<p><a href=“UVa rector denounces Rolling Stone article; university vows changes to address sexual assault”>http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/local/uva/uva-rector-innocent-people-have-been-hurt-after-rolling-stone/article_61177b98-87ba-11e4-9d20-efbe4d7877d5.html</a></p>
<p>Finally, someone at the university criticizes Rolling Stone and its ‘callous indifference to the truth’.</p>
<p>Yes, I am glad to see this statement from the rector. This has truly been painful for people with ties to the university. The community was still reeling from the death of Hannah, when this article came out. The students have had no break from the media for most of the semester. It has been a very difficult time. </p>
<p>Well…while I agree with Hunt that we need a process that builds in protections for the accused, I also want female college students to be safe. The failure of colleges to protect them from sexual assault–a failure which definitely affects their education–is why this is a Title IX issue in the first place.</p>
<p>Moreover, many–if not most–college rapes are acquaintance rape. There’s nothing nice about being raped by a stranger, but it’s worse when you know the person who raped you. It’s even worse when you can’t avoid that person–because he’s your lab partner or your TA or in one of your classes or works at the same work-study job you do. Add to that hearing how he’s bragging about having “scored” with you, and it’s even worse. </p>
<p>I don’t know if it’s one in five or one in 7 or one in 10 or one in 25. ONE is too many. And while rape is definitely a problem for all of US society, too many of our daughters trust anyone who is a fellow student. There’s a reason why most victims are freshmen and most rapes occur during the first 6 weeks of school. </p>
<p>The fact that we know that, it seems to me, should give us some ideas to reduce the incidence of rape. How about we require any party over a certain size to have a campus policeman there? Not to enforce the liquor laws–or maybe to do so–but most importantly to stop something like what allegedly happened at Hobart & William Smith. If I see 10 guys “doing” a girl on a pool table, I’m going to question whether it’s consensual. And even arguing that it is, in what other semi-public place would this sort of thing happen without having it stopped as a lewd act? </p>
<p>How about we declare frat bedrooms off limits for female guests when alcohol is being served? How about we ban the sweet punch with grain alcohol-- Everclear?–from being served? And what if “jello shots” and beer pong were not permitted? What if hard liquor were banned from being served at parties? At the very least, it seems to me we ought to ban “vodka shot” contests and antics. What if we put video cameras into places where parties are held and pay people to watch the monitors. (Heck, I feel safer using my apartment building laundry room because I know the doorman can see the laundry room on a monitor in front of him a floor above me.) What if students who seemed drunk at a party were breathalized and anyone with a BAC 1.5x above the limit for driving was escorted home by the campus police?</p>
<p>I personally would prefer to prevent rape rather than adjudicate it. </p>
<p>“However in today’s world where 40-50 percent of marriages end in divorce”</p>
<p>No!! This is simply not true. Someone observed that the number of marriages in any given year is twice the number of divorces in that same year, and concluded erroneously that half of all marriages in divorce, when the true denominator is all existing marriages. The true divorce rate is much lower than 50-%. I hate to see this canard repeated. Carry on. </p>
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<p>The sorority woman who wrote about her ambiguous sexual encounter, and the NY Times writer who wrote about hers, clearly think that the issue is worthwhile talking about. What should the sorority woman tell her little sorority sister? Maybe she should say, Little, if you don’t like what’s going on, say, “Stop, I don’t like this,” be the confident competent woman you, instead of going along, lying there looking at your watch and figuring out the subject of your term paper in philosophy? Or what?</p>
<p>I am not sure it is wise to advice anyone to figure out the subject of their term paper in philosophy after 13 straight hours of drinking like this sorority woman did. You need a clear mind to think about such things. JMHO.</p>
<p>Heh. In vino not so much veritas? But I was advising her to stop devoting her muddled brainpower to philosophy and turn it toward insisting on sexual activities she actually welcomed.</p>
<p>She voluntarily went looking for satisfying sexual activities from a “guy with whom [she]’d had countless conversations about his inability to care about women”. I want to grow outdoor citrus trees in New England weather too.</p>
<p>This may be very quaint and outdated but I think the odds of finding satisfying sexual encounters for women are rather low when they are sleeping with “a guy who’d had anonymous girl after anonymous girl in and out of his bedroom since [they] were in the dorms.”</p>
<p>A steady, stable relationship not borne out of heavy drunken flirting over 13 hours straight is perhaps more conducive to satisfying sexual experiences in general and moreso for women. Just demanding it from “a notorious charmer with some serious bad boy in him that made him weirdly hot in a not-hot way” may not work.</p>
<p>^^yeah, well, she didn’t get what she wanted…that’s why all of us early 70s college women knew the words to the Rolling Stone song, You Can’'t Always Get What You Want.</p>
<p><a href=“The Rolling Stones - You Can't Always Get What You Want (Live) - OFFICIAL - YouTube”>The Rolling Stones - You Can't Always Get What You Want (Live) - OFFICIAL - YouTube;
<p>It all went downhill in the 80s. So let’s blame it on the 80s and don’t even get me started on Blurred Lines and Girls Chase Boys. </p>
<p>Went downhill with AIDS. And whatever else surged.
Oh, that isn’t the downhill you meant, is it? But we had racy songs in the 70’s.</p>
<p>Ah, I’m just being snarky and pragmatic, but i do think we send bad, bad messages in the media these days to young people. </p>
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<p>Agreed.</p>
<p>Although bad messages I can deal with because it is easy to point those out and give a moral contrast. It is the inconsistent, illogical messages, which lead to confusion and ambivalence to rules that ultimately leads to ignoring what adults say, in general.</p>
<p>As my DS puts it (paraphrased) - It is hard to take adults seriously when you tell us do not binge drink, remind us the drinking age 21, and that no alcohol is allowed in the dorms etc. (His handbook is very clear about this.) And then when I am walking with other students who are publicly drinking beers on campus in the open and with students who are clearly drunk, campus security and local police look the other way - all the while knowing these kids on the freshman quad are all underage, drinking and many drunk. </p>
<p>A lot of people are trying to tell students they must obey one set of rules over “here,” while passively promoting that is OK to break the rules over “there.” And people think that is a good example to set?</p>
<p>I wonder why it has not occurred to many that this double-speak and inconsistent enforcement must result in very few rules being followed properly, as different student subsets will selectively and conveniently choose which rules to they follow; just like the adults selectively and conveniently choose which rules they enforce. </p>
<p>If the students are not adhering to rules adults want, I wonder where the students learned that not all rules and laws matter? We reap what we sow or, as the students are teaching us, we cannot have it both ways. </p>
<p>I understand the push to make the drinking age 18; however, my point is more fundamental than this one issue. If we continue to look the other way in other situations, then not much will change in students not talking what adults say seriously, including what advocates say in regards to the new myriad of rules governing sex interaction between students. </p>
<p>The students ARE adults. And many of us know that binge drinking hard liquor is one of the leading causes of girls being victimized on college campus. It is much easier for the criminal sex offenders on campus when their potential victims have been pregraming vodka than when they have been having a few beers by the keg over the course of the night. Lowering the beer and wine age to 18 or 19 and putting a prohibitive tax on hard liquor would lower the rate of alcohol overdose significantly. Lowering the rate of significant incapacitation due to alcohol would lower the incidence of victimization. I’m not really sure you understand what’s going on in either case.</p>
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<p>No doubt.</p>
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<p>Sorry, but there is zero evidence for this statement. (A higher tax on all liquor would reduce overall drinking in teens/young adults, however, just as it has reduced smoking.)</p>
<p>The federal rules kicked in in the late 80’s, and look-see what is happening with the high schoolers:</p>
<p><a href=“Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) | CDC”>Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) | CDC;
<p>And binge drinking among the college-aged has also declined since that time:</p>
<p><a href=“http://responsibility.org/sites/default/files/files/College%20Drinking-Binge%20drinking-2013.gif”>http://responsibility.org/sites/default/files/files/College%20Drinking-Binge%20drinking-2013.gif</a></p>
<p>(The comparisons to Europe don’t make sense to me, since the college-going populations and societies --access to cars – are much different.)</p>
<p>I’m not in favor of the additional tax, but I would like to see the age for beer and wine lowered. It seems ridiculous that I can’t give my young adults a glass of wine technically without breaking the law and I know they’ve been sneaky-pete drinking for years. I actually think the binge drinking is a very “young” thing or at least that is what I’ve observed with my kids. Once they get into the upper years, lived off campus and then turned 21 there was a swing in their attitudes about alcohol. Once it comes out of the closet so to speak the kids relax and aren’t as furtive at age 20 as they were at 18…they don’t “need” to chug-a-lug. My kids were all 18 as seniors in high school so turned 21 (or will turn 21) by their junior year of college so that could make a difference. I have to admit I’d be nervous about sending a 17 year old who has been sheltered to a big campus. My third told me there were quite a few 17 year old girls on his dorm floor who went home at Christmas to tell their parents they now had MIPs. In the spirit of this thread they are fortunate that nothing worse happened to them.</p>
<p>Okay, I can’t believe this is turning into a discussion about how to keep girls from being raped while they are incapacitated by alcohol as though that’s just a necessary stage one has to go through at college. Hopefully, I’m misunderstanding something here. But, if I get really drunk and wander around town all day doing additional shots something bad will probably happen before I get home. tonight. So, I’m not going to do that. It’s pretty simple.</p>
<p>incidentally, UVA has released reams of emails with Rolling Stone and are finally calling the article a lie.</p>
<p>Many here argue, with scant evidence (Britain’s not a part of Europe now?) that lowering the drinking age will reduce college binge drinking. If college binge drinking were reduced by moving the peak binge drinking age to 17 instead of 19 (or whatever it is for college students) that would not be an improvement.</p>
<p>Bluebayou, about that last graph you posted, showing a slow steady decline in binge-drinking among the college-aged population, do you happen to have that data by race? Binge-drinking is higher in whites than in everyone else. The college-age population is steadily becoming more diverse. It could be that we have Simpson’s paradox here: binge drinking frequency going down in the overall population, but going up in every single racial group in the college-aged population. In fact, I’m betting we do have Simpson’s paradox here. Ten bucks to your favorite 501 c 3 charity if you can show me that binge drinking is going down in the 18-24 age group in most racial groups.</p>
<p>Also, bluebayou, we’ve been discussing college students here, since after all this is College Confidential. Are binge drinking rates going down in students at four-year colleges?</p>
<p>I think it’s a very good starting point for boys and girls. It is simple unless you’ve never, ever had a touch of alcohol in your life and don’t realize how so little can affect you so much. When it’s mixed with punch or cola and it’s vodka…you don’t even taste it and don’t even realize it until it hits you. Both sexes are inclined to do things they probably wouldn’t do if they weren’t drinking. We’ve pretty much all been there done that and most likely so have many of our kids - not the assault part, but the doing something you probably wouldn’t do sober.</p>
<p>Well, I understand that, of course. I did send a 17-year old girl off to a large university without much fear of her getting plastered at a frat party, though. Levels of naive vary, I guess.</p>
<p>Yes they do as does levels of parenting. Clearly you’ve done a good job in helping her grow into maturity.</p>
