PG: Thanks for the heads up on that film. It looks to be a powerful exploration of the subject.
It seems to me one problem here is a difference of perspective. My perspective is that college women, for my whole lifetime, have lived in a dangerous campus culture. We take it for granted we have to teach them how to protect themselves from this danger. We call their behavior risky, and put the burden on them for preventing violence. We have not been willing to try and put a stop to the violence. imho.
It has become increasing clear to me that decent men, the good guys, may not recognize this violence since the behavior is so inconceivable to them. On one of these threads, a Florida Dad, father of a son and uncle of a niece about to start college was very upset by all these statistics. There were pages and pages where he asked for advice on how to help his niece to protect herself in college. Some of that advice included seeking out older women on campus who could identify for her the rapey fraternities and other danger spots. This is a lot of insider knowledge, especially for those from backgrounds unfamiliar with greek life or college life in general. I would think many just assume their daughters will be safe on college campuses. That seemed to me to have been the Florida Dad’s opinion before the threads. I can’t think parents who assume their daughters will be safe on campus are negligent parents. I can’t think women who haven’t been taught campus violence is going to be their reality and they need to take measures to protect themselves, are responsible for their rapes.
We have a really difficult time not making women responsible for this situation. They aren’t. Except to the extent some women have accepted the status quo for far too long. I certainly have been guilty of this. I am ashamed of myself.
adding: dstark has repeatedly posted what happens when women go to police. It isn’t pretty. Women just can’t win here. If the responsibility for avoiding rape lies with the victim, then what happens with the police makes sense. No other way does it. imho
When women take matters into their own hands and start making a racket, there is an effort at silencing. That has been happening my whole lifetime, but these young women just won’t be shut-up. Finally, they won’t shut-up. I think supporting them is the very least we can do.
About “positive cooperation:”
“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.”
That’s why we have to agree, we need to answer alh’s question, first. Before we can talk about, “Well, she seemed to want it,” we have to agree on whether she has the right to decide, with clear, rational control of the decision.
It’s what I mean about not adding confusion to this issue, with all the exceptions. Just start on square one.
“There are many times more people who have sex who have no problem agreeing that they consented” Is that what this boils down to? Lots of people have sex, so there is no issue? No. because the problem isn’t all the people who are fine with what transpired. It’s those who are NOT.
Again, don’t go back to all the “maybe” scenarios- some girl who was mentally off or seemed this or did that. Or some publicized case here and another there. No wonder people are confused.
As for lawsuits, the number where the plaintiff won can’t be deemed significant or insignificant until you know what totals they come from. What percentage of all judgments is 31 cases?
We have a really difficult time not making women responsible for this situation.
Even on this thread. When women take matters into their own hands and start making a racket, there is an effort at silencing.
Even on this thread.
When alh says she’s ashamed, we all should be. Don’t just kick back at that without thinking. Each time one of us says, well, she-, we’re perpetuating.
CF: given that you are married with college-aged kids (or soon to be), I would imagine this “flame” falls into ancient history, not a few months ago. I would still think that the lines were clearly drawn as to the expectation that this was only for convenience and warmth and no fooling around initiated by anyone. I still think your scenario is very far from what it going on after a college party.
There is no agreement about what constitutes “yes means yes” and that is just one of the reasons I don’t like it. It will not change he said/she said cases and it is so vaguely written that it won’t stand the test in the “real world.” It’s even worse in my opinion than no means no. So a woman accuses someone of not obtaining consent, but the accused could claim “she started it” and never asked me for consent. Yes means yes is simply not practical. Yes means yes has no teeth. It has less legal teeth than no means no. Because “no” means stop NOW. Sooner or later some kid will get expelled in California with lack of yes means yes as the reason and it will end up in the courts and then what? Yes means yes is a nod toward trying to change behaviors much like AIDS changed condom behaviors, but as far as a “defense” for a complainant charging assault…not so much. As far as advancement for women…not so much because the current California law include implied consent and that is no different than before. People can champion “yes means yes” and point to all kinds of theoretical reasons why it is “better” than “no means no” but on surface I don’t see it.
Looking forward there are been reports that the plaintiffs are winning over 2/3rd of the cases, that number might go down if you exclude cases where the universities settled rather than continue to the trail, although colleges settling is as good as the acknowledging that did something incorrectly.I’m sure that there are plenty of cases that universities have closed that never make it to civil court because the students agreed with the terms of the judgement. Almost all of the cases that are being tried are being tried because expulsion was the outcome and the universities failed to consider all the accusers evidence, or failed to allow specific witness for the accused, or failed to allow attorney consult, or breached a contract, etc. etc. I don’t think “quantity” has anything to do with it as we know from the Yale documentation there were 70 misconduct issues over a 6 month period. All it says is that colleges and universities need to examine their policies and procedures very carefully when considering “expulsion” and ensure they don’t violate anyone’s due process rights in the process to impacting some kid for decades to come.
Consent, whether it is to sex or anything else, cannot legally be given by an incapacitated person. So “sleeping in the same bed” would not have any bearing, if drinking has been involved.
Consent, like intent, is a mental state. The difficulty with both of them is determining what words or actions demonstrate the mental state. We sometimes decide, for public policy reasons, that some evidence will generally be excluded in making this determination–an example is the rape shield law, in which the accuser’s sexual history with other people is (usually) not admissible.
There are some easy cases–the guy who barricades the woman into his house and then threatens her is not likely to successfully claim consent, at least these days.
But there are hard cases. They get even harder when “how drunk is drunk” is mixed into the same case. This is another reason (I know I’m harping on this) I don’t like the use of the preponderance of the evidence test. Imagine that in a particular cases, one of the pieces of evidence given to support the claim of consent was that the accuser took off her clothes and got into bed with the accused. This very thread suggests that the past experiences of the fact-finder could determine whether the accused is convicted or not, especially if the preponderance standard is used. Some of us think women don’t take off their clothes and get into bed unless they are expecting sexual activity; others of us think this happens all the time with no sexual component. In my mind, these kinds of complications mean that the preponderance of the evidence is not a lot better than a coin flip.
Is it possible to suggest that what we really ought to be teaching is that “Yes means yes AND no means no”?
Note: I have to add that nobody actually thinks that “yes mean yes.” What we actually mean is that “yes mean yes as long as the person saying yes isn’t incapacitated, isn’t under age, isn’t being threatened, etc.”
Hunt: I like your post. In fact, we have been teaching women to say “no” as long as I can remember. It hasn’t changed violence towards women, as far as I can tell. Maybe you feel differently. I doubt anyone is going to quit teaching their daughters to say “no” and most of us teach how to punch and slap. If I recall correctly, Harvestmoon gave her daughter pepper spray. Great idea! The Florida Dad was urged to get his niece in some self defense training courses.
Requiring a “yes” shifts some of the responsibility. imho
I was thinking about the idea that nobody should be touched without permission. That sounds sensible, and certainly true if we are talking about sexual touching, but in fact, many of us touch others and are touched by them without express permission all the time–in situations where it seems normal to do so. So, for example, you might tap somebody on the shoulder to draw their attention to something, or you might put your hand on the shoulder of somebody you know at church. In other words, in many situations, consent to being touched can be implied by the surroundings, and by normal social interactions. There may be a person who hates being touched by anybody, but he is not going to successfully sue a person who taps him on the shoulder to tell him he’s dropped something.
And this is where “yes means yes” may get difficult when you try to apply it in the real world.
" Some of us think women don’t take off their clothes and get into bed unless they are expecting sexual activity; others of us think this happens all the time with no sexual component."
*And this is where “yes means yes” may get difficult when you try to apply it in the real world. *
Yes, the real world is difficult, if not impossible. However, there have been such major cultural shifts in our lifetime in the area of civil rights, gay rights, etc that I would like to think it possible we can change the culture of violence towards women.
I am a hugger. As a result of this thread, I have quit hugging socially. That was difficult and really a huge social shift for me. However, I can’t say it has negatively impacted my life in any way. Probably it has made many of my acquaintances much less uncomfortable around me.
Nowhere in my post did I say the school should stop all disciplinary actions and procedures. What I said was very specific:
The “But” at the beginning of the sentence in the quote indicates a contrast, or an opposite effect, which means that what the schools are doing in other areas satisfactorily works. The overall deduction is that in other areas the disciplinary procedures are doing fine, as there are very few to no complaints and lawsuits, but no so in sexual assault cases.
However, the overall premise of your quote is strange. It is strange because it has no distinctions of gravity and no distinction of required capabilities. You act as if plagiarism, cheating and other displicniary issues are equivalent to someone being accused of sexual assault aka rape. I see several things wrong with this mass equating of what disciplinary boards and tribunals should do for it completely disregards the different technical processes and skills necessary to perform each resolution task properly and fairly.
The main distinction is plagiarism and other cheating are actually the core business of the school, as these two activities directly affect the integrity of the end product, the degree. It is therefore the school’s responsibility to insure that the degrees it confers are properly earned and reflects what the student learned - definitely part of their core business.
Additionally, plagiarism and cheating are rarely the result of one student accusing another; these actions are mostly caught because a professor, a grading computer, or someone in authority notices something out of the ordinary. And the anomaly is either confirmed or dismissed by looking at hard data, relatively easy-to-interpret data, i.e., tests, computers, seating charts etc. This is hard evidence that is readily available and requires little interpretation of what one is seeing and minimal investigative skills.
And finally, plagiarism and cheating are not clouded and complicated by fuzzy memories caused by alcohol ingestion. This particular aspect is huge since there is less question surrounding what might have happened.
There are many other scenarios in between, which should be covered and easily are resolved by disciplinary boards.
However, sexual assault, that is the equivalent of rape in the real world, is in a different category: 1) it is one student directly accusing another of irreparable harm and 2) there are many details, which are not easily uncovered or resolvable as to what they mean, especially if alcohol was involved without the arbiters having 3) special knowledge on how to examine, question, and interpret statements in order to make proper decisions. 4) And because the tribunal is adjudicating between two students, the school is essentially in a no-win situation in that it cannot help but make one student, or possibly both, extremely angry and resentful with its decision.
It just makes no sense to make any entity perform a task, such as determining sexual assault guilt or innocence, for which it is not properly trained and capable. And definitely not when the arbiters do this on a part-time basis and under duress, as that is a disservice to both the accuser and the accused. The quote in Post #4537 by the UVA official sums it up rather well, “The burden of the university to act as judge and jury in a sexual assault is well beyond the scope of English professors and anthropology professors.” The point the official is implicitly making is this task is outside of the universities’ core competencies and core business, regardless of what outsiders want. Expecting whiskey from a bottle of wine comes to mind.
No way can a school win this tribunal sexual assault (rape) adjudication scenario AND simultaneously develop good relationships with both male and female students. It will lose the trust of one group or even both groups. And this will occur especially if the system seems to be purposely rigged to give a particular set of outcomes and the behavioral expectations of males and females when intoxicated are completely different. Very few will trust such a system. What is required is a disinterested third party where outcome is not viewed as a political ploy or expected to go a certain way.
I add that I agree with @momofthreeboys and others that drunk sex, where what happened is two impaired students doing things they would not normally do because of alcohol, is best handled with counseling and mediation.
Can we just stipulate here that preponderance of evidence is a bad idea? Nobody’s arguing for it.
But I don’t think that going to substantial and convincing evidence solves the problem of the woman who shares a bed with a guy, and she thinks it’s not consent and he thinks it’s consent. If it isn’t consent, if she does not believe it’s consent, then we should be more interested in preventing that non-consensual intercourse than adjudging it afterwards. We don’t want to be sitting in a courtroom or a college board room listening to the two sides. We want him to ask her, discover that she is not interested, and go back to sleep.
The No Means No standard is fine. For men. It works. For men. It protects men from being accused of rape in ambiguous situations. It doesn’t work at all for women for ambiguous situations, because someone can rape them in a situation they didn’t even realize was ambiguous, and it’s their fault, and their rapist will go unpunished. I don’t want to protect men from ambiguous situations-- I want them to stop the situation from being ambiguous in the first place, by getting unambiguous consent.
With the Alaska case, she woke up with him inside her. It doesn’t matter to me what happened afterwards, because from my point of view (and, apparently, hers) he was already raping her. She was already a victim of rape, even if he stopped right then. Alaska puts onerous requirements on people who are in the middle of being raped.
If we start teaching our sons (and daughters) to ask a potential partner if that individual wants to have sex, we protect our sons, as well as our daughters, from unanticipated and unwelcome consequences of miscommunication and misunderstanding.
*Usually it’s phrased as touching in intimate areas. It’s what you tell your toddler, right? *
I was thinking about this exact idea last night. How do we get from a societal consensus regarding toddlers, to posters who don’t necessarily agree women have privacy rights to their bodies? It is really complicated for me to puzzle this out.
With regard to what touching is intimate: If I’m not going to tolerate butt grabbers (who may not think there is a sexual intent to their touching) I am not going to be able to hug indiscriminately. I have decided to err on the side of caution in dealing with those not my family or closest friends.
Alh: I think it is sad you have stopped hugging because of this thread! Were you hugging random people or your friends, coworkers, acquaintances after parties? Is a hug now considered assault?
There are clearly cases where the woman is in no position to say no, and affirmative consent s the only standard. The waking up situation CF reports is clearly one, incapacitated another. But No means No also works in the vast majority of cases for women, especially in an acquaintance situation. The goal, as you state CF is to stop the situation from being ambiguous in the first place. Along with getting a yes, a No is pretty unambiguous. Why is that only protecting the men? It also protects the woman and gives her a more compelling case in the unfortunate event that the No doesn’t work. Again, assuming no force, no incapacitation, no violence, why wouldn’t the woman say no to make it clear? Especially if she has consented to some part of the activity. I just don’t get that. Not saying an absence of a no means there was consent, just that a no makes it clear there was no consent.
mom2and: I don’t agree it is sad. I was hugging everyone who walks in the door at my house and I have a lot of guests. I usually wasn’t hugging the workmen on site doing our renovation, but was making an effort to restrain myself there. I was hugging all my friends when I walked in their front doors.
Once I gave it the least bit of thought, it occurred to me 1) I didn’t have that right. 2) Not everyone is as comfortable with social hugging as I am. 3) A big smile should accomplish the same goal.
I am sorry to be going off on a remote side trek here again. Please just ignore me.
Re post 4625: " Consent, whether it is to sex or anything else, cannot legally be given by an incapacitated person.So “sleeping in the same bed” would not have any bearing, if drinking has been involved. "
You mean excessive drinking? Or any drinking? Because 2 beers will not result in incapacitation for most people, but 7 might. So can your 2 beer woman offer consent?
Saw this article about victim response to some of the bills being presented in state legislatures:
"Indeed, any proposal that mandates campus rape reports to college administrators be sent to cops meets near-universal opposition from sexual assault survivors and advocacy groups.
“If a survivor comes forward and says, ‘Hey I need help, I want to get this guy out of my classes,’ that’s very different from saying, ‘I want to involve myself in a lengthy arduous legal process,’”
So it seems many don’t want mandatory reporting to the police, and a goal is simply to get the guy out of your classes? This is a serious crime, but it is easy to see why some don’t take it seriously when the desired punishment is getting the guy out of your Chem class.
If he raped you he deserves more punishment than a schedule change.
^^ Agree where it falls apart is when people (like California) make “laws” - however there is no legal guidance or anything that is documented or proveable at the point of consent - it’s just one person’s word vs. another person’s word (unless students start mass videotaping or recording each other). I’ll stick with my very vocal “no” if I don’t want someone messing with me.