to do something else.
But this is exactly what the Civil Rights Act as amended requires schools to do. Rape and other gender-based violence results in the very inequality that is prohibited by federal anti-discrimination law. To insure that everyone has equal access to education, schools are required to prevent and respond to reports of gender based violence. Title IX is based in civil rights law not criminal law. It isn’t a replacement for reporting to the police. So continually comparing it’s inadequacies to the criminal justice system does not make sense. Title IX is not regulated by criminal law nor does it impose criminal sanctions.
Title IX tribunals simply give students additional rights.
@harvestmoon, that is the problem. There has been no amendment to Title IX. We are talking here about administrative interpretation of existing law. Large difference. And it doesn’t really matter whether the sanction is administrative or criminal. The point is that there are arguably significant sanctions being imposed absent at least some of the due process protections which are inherent in the legal system.