Weak straw man = imagined unlikely or irrelevant scenario, which is why I used a real-life scenario where I know two of the three people involved.
My question for you @northwesty is, in this real scenario from my past, what would you imagine the proper response should be? It seems to me you are arguing for a system where nothing would happen to these two young men.
In the example I gave, of the drunk athlete, I know one of the team members who was at the party where the rapist announced he was going to rape. This is not hypothetical. I don’t know how unlikely it is, but it happened.
OK new rule.
No expulsion unless (i) reported to police or (ii) multiple incidents.
It fundamentally is a bad policy to purport to have the college system be an available alternate universe. Lots of very thoughtful and smart analysts say that.
If you significantly reduce the circumstances in which schools would have to consider expulsion, you then also can significantly reduce the due process required. Remember, the victims get worked over by all that due process too. Dear Colleague doesn’t seem to be working for the gals or the guys. Both sides just sue.
Analogize expulsion to being the academic equivalent of the death penalty. Nebraska recently banned capital punishment after determining that it was just bad policy trying to enforce it – too slow, too costly, too hard to get right.
I want to know how many students have been expelled for sexual assault. This seems to be a big issue…not necessarily the assaults but students getting expelled.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/05/stanford-sexual-assault-sanctions-gap-year_n_5454189.html
Stanford is changing its policies.
More…
So the drunk athlete gets to stay at the school, then? Even with all those witnesses? They had this guy dead to rights, but the victim was from a culture where she’d be shamed by reporting.
@northwesty, I have a friend who is a lawyer who deals with death penalty cases. He deals with death penalty cases where the convicted should not be on death row.
I am supposed to see him on Sunday. I will let him know that expulsions from school are similar to death penalty cases. 
CF- That’s really mostly not true for several reasons.
First, in a college environment many (probably more than 40-50%) of the completed rapes involve two people who already have a sexual relationship. In these cases, the guy isn’t serially targeting one woman after another, so prevention programs aren’t merely shifting risks from one woman to another.
Second, if you believe that it’s freshmen women in their 1st semester who are at greatest risk of being raped, then prevention programs that do a good job of keeping them safe probably won’t shift risk (though this conclusion depends a bit on why it is that freshmen women are at higher risk).
Third, even if there is risk shifting in some cases, the risk isn’t shifted 100%; i.e. it isn’t like being prevented from committing one rape is going to cause the rapist to commit two rapes. In my opinion, the vast majority of the risk isn’t shifted - even for pure stranger rapes. There is still a net reduction in the number of rapes that occur.
I’m trying to reconcile that with the results over time of the Canada interventions. We see a jump in total number of rapes, and total number of attempted rapes, in the first week and a half. Plus we think that first-semester women are particularly at risk. Aren’t these young women mostly being raped by guys they hadn’t had sex with before?
We think that first-semester women are particularly at risk. Is it also true that first-semester women are likely to report? If these first-semester rape victims are naive and unlikely to report, then your experience wouldn’t generalize to them, would it?
CF- Perhaps I don’t understand your point but here’s how I’m thinking of it (it’s obviously over simplified but you’ll get the idea). Completed rapes are the union of three non-overlapping sets: A=those involving freshmen women, B=those involving (non freshmen) women and a sex partner, and C=acquaintance/near-stranger rapes involving non freshman women. Type-A and Type-B rapes are a big proportion of the total. Look at the three categories one by one:
Type A) The NEJM study shows the program reduces the number of rapes in set A. By definition, this won’t result in risks shifting to A or B. Risks can only shift to C. But we believe non-freshman women aren’t as at high risk (for whatever reason), so I’m arguing that the guys who are prevented from raping freshman women mostly won’t be able to turn around and rape non-freshman women.
Type B) I was arguing that prevention programs will also reduce B-type rapes and there won’t be any risk shifting outside of or within this category since these cases involve two people who have a sexual relationship.
Type C) I was arguing that after a thwarted C-type rape the potential rapist mostly just gives up for that night, and whatever he was going to do on a later night is at worst unaffected.
So, I think that prevention programs reduce the number of rapes in all three categories.
That may be true, but I’m assuming the survey data the NEJM study used for freshman women is reliable and their conclusions are valid.
I tend to agree with your view of things in cases like this. However, I can see the other side. You do realize that guys lie to other guys all the time about their “conquests”. If the young drunk girl did not have a memory of the two rapes, and there was no evidence, then outside of a confession I am a bit reluctant to say they should be expelled.
al2simon, I was questioning your assertion that about half of all college rapes involve people who previously had sex with one another. If more than half of all college rapes are rapes of freshmen, and freshmen rapes are usually between people who weren’t previously intimate partners, and half of all non-freshman rapes are of intimate partners, then the total would not be what you said.
I thought that you might believe that about half of all college rapes were between intimate partners because you didn’t get many reports from freshman women, even though they are most likely to be victims.
That’s true only if all freshman women undergo the intervention. Though I think all freshman women should have the training, I wasn’t believing that all freshman women would have the training. And in that case, the rapists would just go off and find a more vulnerable freshman.
The interventions did not reduce the level of “coercion,” where a person finally succumbs to having sex after being pressured or verbally coerced. I don’t call that rape, but it could possibly be correlated with intimate partner rape. So it may be that the programs do not reduce the level of B-type (intimate partner) rapes. It would be good if they did.
@dfbdfb I agree that language is inherently ambiguous. I prefer to make it less so when possible. One of the statements you made with which I completely disagree is when you said that survey questions should not aim to reduce ambiguity.
Let me give you a few examples, and some background.
My wife left me a note today to “dry the clothes in the washer”. I think I know what she meant but I am literally not sure. I doubt she meant for me to actually try to get the clothes to dry be either keeping them in the washer or putting them there. I assume she meant for me to take the clothes out of the washer and dry them. But how? Saying “take the clothes out of the washer and dry them” would be less ambiguous but still not specific enough. Does she want me take them and line dry them, or use the dryer? It is a legitimate question because she complains that some of her stuff shrinks when dried in the dryer. So maybe she could be even less ambiguous and say “put the stuff from the washer in the dryer and dry it”. Still too ambiguous for me because we have an energy monitoring system and we save money by using appliances at off peak hours. Does she want me to dry the stuff immediately? Maybe she needs it for a lunch appointment. Maybe she wants me to dry it later in the afternoon when the rates are cheaper. This would be better: “please put the clothes from the washer in the dryer and dry them once the rates go down. Get them about 80% dry before taking out my sweaters, etc and line drying them so they don’t shrink”. That is unambiguous and much preferable to the original ambiguity.
The survey questions should aim in a similar fashion to be as unambiguous as possible. I believe that and find it hard to believe that a linguist such as yourself doesn’t agree.
Now, some background. I have spent the better part of 4 decades as a TV consultant going around the country and working with stations on things like reducing the ambiguity of their writing. We measure what viewers want by using surveys and then implement plans, as well as trying to predict what trends will be (hence what I said a few days ago about not being a statistics expert, but being around a lot of them at work. I think I have a pretty good idea after 40 years of how surveys are supposed to work, even though that is not my expertise).
One of the things I run into constantly are sentences that do not convey what they were intended to convey. In one case
[quote]
a woman was raped by a visitors center/quote. Maybe it is deranged visitor centers that are some of these serial rapists we talk about I wonder if we could cut down on the rape rate by building fewer visitors centers.
The sadder thing is that when I showed the producer this sentence they didn’t understand what was wrong. They said that the woman was raped near the visitors center. I said I agreed that the woman was raped near the VC but that that is not what they said. They said she was raped by the VC when actually, they were raped byan unknown assailant. Days later the station got a couple of emails saying that the writers would no longer watch that station because of the poor writing, and used that exact example.
I can’t tell you how many times I have heard/read “the victim was shot in the 1500 block”. As you well know that is not the best sentence structure. Will the viewers know what is meant? Probably. Would it be better written as “the victim was shot while in the 1500 block”? Of course. I can see a 5 year old watching the news and asking their parents “mommy, I know where a person’s arms are, and I have heard of legs, but where is their 1500 block? Does it hurt when you get shot there?”
You should know as well as anyone that words have specific meanings and that we have everything from grammar to syntax, etc for a reason.
I also have a problem with some of your statements, like the one about IQ. You sometimes say things that make no sense. Is IQ a perfect measure of intelligence? No. You could bring up points like the CHC theory of intellect, etc and point to some inherent flaws in IQ tests. Instead, you make it sound like a broad IQ test has no bearing on a person’s abilities to understand and interpret things at a higher level than someone with a low IQ.
I’m not aware of anything on the second question (and I’m not sure if it’s possible anyway), but on the first one, bystander intervention training does appear to have some positive effect, though the size of that effect is unclear.
@TV4caster wrote: “One of the statements you made with which I completely disagree is when you said that survey questions should not aim to reduce ambiguity.”
When did I say that? I’m pretty certain I didn’t. I may well have said that it’s not necessarily important to reduce the ambiguity of certain survey prompts (whether because they were actually intentionally ambiguous, or distractors and therefore unimportant anyway, or reliable enough that the ambiguity is unimportant), but I’m pretty sure I never said that surveys should be ambiguous. If you could provide a reference, I’d appreciate it.
(Or is this an example of the inherent ambiguity of language?)
Also, you wrote: “I also have a problem with some of your statements, like the one about IQ. You sometimes say things that make no sense.” You then go on to make it sound like I was dismissing IQ testing entirely. This is not true. I was dismissing a reported score of 170, which, as anyone who’s looked into IQ testing knows, is an unreliable score due to issues of scoring compression (e.g., ceiling effects), not to mention that it’s simply impossible for most IQ tests to result in a score that high (most cap out at around 140 or 160), with the exception of dubious, incompletely normed and verified tests like those offered by the Prometheus Society.
CF - I think you’re right about my estimate of 40-50% being too high. I took at quick look at the Krebs survey and the Fisher (2000) survey. Their estimates are more like 25-30% of completed rapes occur between dating partners / ex-partners / spouses, and some of these couples won’t have had sex with each other before the rape. Like you said, my view might be skewed because freshmen women are less likely to report. Maybe better numbers are more like 45% of completed rapes are of freshmen women (not sure it’s over 50%), and another 20% involve intimate partners?? I guess this would mean about 60-65% of completed rapes are in these two (possibly overlapping) categories - still quite a lot, and effective interventions would really help solve a chunk of the problem.
Here is the quote to which I was referring.
I take that quote to mean that you feel it is ok for survey questions to be ambiguous. I (and my firm) prefer that our survey questions are as unambiguous as possible.
Is it ok in your world if 80% of respondents (eg “the vast majority”, to quote you) interpret a question in the same way? In my world/work it might be ok, but it is not preferable.
Which do you think is more representative of a given population’s views, one where 80% of respondents interpret a question the same way, or one where 90% of respondents interpret it the same way? I/we prefer questions where “all, or nearly all” respondents interpret the questions in the same way. We get that by being as precise as possible and minimizing the amount of ambiguity as much as possible.
The Cal Poly climate survey asked, for people who experienced “unwanted sexual contact,” when it occurred. The majority of “unwanted sexual contacts” occurred freshman year. That’s suggestive, but not dispositive, about rapes, because unwanted sexual contact could mean a lot of different things.
“I want to know how many students have been expelled for sexual assault. This seems to be a big issue…not necessarily the assaults but students getting expelled.”
The due process load isn’t determined by the number of students who actually get expelled. It is determined by whether the case being adjudicated might possibly involve expulsion. Because you have to set up your procedures at the beginning not the end.
If the possible punishments are less severe (no academic death penalty) then the due process required is less. Traffic court can operate differnetly than capital murder court.