She was asleep. Someone else’s boyfriend crept in, started kissing her and tried to get in bed with her. She shoved, slapped and punched him.
She came up to him at a party and sat in his lap uninvited. It seemed socially inappropriate to push her off. He knew he didn’t want to have sex with her, but she was persistent and he didn’t say no. His friends left him alone with her. The sex didn’t happen because he couldn’t get it up.
He saw a woman he knew slightly when he came home to his fraternity. He chatted, then went up to his room to go to sleep. Fifteen minutes later, the woman, very drunk, appeared in his room. He told her to leave, but she wouldn’t. Eventually he led her out into the hall. She shouted, “Stop it! Stop it! I don’t want to have sex with you!”
She was staying overnight at a female friend’s house en route to an appointment the next day. At the end of the evening, the friend started kissing her. She didn’t want this and didn’t reciprocate. The friend told her to stop being such a prude, kept kissing, and started touching her in other places. After a while the friend stopped, and again called her a prude.
She was kissing with a guy, with no plans to go farther. He drew her into another room and began groping her under her clothes. She tried to push his hands away. He was trying to draw her into a different room, and she was trying to push him away, when her friends came in and rescued her. "There was no question about consent,” she said. “I said ‘no’ and he didn’t care.”
At a nightclub, she suddenly felt “like she was having a stroke.” She believes her drink was drugged so a guy could rape her. Her friend reached into her purse, pulled out her cellphone and called her roommate to come get her.
She was at a party with a friend. The friend was very drunk and needed to vomit, so she helped her to a bathroom, remaining in the adjacent bedroom for a short time. A man came in, dragged her clothes off, and threatened to strangle her if she screamed. She managed to squeeze his balls hard and escape.
She was drunk at a party. A man ambushed her and began groping her forcefully. He threw her down on the bed. Somehow, she managed to get away.
She was drunk at a house party when she “realized” she was on a couch, making out with a guy who had his hand inside her underwear. She jumped up and ran away.
She returned from a bar, very drunk, with a friend. She told him she didn’t want to “go very far.” She was passive. He went farther than she wanted.
I would say that 1-9 are clearly assaults if the descriptions are accurate. Many are attempted rapes. I can’t tell from the description about (10); I don’t know what she means by suddenly realizing she was on a couch making out. I’d say, probably not an assault. I say (11) is unclear, but also probably not an assault.
None of these are trivial incidents of incidental contact.
No doubt the incidents described meet the technical definition of sexual assault. But there is pretty big span of behaviors being described by the single phrase “sexual assault” here.
Speaking as a man, if #2 and #3 count as sexual assault then I’m absolutely sure the survey is wrong because the rate of sexual assault they should have gotten should be more like 80% over the 4 year of college, and that’s of males !
2 - A girl sits in your lap and ... yada yada yada ... you find yourself "forced" to attempt intercourse with her?? Come on. The guy could have put a stop to it anytime he chose to. A girl sits in your lap and wriggles around? That type of sex play happens all the time in a college environment. If he didn't like it, he needs to develop the social skills to disentangle himself without causing the woman to feel rejected. We can't gear up the full machinery of Title IX and/or the police for this kind of stuff unless we also want to live in a police state. That's also why I don't have much patience for those who think policies should treat men and women 100% completely the same.
3 - A drunk girl is horny and decides to hump your leg and wants to fool-around or have sex?? Hell, by that definition I've been sexually assaulted 50 times. Even now, as a middle-aged man, I've been sexually assaulted in the last three years, and I was at the party with my wife ! But am I going to wreck a woman's marriage and family by accusing her of sexual assault? No, she was just drunk and acting stupid. Sex is a primal instinct. What's being described in #3 ... It's just life.
I’d probably put #3 in the category of a minor incident even if it’s not incidental contact.
Just like the Eskimos supposedly have 20 different words for different types of snow, I guess we now need 20 different phrases to describe sexual assault. Otherwise, I think we’re just talking past each other.
A drunk girl comes into your bedroom uninvited. You think it’s minor that someone bursts into a person’s room in the night when they’re getting ready to sleep? Is that something that usually happens to you, @al2simon? If a guy came into my bedroom uninvited and tried to have sex with me, I’d think it was considerably more than a “minor incident.” I really disagree with your assessment of this one, @al2simon, and I’m surprised you think it’s minor.
I agree that #2 is more arguable. The guy did not consent (at least in his telling). I don’t like the “he could have gotten up and left” defense. She was assaulting him. Whether he could have gotten up and left doesn’t change the fact that she was assaulting him. The incident seems less bad than the other ones, a lot less bad, but sexual contact requires consent, and she didn’t have it.
@al2simon, consider what you just said, but reverse the genders. I suspect you’re falling into the trap of believing that men and women should be held to different standards when it comes to sexual behavior.
i think you two, @CF and @al2simon need to continue reading. Or start at the end. Most of the rapes are in the latter stories.
Just reading the male assaulting female stories…I read approximately 20 stories where there were rapes. 10 definitely were not. Maybe 8-10 were questionable. I am not saying I have each story exactly right but I am close enough.
@dstark, I was just listing the non-rape assaults, not the rapes. I got bored after #11, but if someone wants to summarize the rest of the assaults for our discussion purposes, that would be good.
I wondered whether the assaults were tiny little incidents, or incidents I wouldn’t call assaults, but most of them are clearly assaults and serious. I continue to be amazed that @al2simon would think that bursting into someone’s bedroom at night and trying to have sex with them is not a serious crime.
CF, that is serious. I liked using penetration as the guide though. There are enough penetration stories. Or a story where a woman wakes up in a strange bed without pants. Or a woman wakes up without pants and a quarter falls out of her vagina. I listed that story as a rape.
@dfbdfb - I absolutely do think they should be held to somewhat different standards. If that makes me a “sexist pig”, then all I can say is Oink, Oink :@) :@) .
Of course it doesn’t happen to me now that I live in my own house unless you count my wife. But I think we have different mental images here based on our own experiences. The environment of a fraternity house is different, CF. At least at the college I went to, most guys didn’t keep their bedroom doors locked unless there was a party (I didn’t usually). Roommates, friends, come in all the time without knocking. This was his friend, so she probably just went up the stairs and opened the door to his room where she’d visited him before.
What would be an arrestable offense in normal life is just routine behavior in a college environment. And a girl entering a guy’s room without knocking is very different than a guy entering a girl’s room (again, in a college environment).
I’m not saying what she did was 100% ok, I’m saying I’d call it a minor incident. In fact, as the story indicates, the biggest problem a guy might worry about is that the girl would feel rejected and start spreading false rumors about him to deal with the fact that she’d been rejected (a minor version of this happened to me in college; the lesson I learned is that a woman’s sexual self-image is very important to her self-worth and I needed to be very sensitive to this if I didn’t want trouble and didn’t want to lose a friend). A false sexual assault accusation is always a (distant) possibility too.
dstark - No doubt there are lots of rape incidents in the stories. I just think using too broad a definition of “sexual assault” isn’t helpful for anyone.
Personally, when I read these surveys I mostly just focus on the statistics for completed rapes. Much easier to not misunderstand what’s being talked about.
If you guys think #7 is a clear assault, no wonder you think the police are sweeping rape arrests under the rug.
@“Cardinal Fang” , as I read #3, it doesn’t say the woman “burst” into the guys room. It says she appeared. We don’t know if the guy was in a single, or a suite. We don’t know if there were other people in the room, if the door was shut, lights out, etc. This is assumedly college, and probably at a frat house. While having someone other than my wife appear in my bedroom now would be a significant shock, having someone appear in my bedroom of the apartment I shared with five other guys in college certainly would not have been. Nor was it unusual for people to be walking around frat houses during a party.
As far as #1, I actually witnessed something very similar. One of the guys with whom I shared an apartment was “that guy”. For whatever reason, women just loved him. It used to really tick me off One night, one of his several admirers crawled through one of two open first floor windows of our apartment, both of which led to the two bedrooms. This particular co ed picked the wrong window. She quietly got undressed, slipped into bed, and kissed one of our other roommates who got scared witless. Five minutes later we were all laughing about it. I have no idea if it was a similar situation in this case, but my word it was funny then. Who knows what would have happened today.
PS - the woman and “that guy” have been married for almost thirty years.
Men look differently at sex than women look ar sex. This is one reason education can really help lessen this issue.
Years ago, Most of the guys I knew, if they were plastered out of their minds, and a woman had her way with them, would think this episode was a badge of honor.
“This woman had sex with me while I was so wasted. I am irresistable. I am God’s gift to women!”
I heard crap like that. Well words like woman or women weren’t used.
7 was an assault if she was in fact drugged, not otherwise. In a word where dealers sell date rape drugs in the 500 rape economy size, lots of drugging is happening.
“If she was drugged” being the operative language. My point being, if you are an investigator for a sex crimes unit, what exactly are you expected to do with a complaint like that?
In the MSU case referenced in the other thread a witness came forward and told MSU that the accused had asked them where he could get “roofies.” Certainly uncovering something like that in a criminal investigation would be very relevant.
@al2simon, how should we think about this, then? I’m pretty sure that most women would regard an episode of some drunk guy coming into their room uninvited and attempting to have sex with them as much more than a “minor incident.” I guess this is different from a drunk woman coming into a guy’s room and attempting to have sex with them, because the guy knows and we know that (in most cases) she can’t physically overpower him, but he can physically overpower her. And maybe because we know that a substantial percentage of guys, though certainly not all guys, would welcome an uninvited assault?
But should men not have the right to not have women assault them, just because we know that (in most cases) the guy can fight her off? What about men assaulting men? What about if the person who came into the guy’s room and started to have sex with him was a guy? Is that a minor incident too?
Shouldn’t guys have the equal protection from the laws, and an equal right not to be assaulted? Shouldn’t the guy who is assaulted and doesn’t want to be assaulted have the right to justice? Wouldn’t it be strange to say that women are allowed to assault men, but men are not allowed to assault anyone?
@al2simon, also what if this woman who came into your room and started having sex with you was a 6’2" Olympic weightlifter who could overpower you? Still a minor incident?
@dfbdfb Um, investigate what? That the girl “feels” like she was drugged? You want the police to go to whatever bar she happened to be at and try and talk to each of the employees? Or are you saying that because she “feels” like she could have been drugged you want the cops to run out and arrest whatever guy she points out and bring him in for questioning? Sorry, probably not going to be able to get a warrant on the information in front of us. Plus, my guess is you would not be in general support of a star chamber type legal system.
@HarvestMoon1 Yep, that is information that is outside the scope of the report referenced in this case, but yes, that is the kind of thing that the police would look into. If the woman involved in the MSU case goes to the police and says there are people who can tell you this guy was looking for “roofies”, then it gives the police an avenue of inquiry. In that instance, the police will want to talk with the other witness first, find out who they are, how the subject of roofies came up, etc., etc. Given that she seemed upset that the police didn’t send a couple detectives out to talk to her in the first place instead of regular officers, I wonder how an investigative interview would strike her.
So now the woman was raped? The text that was copied and pasted into this thread, that you believe constitutes a “clear” assault, says
There is no indication of physical contact at all. So, on the facts as reported, no I wold not expect the police to do anything unless I brought in a sample of the drink that I felt was drugged. Adding the kinda important and additional fact of non consensual intercourse, then yes, I would expect the police to investigate.
