And ds- if you have been replying at all to me I have not been able to see anything you have written either. I prefer discussing issues with people who at least see some grey areas and not stark black and white 
A college rape prevention program success at three Canadian universities:
[New York Times story](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/health/college-rape-prevention-program-proves-a-rare-success.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=mini-moth®ion=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below&_r=0)
[The study, ungated, in the New England Journal of Medicine](http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1411131)
I hate the fact that they have to train women how not to be raped. On the other hand, 10% of the women in the control group were raped in a year, and only 5% of the program participants. Iâd send my (imaginary) daughter to that program in a heartbeat. (The program used the SES-SFV survey as the follow-up survey. Thatâs the same one used in the Syracuse study.)
Women absolutely should yell and break chokeholds if someone is trying to rape them. But a woman who merely pled and cried was unambiguous: she did not consent, she did not want the sex, and the guy choking her to get sex was a rapist.
At barely 5â1 and 117 lbs. I am not sure I would even be able to do those things even if trained. I still think the inherent physical differences in strength and stature between men and women put most of us at an extreme disadvantage.
@HarvestMoon1, you could yell. Youâd still be at a disadvantage, and the blame for a rape falls squarely on the rapist who disregards lack of consent, but still, itâs better to be able to resist a criminal committing a crime than not to be able to resist.
And, yet again, 10% of the control group participants were raped in the year. Ten percent. And FIVE PERCENT of the intervention group. That is still terrible.
@CF, I am glad to see a program having an effect. @northwesty will be happy⊠As he should be.
These rape percentages are off the charts. What is going on? One reason I am using a 2 percent a year number⊠which is very highâŠis I have a hard time with percentages of rape of 5 percent a year. Much less 10 percent in a year.
At 2 percent a yearâŠthese schools should be in troubleâŠat 10 percent a year⊠these schools should be closing.
I forgot to say the Canadian study was done with first-year women, like the Syracuse study. The control groupâs risk of completed rape during the year (9.8%) was somewhat lower than the Syracuse groupâs risk (6.6% forcible, 9.6% incapacitated, some unspecified overlap), but in the same ballpark.
âlanguage is inherently ambiguousâ
Much language is indeed. Itâs why emoticons were developed for texts. Itâs why lawyers draft 20-page contracts when most of the rest of us think a simple three paragraphs would do. Itâs why translations, however good, sometimes just donât convey the essence of what was originally intended.
The more I look at this NEJM article, the more I find. The article is excellently written and full of nuggets of interest.
I hope the intervention is repeated with a bigger cohort; the P value for the effect of the treatment on rape rate was 0.02, higher than weâd like to see. If the effect is real, it will jump out in a bigger study.
For both the control group and the intervention group, women who had previously been raped were much more likely to be raped again. In the control group, of the women who said theyâd been raped before, 22.8% (!!!) were raped again, whereas 5.8% of the women who had not previously been raped were raped as first-year students. This could be because some women falsely describe non-rapes as rapes, or because women who put themselves in risky situations (by drinking) get raped, or because women who were already sexually active as high school students remain sexually active and are therefore at higher risk of rape than women who have more conservative sexual behavior.
There was a study done in the early 1990s (IIRC, couldnât find it) that illustrated this issue. One group of women was asked if they had ever been raped. The other group was asked to discuss what type of interactions constitute rape, then were asked if they had ever been raped. Group 2 had twice the reported rapes compared to Group 1.
Answers to the same exact question can vary based on the history of the conversation, which is why communication is variable even when the language is easily understood.
âI hate the fact that they have to train women how not to be raped. On the other hand, 10% of the women in the control group were raped in a year, and only 5% of the program participants. Iâd send my (imaginary) daughter to that program in a heartbeat. (The program used the SES-SFV survey as the follow-up survey. Thatâs the same one used in the Syracuse study.)â
Finally some common sense. An ounce of preventionâŠ
The results are actually even better than that for attempted rape. 2/3rds reduction in risk for freshman females!!!
âThe risk of attempted rape was even lower â 3.4 percent among women who received the training, compared with 9.3 percent among those who did not.â
The ROI on a program like this absolutely obliterates that of the Dear Colleague path, which doesnât really protect the girls and has the due process collateral damage for the guys. Thanks Obama.
THIS is what colleges should do, not pour time and money into an attempt to become the best possible amateur rape adjudicators. The overworked taboo against âvictim blamingâ needs to be pushed to the side.
The PD at my daughterâs school pitches their version of this program to the parents during freshman orientation. All colleges should do that. If they need to find funds to establish such a program, just take it out of the budget of the semi-pro college adjudicators.
Risk management > > > adjudication.
Now letâs find a way to reduce the 30% of college guys who would force a woman to have sex with them if they knew no one would find out. Any studies on that? Any ideas of how to identify the guys who are most likely to rape? This isnât a zero sum game, or a game at all. Does the risk of being accused of rape cause men to be less likely to rape? Someone is doing something to these young women. The women need skills to protect themselves for sure. But is there a way to change the behavior of the people doing it too? Or will âboys just be boysâ?
@CF, I am on an iphone. I canât read the study well.
Why would attempted rapes be a lower percentage than completed rapes? Are attempted rapes actually attempted rapes that were not completed?
3.4 percent of those who went through training experienced attempted rape and 5 percent experienced completed rape?
Add me to the group that would hate it if they got rid of college-enforced punishments and left it up only to the police and prosecutors.
Real scenario, and one that gets repeated often enough on campuses: sophomore girl gets incoherent drunk and returns to her room with her boyfriend. She passes out, he rapes her (bad enough already). He then goes and gets his fraternity little brother who also rapes her (now itâs downright sickening). She wakes up the next morning in bed with boyfriend and no recollection of the night.
A week later someone overhears them talking about it and turns them in. In northwestyâs campus scenario, no arrest, no punishment for the two because there are no witnesses, no evidence, and only a tenuous hearsay case. At least a college has the right to expel these two. Cases like this are the impetus of the Dear Colleague letter.
Not sure what youâre asking, @dstark. But the definition of âattempted rapeâ is a rape attempt that wasnât completed, same as for the Syracuse study.
We should be more skeptical of reports of attempted rape than of reports of completed rape. The SES-SFV survey has been validated: the researchers had women take the survey, and then those who reported some sexual aggression, and some who didnât report sexual aggression, were interviewed about the incidents that the responders reported. Coders looked at the reports, and independently decided how they would classify the incidents. From the abstract: "Coders viewed nearly all incidents elicited by the SES as reflecting some type of unwanted sex. Respondent-coder agreement for rape and coercion incidents was high, but low for contact and attempted rape incidents. "
That is to say, the coder usually agreed with the surveyed woman when classifying rapes, but did not necessarily agree with the surveyed woman when classifying attempted rape or other sexual contact. Unfortunately, the paper is gated.
http://pwq.sagepub.com/content/28/3/256
We should be clear about what the validation does, and what it doesnât do. It says when a woman describes an incident that she identifies as forced or incapacitated sex, the coder agrees that the described incident was forced or incapacitated sex. It doesnât tell us whether the woman is accurately describing the incident.
@northwesty - I agree 100%. Preventing sexual assaults should absolutely be the most important goal, and even relatively mild interventions like this program will do a tremendous job at keeping women safer. Frankly, anyone with a tiny bit of common sense, who hears actual cases as opposed to media portrayals and remembers their own college experience, and who isnât blinded by ideology would have predicted a similar result (though perhaps not a 50% reduction).
On the other hand, programs like this arenât going to be the entire answer. Sexual assaults will still happen, and colleges need a way to punish and remove offenders while ensuring adequate due process. But programs like this can help prevent many assaults from occurring in the first place. The combination of prevention programs (directed at both women and men), bystander intervention training, and mediation can do the best job of addressing a lot of the problems, particularly the âgray zoneâ cases. College adjudication and the police and handle the other cases, and theyâll do a better job with the more clear-cut incidents.
@CF, ok. You answered my question. Thanks.
What I hate about this intervention program is that it, potentially, redirects rapists to other targets. Yeah, if I kick him in the balls instead of saying no fifty times and crying, he wonât rape me, but he will rape my friend who says no fifty times and cries but doesnât kick him, because heâs a rapist.
Whereâs the intervention program that teaches guys that it shouldnât take a kick in the balls to prevent them from raping? Maybe there isnât one. Sigh.
Magnetron â your scenario is a weak straw man.
Colleges have been dealing with student discipline for centuries before Dear Colleague came along a few years ago. It deals with all kinds of misconduct, some of which is potentially criminal.
The flaw of Dear Colleague is that it is overkill. Semi-pro college adjudication should be secondary and ancillary to real police and courts. Dear Colleague sets up the faux college courts as a parallel and alternative court system. Thatâs expensive and stupid. And folks like RAINN and all those hair-on-fire Ivy League law school professors say the same thing.
How about this rule to get the two systems in the proper configuration. Expulsion is not an option unless the incident is reported to real police. Schools can still intervene, manage the situation and punish short of expulsion. To do that, schools wouldnât need to go full monty in trying (as the DOE OCR requires) to a fully parallel alternative system.
@northwesty, sometimes you just have to kick somebody out of the school.
Yale had 62 cases of sexual assault, sexual harrasment and stalking in a 6 month period. 1 person was expelled.
UVA did not expel anybody over a 9 or 10 year period for sexual assault.
How many students are really getting expelled and for what?
In that survey we are discussingâŠ@northwesty, the percentage of students who were raped after going through the program was 5 percent? This is after going through the program. I did not see a 1 out of 500 number.
This has one strange effect, though. Suppose we have a persistent boob-grabber. The first time he grabs the boob of a woman, he gets a stern talking to. The second time, he gets probation. The third time, he gets expulsion. So, we can expel the boob-grabber without going to the police, but we canât expel the rapist if the woman is not willing to press charges? I donât think the police want to hear about boob-grabbing. Do you?
I know of a case where a drunk athlete tried twice in one night to rape a student. He announced to his teammates that he was going to do it, and was foiled, twice, by other team members who were horrified by his plan, the second time after he broke into the room of his sleeping target. The target, an international student from a conservative culture, refused to go to the police. The college had a bundle of witnesses to this, and nobody supporting his version of the story. Should they not be able to expel the guy?
Suppose the matter goes to the police. When can the college expel? Can they expel the minute the police learn about the alleged incident, or do they have to wait for final disposition?