Yeah, OK, fine, I agree.
I’m not unsympathetic to the impulses that led to the OCR letter. If one becomes convinced that colleges aren’t taking sexual assault seriously, that they’re letting perpetrators off with a slap on the wrist (or even less, if they are athletes), that they are discouraging women from seeking real punishments because of bad PR, etc.–what are you going to do? The options for federal intervention are limited, and Title IX was one way into the situation. I think they could have handled it much better, and gotten better results, but I can see why they followed the course they did.
Hunt: Are you willing to share whether it is your opinion “that colleges aren’t taking sexual assault seriously, that they’re letting perpetrators off with a slap on the wrist (or even less, if they are athletes), that they are discouraging women from seeking real punishments because of bad PR, etc”?
Re Post 4186:
I too thought that is what already happens. More importantly though, the gross procedure is not the issue I believe that is causing contention.
What I believe is causing contention is these proceedings, informal and formal, are adhoc, change from school to school, an attorney or other professional representation is not necessarily guaranteed for the accused, and, in general, the accused seems to be entering a weighted guilty until proved innocent arena.
In juxtaposition, honor committees are viewed very differently. There are no issues, of which I am aware, that honor committees do not function fairly and well at schools. No one is saying that not enough people are being thrown out for plagiarism etc. and that the process is unfair. However, just the opposite is being said about the tribunals.
I am not comparing plagiarism and cheating to sexual assault, but I am comparing how both are seen as handled procedurally by the schools. And in many respects, given the gravity of the charge, people do expect even more safeguards in place for the accused in assault tribunals.
As a whole, I do agree with the post. However, until the details of the internal tribunal practices at schools are consistent, transparent, and seen as fair to both parties, I suspect very little will be resolved, as to the current discussion.
I think some colleges have done this, but I can’t say about all colleges, or even colleges on average. For me, the disconnect is in thinking that the problem was with the procedures being used by colleges, as opposed to whether colleges were taking the issue seriously enough. I guess the concept is that by forcing the colleges to revise their procedures, you also send them the message that they’d better start taking the issue more seriously.
But here’s another thought experiment. What if all the colleges adopt the procedures that OCR is requiring, and the rate of punishments doesn’t change very much? What would that mean?
I agree it is impossible to lump all colleges together. Campus cultures differ in my opinion.
I have no idea how to answer the thought experiment. A while back Cardinal Fang wrote about what conviction rates truly mean and I’m still trying to grasp that concept. I hope she will respond.
or maybe you’ll just tell me what you mean, which I’d greatly appreciate. I am trying here.
It could mean a lot of things, but conviction rate is not the only thing we want to look at. To understand why, let’s make up some numbers. Suppose at College A we have 20 students a year accused of plagiarism, and 10 of them expelled. Suppose we change our procedures, and the next year we have 200 students accused of plagiarism and 100 expelled. The conviction rate is exactly the same, but we’ve just thrown out ten times more students for plagiarism.
We need to look both at the conviction rate, and at the raw numbers of students punished. And we need to make sure the procedure is convicting the guilty and not the innocent.
(As an aside: Awc says, " No one is saying that not enough people are being thrown out for plagiarism." This is way off the mark; many people say that students are plagiarizing right and left, that in the Internet age plagiarism is easier, and that many students don’t even accept that unambiguous plagiarism is plagiarism. I myself was an online TA for an online course, where I came across some obviously plagiarized papers: I had the papers, and I had the web page, a company website of all things, that the text was lifted directly from. The students who “wrote” these papers, and other students, argued that it was not plagiarism to take the text from the company website and insert it directly without attribution into the paper. Several different students did this, and many other students defended them on the online forum. I would like to see a lot more students punished for obvious plagiarism.)
A few points Re: are schools taking sexual assault seriously enough
I read the Krebs study as indicating about 11% of female college students will be raped during their undergraduate years (i adjusted the raw numbers in a way I consider reasonable that I could detail, but I don’t want to digress on this). Let’s assume this is about right - I know some disagree.
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if this is true we have a massive under reporting problem. I know this is one of the issues the OCR is focused on. Take the Yale data. By my count it shows 13 rape reports over the entire 13-14 academic year. The Krebs study would indicate about 140 actually occurred. Having 90% of rapes go unreported is a massive under reporting problem if true.
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when schools are put under Title IX investigation the rate of reporting often doubles or triples. This is what I remember. I’ll try to find the cite. The OCR would claim that this is pretty fishy and somehow reports are being suppressed.
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again suppose the 11% figure is about right. Does this mean that about 11% of our sons commit rapes? People try to skirt around this conclusion by claiming the “average rapist” has 4 or more victims. If this is true, then the moral duty to expel is high.
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Stanford’s policy was generally to suspend a student “convicted” of rape until the victim graduates. In essence, they are just separating the two. Are they really taking the issue seriously enough? They seem to believe that a rape is a one-time mistake.
The 11% number strikes me as a bit high but not unreasonably so. It translates into 2.4% of women being raped each year if you assume a 4.5 year average time to graduation. I can’t say that 2.4% per year is obviously wrong.
I’ll now give another take on Hunt’s hypothetical. Suppose that a college adopts all the OCR rules. They change their standard of proof, and they do all the other stuff. And then nothing changes: they don’t get more accusations, and they don’t punish more students. Then I would conclude that the standard of proof doesn’t make much difference, but they might want to look at going back to their old procedures if they were easier or cheaper, since the new procedures aren’t making any difference. But even then, I’d want to see if the new procedures really weren’t making any difference: are the accusations under the new regime the same as the accusations under the old regime? Are the same types of accusations resulting in punishments as they used to?
If we believe the 11% figure, we’re faced with two alternatives, both unpalatable. Alternative 1: we accept the Lisak claim of serial predators. We don’t say that 11% of our sons are rapists; we say that a few rapists are raping many women. In that case, colleges are doing a terrible job of getting rid of men who prey on our daughters.
Alternative 2: We don’t accept the Lisak claim. We don’t believe that most rapes are committed by serial predators. Then we have to believe that 1 in 10 of our sons are rapists. That’s a pretty horrific idea.
^THIS is what I’ve been waiting to see discussed. We keep backing off when we get to that point.
Oops, made a math mistake. At Yale the Krebs estimate would be 72 women raped a year for an 80+% unreporting rate. Supposedly Yale has more gay students than average which might reduce this though.
I hate the conclusion that 10% of our sons might be rapists. But even unpleasant facts are facts (if they’re true of course)
I don’t believe/understand the numbers because the language is so screwed up - again with the word “rape”…if you look back several pages there was a link to Yale’s 6 month numbers and the total percent of kids charged with sexual misconduct matched pretty closely the percentage the DOJ was using and it was divided into several categories - which I understand because that is how it is in Michigan: 4 degrees of sexual misconduct with specific definitions that align with each degree and specific sentencing guidelines…so I’m not “getting” a raw percentage and the word rape - I have no context, I have difficulty understanding the conversations… So I don’t know if the Krebs study 11% raped - ? what is that 11% representative of – all felony assaults. Nobody needs to answer this, but I just get lost when people start tossing percents out. It’s part of the reason I never could get behind the 1 in 5…it just didn’t make any sense to me in any context. I don’t believe the rate of criminal sexual misconduct is “higher” on college campuses than in the general society - this I’m pretty certain of my feelings so if the percentage is higher on campuses then I’m thinking it’s being miscounted in general in society and perhaps we’re mixing terminology or counting different things in different buckets.
Also if in fact the concept of the sexual predator is true, by golly we have absolutely ZERO business having a college have anything to do with this. That is a person that shouldn’t be in society and should be in jail. If a college knowingly has reports from several women and the reports are reputable the college better be calling the local police and prosecutors office…even expelling that person without telling the police is repugnant because it just moves them from one social setting to another. Yuck.
Well, that IS one of the examples in which the college is supposed to make an informed decision to report to police.
First of all: people’s opinions change. I thought that was the idea behind these discussions. Secondly: Much of what you say about changing positions in the following paragraphs is patently false.
Are you referring here to whoever specifically posted the missive that you were responded to, or where you referring to the “other side” in general? (for lack of a better term).
Anyway, the overall claim certainly wasn’t that women on campus were more vulnerable. It was that they were vulnerable. Also, apparently the study that was linked by CF shows that women on campus ARE assaulted at the same rate as off campus and, as she points out, demographics would suggest it should be the opposite.
That is an massive exaggeration. Plus, the initial frame was that here is an assault rate (1 in 5) and here are some other lower rates that still show a major problem. That is what we should be focusing on. (paraphrased)
[quote=awc]
As for the third quote, that was never the focus of the initial frame. The initial siren call was not "We have to reduce the number of men committing rape" it expressly was "We have to increase the number of males punished for and convicted of rape,"
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I call BS. Please cite links. Otherwise I don’t believe your recollection.
Again, examples, please
[quote=awc]
And something that was not mentioned in your post that was a part of the initial frame was the move to chastise people, who questioned Jackie's story at UVA, all under the guise that rape victims never lie.
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Completely falseThe initial frame was that some people were inclined to question Jackie’s story because a very high percentage of women supposedly lie about being raped to get back at men. The argument was about what percentage of claims were false. Nobody EVER said women don’t lie about being raped. What people did point out was that the number was quite low (something like 2-8% depending on the study).
No, what “people” said was that we weren’t sure if the original story was true or not but that our inclination was to believe it because such a low percentage of rape claims are false and that we knew there was a problem with college women getting raped. Once it appeared the initial claim was false the discussion turned to the overall problem. That shouldn’t affect anyone’s credibility. The issues may be about the same overall issue but there are two completely different discussions.
[quote=awc]
And the focus also brought out the serious lawyers who are going to make colleges address the due process issues surrounding the accuser and the accused. And who knows what the result of that would be - one possibility is that if females realize they cannot just railroad a male in the tribunal, the charges may not be as quick to arrive at the tribunals doorstep.
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It is obvious that you think all women are simply out to get all men (note the phrasing of “females” instead of “some females”). I also love how you think just males are getting railroaded despite the cases that have been discussed where the woman was railroaded (or didn’t get any penalties against the male despite substantial evidence).
And this is why people who look further that simply the present wonder what is up.
I (and many others that run companies that I know) could not imagine living with myself if I knew of such a person in my company and that he (or she) raped someone or multiple people, and my response was to fire the person and let them move on to another company to continue the practice. It is not like the person doctored books, stole a few thousand dollars, or was a serial hugger.
It would not even cross my mind to think not telling police was an option. And furthermore, I would not even give the accuser the option to make me or the company hide it under the rug with some informal HR or resolution team hearing and counseling sessions. I second the Yuck aspect to even that being thought of as an option.
@awcntdb Do you have any idea how your company policies compare to others. I have been told that our company will not EVER disclose any information about former employees other than to confirm employment and duration.
I find this hard to believe and am with you re policies like you have
Awc, suppose after your company party three different employees, all of them people you trust, come up to you and said that they had twice forcibly stopped Mr. X from assaulting Ms. Y. He was already ripping off her clothes, they say, and it was obvious what he intended. You ask Ms. Y. She says she won’t press charges because her family couldn’t take the shame. You call the police. They say they cannot investigate if Ms. Y won’t cooperate.
Isn’t Mr. X soon going to be an ex-employee of AWC Enterprises? Or are you going to keep Mr X in your company? How are you going to live with yourself when he attacks Ms. Z at the next party?
“Anyway, the overall claim certainly wasn’t that women on campus were more vulnerable. It was that they were vulnerable.”
This doesn’t make any sense. No-one thinks that one in five women are likely to be raped off campus so when the public is told in press conferences that is a campus reality it certainly makes the casual observer think these women are more vulnerable. And, yes of course the goal is to get more guilties because the goal is to prove statistically that all of this effort was a success and something has been accomplished. And, it’s not preventative, obviously.
And, why would demographics suggest it should be the opposite? Where else do people party this much?
CF - My actions in the above scenario are easy. We’ve got 4 people = 3 witnesses + Ms. Y confirming events. I’m assuming they’re all credible and there are no obvious vendettas. If Mr. X isn’t in a protected class (i.e. he’s a white male under the age of 40), he’s fired without cause immediately. I’d consult with HR+internal & external counsel as to whether or not to let him know why - i.e. give him a chance to defend himself / potentially expose others to retaliation / insulate myself from a claim. At that point my decision would be fact specific. If he’s in a protected class then I have to work a little harder, but I’ll find a way. I’m confident that it would happen within a few days to a few weeks.
In my experience most companies will do little more than confirm employment and duration (however, my industry is relatively small at the senior level and about 1/3 of the time either I or someone I trust can find someone who’ll speak off the record). Therefore if Ms. Y. won’t go to the police another company can hire him again. Little I can do at that point. I’ve discharged by moral duty, and *Ms. Y. * will have to live with herself if he does something at another company.
This is different than what occurs at colleges - in a previous post, I made the point that FERPA allows schools to share why someone was suspended / expelled with other schools. I’m not sure what I believe yet, but I’m beginning to think this might be unjust given the level of confidence that schools should have in their truth finding ability.