Just saw the preview of The Hunting Ground. Wow!
http://variety.com/2015/film/reviews/sundance-film-review-the-hunting-ground-1201413564/
Some of these schools may get in trouble and it won’t be because 20 guys sue…
I expect the trashing of some of these girls in the documentary to start fairly soon…
So Kinsman, the Florida State accuser, is yet another woman who says her attacker drugged her and raped her. She went to the police, but it looks like the guy who was supposed to investigate was in the tank for the football team.
This is bad…
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/15/us/in-florida-student-assaults-an-added-burden-on-accusers.html
There were two arrests…
This going to the police is bs…
Two arrests…
These two quotes sum up what someone said to me about this law over the holidays, “Affirmative Consent is a law that is very clear until it isn’t.”
The issue is the assumption that the two parties agree on what actions mean consent and consent to what. In short, the person felt the law was useless without a recorded (written or otherwise) checklist because unless “No” is used then any continuation after an initial verbal “Yes” or non-verbal indication of “Yes” could be interpretated by any reasonable person as to mean a continuing exercise of one’s free will in the “Yes” direction based on the initial “Yes.” Bottom line, the person thinks the law is will change nothing, and the “He said, She said” scenario will stay the same.
And the very fact that posters here are debating line-by-line what the law says belies the fact that two people in a room do not even think or act like the language in the bill, unless they are robots of course.
http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-82617929/
Inevitable, dstark. )-:
[quote]
Ziering, who did many of the interviews, was especially moved by talking to Tom Seeberg, whose daughter, Lizzy, committed suicide in the aftermath of her allegation of a sexual attack against Notre Dame football player Prince Shembo, who was never charged with a crime. “I began to cry, I had to pull myself together,” she remembers, tearing up again at the memory. “Another one who broke my heart was a girl from Berkeley who hadn’t told her parents yet. I was so upset, she gave me her teddy bear.”
[quote/]
That is true of affirmative consent. It is equally true, if not more true, without affirmative consent. Courtrooms are full of rape cases where the two parties disagree about what constitutes consent, in jurisdictions without any affirmative consent laws. We can’t even agree here about what constitutes consent! Some of us argue that a woman sleeping in the same bed as a man is consenting to sex; others say she is definitely not. But I’m pretty sure that we’d agree that if the Alaska/Stanford guy had woken the woman up and asked if she wanted sex and she said yes, that would constitute consent, and if she said no, that would be clear non-consent.
By the way, @mom2and, when you said, “The difference with your bike tour scenario or a boy girl sleepover as friends is that these are not people that were in some way having a physical interaction prior to getting into bed.” Hmm, well, one of my best bike buddies is an old flame. Our romantic relationship is over, but the Alaska/Stanford woman says that her romantic relationship was also at an end. So, no difference there.
“Courtrooms are full of rape cases where the two parties disagree about what constitutes consent, in jurisdictions without any affirmative consent laws.”
Well, no courtrooms are not full of those cases because prosecutors typically do not bring those cases to trial because they are not winnable without evidence. He said, she said yes or no is not evidence, either.
Thanks for the heads up about the film. I hope it’s on CNN (the cable channel) so I can see it.
Personally, I intend to be very cautious about accepting things in this documentary as fact or as typical situations. If I’ve learned nothing else from this thread, it’s that this is a complex subject. Every story seems to have three sides - “yours, mine, and the truth”. A film, especially one made by people with a strong point of view (either direction), is pretty low on my list of reliable sources.
Actually, marie, they do bring those cases-- because accused rapists say that anything is consent. I was reading rape cases that went to appeal, truly stomach-turning cases, and the rapists said their victims consented. A guy said his victim consented-- she had a blood alcohol of .54. Not a typo. Do not try to achieve that BAC, or we will look for you on a marble slab. BAC of .54 and he said she consented.
Another guy barricaded his victim in his house, preventing her from leaving. He told her lurid stories of the violence he dealt out to his previous victims when they resisted him. She didn’t resist him. He said she consented.
It used to be that in California, if a woman asked the guy who was raping her at knifepoint or gunpoint to at least wear a condom, the rapist would sometimes be acquitted because, he would say, she consented. (Now that defense is specifically outlawed.)
The film supposedly interviews a sexual predator. That should be interesting. Also, the reviews are saying, most of the statistics have cites, so at least after learning what the film has to say we can check the sources.
@dstark, just to clarify. The number of guys (and some women) who are suing their colleges because they claim they were wrongly penalized for sexual assault is more than 20. 20 was just the number cases that I had personally looked into and felt were somewhat murky.
Of the 54 cases listed on the Voice for Male Students database, 33 are pending or on appeal, 28 were settled for the plaintiff, and only 3 for the college (so far). I don’t know how they decide which cases go on this list.
I know momrath.
momrath - Either way, 20 or 54 cases nationwide across x years doesn’t seem that relevant. However, the fact that the plaintiffs have won 28 out of 31 cases strikes me as very relevant. If that statistic is typical of the odds of the plaintiffs prevailing then you’d think a pretty big storm could be brewing. But maybe these are just the strongest cases of the bunch.
Edit: momrath corrected the statistic to 18 out of 21. Not as strong a trend, but still might be a sign of the way things are headed.
Sorry, typo! 18 (not 28) were settled in favor of the plaintiff. I agree it’s too early to draw conclusions which way the wind is blowing, but I hope that this litigation leads colleges to tighten up their procedures.
Actually, I think i it is even more complicated than this.
I say this because the truth is also the matter of interpretation, language and culture of the third parties viewing the matter after the fact and from a uninvolved viewpoint.
Therefore, in these cases, there is a “Yours, mine, the truth, and the multiple truths as determined by outside observers.” And it is the outsider truths that really matters since they make the decisions.
I want to mention something about going to the police and bypassing the schools.
FSU…55 people go to the police. 2 are arrested. 20 percent of those arrested are convicted. That means nobody is convicted. 55 go to the police and nobody is convicted. The accused get off.
So when I read, go to the police, and nobody is convicted, I read you don’t really want anything to happen to the accused. Because nothing happens to the accused. Why would I think differently? Nothing happens to the accused!
These 18 cases or 28 cases found for the plaintiff is not even a rounding error. It is a dot.
I like what Brown University is doing.
The rape victim, the rape victim was threatened with expulsion. Not the alleged rapist. The victim. LOL except it is not really funny. Can’t kick out the alleged rapist but we can kick out the victim. Luckily UNC changed its mind.
http://rt.com/usa/univercity-carolina-rape-victim-944/
What UNC has been doing is a joke.
Actually, this is not true at all.
There are many times more people who have sex who have no problem agreeing that they consented and go on to have sex with no issues, than there are people who ultimately disagree about consent. And, more importantly, a whole lot of people who agree that they consented did this without speaking one word to each other, and still there was no misunderstanding that there was consent.
The fallacy in your quote is that it is not “we” on the outside who need to determine what is consent; it is the “two people” involved who need to determine what is consent for them. And since human behavior and actions are not static, and the same action in one arena does not necessarily mean the same in another, then consent is not a simple action or word, per se, but a meeting of the minds and understanding of what is being communicated between people.
In reality, what the Affirmative Consent law is actually trying to do is determine legitimate and reasonable points of disagreement between two people where one thought there was a meeting of the minds and there was consent and the other thought there was no consent. That is vastly different than trying to determine what is consent because that varies as much as there are sets of people intimately involved, and I posit that it is absolutely impossible to take something as complex as human communication in such a situation and boilerplate it. Not going to happen, as the human brain is much more dynamic than that and will defeat any law that tries.
The Affirmative Consent law reads like a supply chain contract with the end result of “yes” send the product. The supply chain contract works because the process is basically linear and breaks in the line are easy to determine and easy to translate into what action is next to keep it running properly.
However, language, interpretation, and human actions are not linear functions that could be given the same meaning and weight all the time. And that is the flaw I see in the whole exercise. It tries to make contract terms out of something that humans, by definition, do not see in stark contract terms. Additionally, there is nothing in the Affirmative Consent law that is confirmable and that can be double-checked after the fact; its basis is still one person’s interpretation vs another. Thus, I do not think it will change anything, except maybe confuse a lot of young people.
Could you please reference those figures? Does that mean that among 55 police reports, in 53 cases the police declined to pursue the case?
I agree that the Tallahassee police department made some bad decisions on the Winston case. I’m not clear, however, what “official” reason they have given for deciding not to pursue a criminal case. Now that the accuser has come forward and filed a civil case we’ll hear more of the details.
I also agree (and said so several hundred pages back) that the way rapes are investigated and tried in our legal system is a work in process, improved and improving, but not where it needs to be. This is where I would like to see the reforming energy directed – not on parallel, often equally incompetent, college run tribunals.
Of course, I want rapists and sexual assauters to be convicted, but I want them investigated and tried in a fair and transparent manner, so that the convictions are not later reversed. The accused who “get off” could be innocent.