<p>Well, what is your explanation for this whole mess? Mine is as reasonable as anyone else’s. She may be a very troubled woman.</p>
<p>There is no reason to trash this girl. She didn’t accuse anybody publicly for two years. She did not write the article. </p>
<p>Rollng Stone is a different story. </p>
<p>I am sorry I did not catch RS’s bs from the beginning. I guess I am just not smart. ;)</p>
<p>She told the story to Rolling Stone, apparently so well that Erdeley and her BS detector were fooled. She defamed a group of men on campus and smeared the university. Did she think the article would go unnoticed? Yes, she tried to get RS to not publish and RS’s BS detector wasn’t worried by that. And now she is incommunicado. </p>
<p>Not sure that I’d have as forgiving a view towards this Jackie <em>IF</em> the story turns out to be a total fabrication.
When contacted by the Washington Post after the Rolling Stone story hit, she continued to maintain that her story was true AND named a boy who turned out to be a UVa student who worked as a lifeguard (but wasn’t a member of the fraternity in question).</p>
<p>She was willing to accuse a specific person of a brutal gang rape - a crime that would have been a death penalty case when I was growing up. Fortunately that Washington Post didn’t publish this boy’s name and continued investigating. </p>
<p>Hopefully we will learn the truth over the next few days.</p>
<p>This girl is apparently both very troubled and convincing. I see no point in trashing her; she has enough problems.</p>
<p>Rolling Stone and Erdley, on the other hand, were reckless and irresponsible, and they deserve all the opprobrium we heap on them.</p>
<p>^^^
Agree that the truth will eventually rise to the surface. But in the meantime it appears that some posters have already drawn their own conclusions and hung this woman before all the facts have been established. They are doing exactly what they are accusing RS of doing. Making accusations without facts to support them.</p>
<p>From what I’ve read, Erdeley’s other stories are now being investigated for their truthfulness. Ironically, she was a classmate of another journalist, Stephen Glass, who had similar fabrication problems. U Penn if I’m not mistaken.</p>
<p>She needs to come out with a complete apology for all the damage she has done. Rolling Stone, too, although they face serious monetary damages and their lawyers are likely telling them to stay silent. </p>
<p>Just observing, that people have no trouble calling accused persons “rapists” without substantiation, but everyone’s hair gets in a knot when a poster calls a person who is lying to some degree or another and has been caught in that lie…a liar. That two me is a double standard again. If we are to to say that we shouldn’t call “Jackie” a liar until a report comes from the college investigation or the police investigation then we have no business calling students rapists who in fact have never been found guilty of rape by a university or the criminal system. People are made that other people are “trashing Jackie” well, think twice when you toss out the word rapist. </p>
<p>CF, Rapists definitely do not act with any honor at all clearly so your question is a valid one but the answer is in their bylaws. It is simply not part of their jurisdiction. Probably as blue mentioned because it is student run. Which may not make sense since the history of its creation is as follow: (from the U’s website)</p>
<p>"The Code of Honor</p>
<p>“On my honor, I pledge that I have neither given nor received help on this assignment.”</p>
<p>Established in 1842, the University of Virginia Honor System is the nation’s oldest student-run honor system and one of U.Va.'s most cherished institutions. Based on the principle that University students want to be trusted, the Honor System helps create and strengthen a school-wide community of trust.</p>
<p>This tradition of student self-governance began with an incident in the University’s early years. On the night of November 12, 1840, a masked student shot and killed John A. G. Davis, a popular professor of law. Sobered by the incident, the students agreed to a plan whereby they “vouched” for one another by agreeing to report misbehavior. In the same spirit, University faculty established an “honor pledge” on examinations, agreeing to trust students when they pledged that they had “neither received nor given assistance” on their schoolwork.</p>
<p>Today students at the University make a commitment not to lie, cheat, or steal within Charlottesville, Albemarle County, or where they represent themselves as University students in order to gain the trust of others. Because of this commitment, there’s a strong degree of trust among the various members of the University community. Students are also expected to conduct themselves with integrity and are presumed honorable until proven otherwise.</p>
<p>Offenses are presented to the Honor Committee, a student judiciary body. Students are recruited and trained by the Honor Committee to serve as advisors and to provide counsel. Students investigate honor allegations, assist and support accused students through the Honor System process, and work with accused students in their defense at trial. Honor jury panels are similarly comprised entirely of students. While anyone may initiate honor proceedings, the process is administered entirely by students.</p>
<p>U.Va. students benefit from the freedom and security provided by the Honor System; every student must agree to live by and support the spirit of honor. Applicants who are not prepared to embrace this freedom and accept this responsibility should not apply for admission.</p>
<p>For more information about the Honor System, visit <a href="http://www.virginia.edu/honor/“>http://www.virginia.edu/honor/</a>.”</p>
<p>Also, though, I think I posted before, in addition the Honor Code violations, per their bylaws, have a more difficult degree of proof required than sexual misconduct (Including Rape)</p>
<h1>2176 JHS:
</h1>
<h1>2190 Cardinal Fang:
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<p>Most people I know live in the world of half-tones and shades of gray - no black and white whatsoever. Group sex and stranger sex have come up on this thread. When I became a parent, I thought group sex and stranger sex were probably a normal part of growing up and the wisdom acquired from those experiences was probably a good thing, even though some of those experiences might be painful for a while. But I was thinking about consensual relations. And it is my impression from my own youth, and my observations since, that group sex experimentation usually happens in middle school and high school among a group of friends who have sincere concerns for each others well-being. They are looking for a safe space to experiment. In my mind it is the teen version of preschoolers playing doctor. This is a completely different scenario than the Steubenville case, and others, where girls are targeted & taken advantage of & publicly humiliated… over and over. I didn’t like to bring the okay group sex situation up before because there doesn’t seem to be universal agreement that events like Steubenville aren’t okay. We are still victim blaming.</p>
<p>I had to look up some dates to remember when my first friend died. (this goes back to the discussion of what we can recall and how, because this was a very significant event in my life) I can relate it to other events, where I was living when he got ill and where I was living when he passed away and where I was during the time he still thought he might get overseas to spend time with us. I might could have just looked up the obituary but that is just still too heartbreakingly sad for me. He got sick in late 1981 and the doctors at the research hospital were throwing up their hands in despair, not able to figure out what was wrong. By the time he died, we had a word for it: AIDS.</p>
<p>In 1987, one of my husband’s best buddies came to stay with us for a few days. He was single and had always been a player of sorts. After he left, my husband asked me if I had heard of single friends who weren’t beginning sexual relationships until they had gone with the potential partner to get tested. I had not at that point, but we both heard a lot more of this shift in thinking over the next decade, among peers who had had multiple partners.</p>
<p>Among my peer group, there was perhaps an over-emphasis on safe sex education for our own kids. Even after the drugs became widely available to keep people alive, it was a while to see what that was going to mean and we were desperately trying to protect our children from behaviors that had turned out to be deadly for some of us.But we never told them sex was a bad thing. We just told them to be very very careful.</p>
<p>And even though I think it’s true there is nothing new under the sun, I do think we ended up with kids very different than we were, some of this related to all that safe sex education and some of it related to making a safe place for our LGBT offspring. Because most of us were thinking we probably better parent as though our kids were LGBT and create environments that worked for those kids. And this was really difficult because we had zero models to follow and we messed up a whole lot. So now I see kids rejecting binary gender distinctions and looking at the world in ways I have a lot of difficulty wrapping my head around. And they err on the side of caution in terms of the feelings of others. Can it begin to be ridiculous? Maybe. But I really admire the world they are creating.</p>
<p>And my point from all this is that I do think education can help lessen the toxic sex situations, because I think that has already begun to happen, though it was pretty unplanned for the most part as far as I can tell. It was just the end result of trying to protect our own.</p>
<p>the end : )</p>
<p>Momofthreeboys, I am not proud of some of my earlier posts on this subject. I want to apologize to anybody who took offense to the posts. I want to apologize to anybody who I called a rapist without proof.</p>
<p>I know somebody who was raped and I bought the story. I should not have done that. </p>
<p>To my knowledge no specific person has been called a “rapist” in this thread. A fraternal organization has been maligned by Rolling Stone and we will see in time if that accusation holds up. But Jackie who is a specific and easily identifiable person, has been pretty much crucified. She may well have much to be accountable for, but for now we just do not have the facts. </p>
<p>“And yet, whatever Jackie’s confabulations were and are, the fact remains that UVa throws students out for plagiarizing every year, but they haven’t thrown out someone for rape in over ten years. Why is rape not an honor violation?”</p>
<p>If you knew anything about UVA, you would know that its famous Honor Code really doesn’t work so well. Lots and lots and lots of cheating goes unreported. Many of those accused of cheating do not get convicted. Mostly, because students are deterred by the serious single sanction of expulsion. Lots of due process concerns too, even though the offense is not criminal in nature… </p>
<p>If the Honor Code (which is supported by substantial resources and prestige at UVA) functioned well, the number of expelled cheaters would be much much much bigger.</p>
<p>That’s a cautionary tale for thinking that faux college courts are the appropriate hammer for this nail.</p>
<p>
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<p>We can’t “heap” enough on RS for their irresponsibility and mis-use of the public’s trust.</p>
<p>“Did she think the article would go unnoticed? Yes, she tried to get RS to not publish and RS’s BS detector wasn’t worried by that. And now she is incommunicado.”</p>
<p>I don’t know how dumb someone would have to be to think that she is going to give daily briefings to the press or something. Of COURSE she’s incommunado. Duh. Assume this was your daughter - who apparently did suffer something traumatic, the specifics of which may be in doubt or are getting reported differently by people who see only part of the elephant. Are you going to trot her out just to satisfy people’s curiosity? Or are you going to get a lawyer and deal with the relevant people at UVA and / or law enforcement?</p>
<p>I don’t know a lot about UVa, though I have several relatives both in my generation and in my son’s generation who went there. But because of this thread, I happened to surf over and check out the results of honor trials at UVa in recent years, reported with names redacted. The honor trials were mostly for accusations of academic cheating. As you say, northwesty, it looked like student panels were reluctant to convict other students, even when the described evidence looked strong and convincing. It may be a kind of jury nullification: students on the panel may think the accused was guilty, but also think that expulsion is too strong a penalty for the offense.</p>
<p>So it looked to me like apparently guilty people were not being punished in the way the Honor Code says they should be punished, namely with expulsion. But it may be that the Honor Code does function in other ways, by deterring people. If you cheat, you probably won’t get caught, and if you get caught you may well avoid punishment. But if you do get punishment, it’s expulsion. I don’t know how well that works as a deterrent, but maybe it works well.</p>
<p>Why welcome, al2simon! How fascinating that you would join college confidential JUST to post on this case.</p>
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<p>And it is really hard to “convict” one’s friends, housemates, dorm-mates, Greek bother/sister, band colleague, starting player on a D1 team, etc.</p>
<p>btw: perhaps UVa has a ‘cheating culture’…</p>
<p>Has anybody read the Liz Securro book? <a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Crash-Into-Me-Survivors-Justice/dp/B005MWJTVM”>http://www.amazon.com/Crash-Into-Me-Survivors-Justice/dp/B005MWJTVM</a></p>
<p>She’s the woman who was gang-raped at Phi Psi at UVA in 1984 – had told the campus police, the dean, etc. immediately thereafter – nothing ever came of it and then 20 years later, one of the guys (who was now in Alcoholics Anonymous) sent her a letter in which he admitted what he had done and tried to make it right. I guarantee there are those of you on this thread who wouldn’t have believed her. Absolutely guaranteed. </p>
<p>The points about accusing individuals are well-taken and heaven forbid any of our collective sons ever got caught up in this, but there really is a difference between publicly naming Joe Smith as your attacker and calling out a fraternity.</p>