I have no idea what happens at TransGropher’s frat, but my brother was social chair of one of the biggest frats at the now infamous Dartmouth, and these sober brothers at parties existed back then a couple decades ago. I even did that duty once or twice when I was visiting and flying the airplane back the next day. Partygoers back then did not notice or even care because these guys were not seen as sex cops. I do not think they are seen that now either - but I leave that current day answer to Trans.
Unless their role have changed, the guy at the stairs and the 6 sober roamers was there to stop random people from going though the brothers’ rooms and meeting chambers and stealing stuff, keeping things in order, and keeping the lights on and trains of the party running. The idea was not not have to the entire house become a mess, but the two downstairs floors only where the party was held.
The sober brother there were not seen a a nuisance and kicked out overly drunk guys, broke up arguments etc. However, he said no one stopped a brother from going upstairs with a female wanted to go with him. Additionally, their business was not to be some sex intervention cop and get in the middle of two people who are acting like they want to be together. Maybe that is their business now, but it was not back then. Now, the obvious extremely wasted girl, I know they sent a few of those home, just like they did wasted guys.
Unlike @Hunt, I do not see sober guys at UVA making any difference because many of the schools, if not most, cited for sexual assault issues already have sober patrol. Nothing new. A pure political play at UVA. But, it seems to make people feel better, so that works.
Call a taxi (if off-campus), accept campus-provided escorts (if on campus), walk back with female friends, make sure you don’t abandon your own inebriated friends to walk home alone or with possible predators.
You don’t have the right to rape a person because she walked in the wrong neighborhood, wore the wrong clothes, was flirtatious, was drunk, etc.
I made a wrong turn. I could have made the correct turn. Most people do make the correct turn. I drove thru a bad area at night. I ended up with a flat tire in an area where the homicide rate is very high and the gas station attendants are protected by bars on the windows.
That did not give anybody the right to rob me, or beat me or rape me or kill me.
If any if those things happened it was not my fault. If anybody said it was, that is victim bashing.
We aren’t talking about the UVA case.
This is the Oregon case. The girl was crying. Rapes do occur.
No one’s denying that rapes occur. Not all sex is rape. Not all sex is initiated and master-minded by males (in a girl/guy situation). A 19 year old frat patrol person is not going to stop what appears to be consensual activity.
If you park your car next to a notorious open-air drug market, and leave it unlocked with the keys in the ignition, that doesn’t give anybody the right to steal it. And I wouldn’t say it was your “fault,” exactly, if that happened. But I would say that my sympathy for your plight would be somewhat limited, and if you were my child, I would offer you some counseling about risk avoidance.
I think it’s possible to simultaneously not blame victims and to tell potential victims to take prudent steps to protect themselves.
Momofthreeboys, you know what I am talking about
I am talking about the Oregon case.
The criminal justice system doesn’t work.
These alleged attackers were not convicted. They weren’t arrested. The girl was crying.
I think the guys were suspended by the school. Momofthreeboys, do you think the suspension was out of line in this case? No arrest. No conviction… So the school should not have suspended these guys?
The prosecutor apparently believed that the fact that the girl was crying would not be enough to obtain a conviction given the totality of the evidence. He might have been wrong about this, but why would we assume that?
I do not recall saying that most girls throw themselves at guys all the time - nice changing of what I said - as usual you change the premise. I (and my DS) was talking specifically about the girls who go out and drink to the point of a stupor and go after guys. Those girls do lose inhibition and throw themselves at guys whether they mean to or not. But, some start out with the goal of getting a guy in mind, but then crap hits the fan later. And this is the scenario where a lot of these assaults on campus trouble is surrounding.
There is a reason there is no so-called epidemic of sober rape assault charges on campus and there is no epidemic of intoxicated guys assaulting sober females either. The overwhelming majority of these alleged and proved assault cases involve drunk females. If people want to keep conveniently looking past that pesky detail, go right ahead.
Therefore, the power is in the hands of a female to control her environment and well-being - do not purposefully become useless to yourself to the point where you are giving wrong signals to intoxicated guys and, in some cases, doing things that later you realize was just a bad decision. Intoxicated people do not take good decisions and it is not the responsibility of some sober monitor at a party to save you from your own stupidity.
Basically, I think it is nothing short of suicidal to purposefully make oneself (male or female) unable to defend yourself and unable to think straight and then think you are immune to the ills of the world. That is pie-in-the-sky thinking.
I think the justice system works quite well, most of the time. One of its features, though, is that people can’t be convicted of crimes unless there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. I don’t ever want to see that changed. As long as that is the standard, there will be some kinds of crimes that will be hard to prove. It’s a cost of liberty.
I’ve said before that I don’t think schools need to use a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard to impose punishments–I just think that there needs to be a fair balance between degree of procedural protection and seriousness of punishment. In my judgment, the balance isn’t fair when a preponderance of the evidence standard is used and expulsion with a “permanent record” of sexual assault is the penalty–especially if other protections are also absent, such as a meaningful opportunity to pose questions to the accuser (and others). So, in my opinion at least, there may be many cases in which it would be appropriate for a school to punish a student even if it would be impossible to get a conviction in criminal court. I just think the pendulum is swinging too far in terms of reducing protections for the accused in these situations.
Re: Letting a guy walk you home and the RAINN statistics:
I think it is worth noting that according to the RAINN statistics, zero campus rapes occur in a car or the bushes or in a non-residential building, etc. So unless a woman is abducted while walking home alone and forced into someone else’s campus residence where she is raped thus showing up on the statistics, the risk of being raped as a result of walking home alone seems to be non-existent. Of course, we don’t know what the risk of being robbed or assaulted or abducted or murdered is from walking home alone, and those are crimes also obviously worth preventing, so it still makes sense to take preventive measures like CF suggested, above.
I recall a poster pointing out that Title IX instructs that admins should not take crying by the female in the tribunal is not an indicator of anything. So this sounds consistent, at least.
Welllll… if she is very drunk and walking home, she suffers various risks. She might get lost or confused and blunder into something she shouldn’t be involved in. If she lives in a cold climate, she can freeze to death or fall into a frozen river, and unfortunately those risks are not zero: every year a student or two leaves a party, drunk, and ends up freezing to death.
I just Googled and found this [recent, awful case:](College student spends hours passed out in frigid temperatures in Duluth, Minn. – New York Daily News) a student left a party after consuming ten shots of tequila, passed out, and spent the night on a freezing porch. She’s alive, but she may lose her hands. She was drunk, confused, blundering around. And by the way, hypothermia can kill even in temperatures well above freezing, as outdoor sports lovers know.
One point on this idea that young men shouldn’t walk drunk women home for fear of false accusations: how many cases have we heard about in which the woman accused the man of rape and he claimed they hadn’t had sex at all? Maybe there are some, but that’s not the typical fact pattern. So isn’t the takeaway to young men that if they are walking a drunk girl home, it’s probably not a good idea to have sex with her, even if she seems willing?
Not unless she knew him very well and trusted him.
However, what I did tell my D was never to allow a guy to walk a girl she knew or even recognized from the dorm who was drunk go home with a guy without going with them. Leave the party too and if you are on a date or have a guy friend at the party, ask them to go with you. I think this is one reason it’s much rarer for an upperclass woman to be raped. If she gets smashed, she usually has friends who will see her home safely–at least if this isn’t a routine occurrence. New freshman don’t.
There were guys who tried to smash their way into my daughter’s place at Michigan. She lived in a house with a few girls a couple of blocks from campus. The guys tried to break the door down. Luckily, luckily, my daughter’s boyfriend was there at the time.
There was a huge fight. My daughter’s boyfriend got hurt. A back injury. But the attackers ran off. I think the guys were caught. Don’t know the rest of the story.
