So then if you were faced with dstark’s case, where the rapist admitted his guilt to members of the firm, but the prosecutor refused to charge the guy (which would probably happen) or the guy was acquitted, then you’d keep the rapist in your employ? Wouldn’t you be worried that when he raped the next woman, she could talk to those other colleagues, discover that you knew the guy had already raped someone, and sue you-- in civil court, where the standard is preponderance of the evidence?
I feel like my body is my own and that I can make decisions about what does or doesn’t occur. Throughout my life I tried to make good decisions for myself about what could or couldn’t occur that would harm by body or go against my desires. if someone assaulted me or slipped me drugs or did something out of my control I certainly would pursue every legal measure available to me and I would want that person in jail. But I digress.
I can also guarantee you that all my boys - all of them 6 ft and over ranging in weight from 165 to 220 fear me or at minimum have a healthy respect for me 
and I do not tower over them or outweigh them. But I also have known women who abused guys - either because they were manipulative or physically had anger issues. People that aren’t mentally healthy can have all kinds of extemporaneous issues.
I think some people think it’s inappropriate to wonder if it would be better for college women to receive training that emphasized saying “no” more forcefully, or if it’s crazy to think this would work well (this is just for a college setting with an acquaintance, which is the majority of the cases).
Here’s a famous story that might help explain why I think it might help. In World War II, many British bombers were shot down and never returned. Generals noticed that the returning planes often had lots of bullet holes in the nose and wings. Naturally enough, they wanted to put armor plating on these parts to protect the planes. A famous statistician noticed that that was completely wrong. The flaw was that these were the planes that returned safely. That showed that getting shot in the nose and wings wasn’t that bad. The ones that got shot down were those where the bullets hit other parts of the plane, so his solution was to armor the other parts, and that worked. The lesson is what you don’t see is sometimes more important than what you do see.
It seems that in many of these college sex cases (without incapacitation) for whatever reason a lot of women don’t say no to their attackers. The lesson might not be that most women freeze up and don’t say no; the lesson might be that saying no to an acquaintance who’s attacking you works at least a fair fraction of the time. That’s why cases where the victim is saying no aren’t typical. It certainly wouldn’t be perfect, but maybe it could help prevent some of these assaults from happening.
Here’s the problem, al2simon: women spend their lives being bombarded with messages about how not to be attacked. We are told over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over that it is our responsibility to keep up a constant, unrelenting defense. How about making it the guys’ turn?
You know what other college sex cases don’t show up? The ones where the guy asked the woman beforehand whether she wanted to have sex, and she said she didn’t, and he stopped. How about instead of giving women training, for once we spent that time giving men training? Why is it always on us?
I like the plane story.
One of the problems with the word no is how it is used and how it is understood.
Many women say no, but they mean no now, yes later. Maybe in an hour or two.
Guys know this. Guys know some women say no but can change their minds. So the guys pursue.
Then there are the guys that don’t take no for an answer. Maybe some posters have married these type of guys. ( I am not just talking about sex).
These are a couple of reasons I like yes. I actually think yes is more definitive and yes is a turn on. I wasn’t kidding before.
On the no front… Decades ago, my wife said she can’t date me. No dates.
What she meant was, “I can’t date you now because I am going to marry you and I am too young to get married”.
How the heck was I supposed to know that?
You’re right - it shouldn’t just be on women. We should train men too. But I think there is plenty of sexual assault education being done already; it doesn’t seem to be working very well. If you think that the guys doing this aren’t completely horrible people then having more training will help some. If you think that the guys doing this are predators and/or repeat offenders then I don’t think it will help.
But I have no problem trying harder. You’ve heard me say that I have no problem ramping up punishments dramatically in those cases where we’re pretty sure the guy is guilty “pour encourager les autres”. I think scaring the cr*p out of guys could work (as well as it being the just thing to do); let’s just do it right.
I’ve also seen studies that claim many / most of the victims are freshman women. Why is that? Do they learn what situations to avoid? What fraternities to avoid? What key facts are we missing?
Very similar story here dstark. I love her very much but sometimes I wish my wife came with a decoder ring. In fairness, her dad did try to warn me, but I was too lovestruck to hear what he was saying 
Good link.
“I think many people think it’s inappropriate to wonder if it would be better for college women to receive training in how to handle sexual assault situations.”
Totally. Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And spare me the claims of victim blaming.
I’ve told my daughters that nothing says “no” like going bat-sh*t crazy – breaking stuff and making lots of noise. If you are in a dorm, RAs and hallmates will come running like the fire department in minutes if not seconds. Not many of these college situations involve a guy with a weapon. Smashing some dude’s laptop into pieces is an unambiguous way to let him know that he won’t be getting any tonight.
While this wouldn’t cover every incident you hear about, it would be 100% effective in many of them.
Stark #4684 is completely correct. Men pursue and always will.
“How about instead of giving women training, for once we spent that time giving men training? Why is it always on us?”
Do we think the guys who are doing these things would respond to training? It’s like me trying to train thugs that they shouldn’t steal my stuff. Good people already know, bad people don’t care.
Not sure we all see it as clearly as good people and bad people. You want to change those who can benefit from some enhanced clarity and sensitivity. Doesn’t the Brown Interim report link cover some of the 'masculinity" issues?
I think it might go deeper…I think in general women are suffering from self-esteem issues at a much younger age. In some ways I felt “luckier” to raise boys than my friends who raised girls. I also think there are far more emotionally fragile kids, male and female, in college these days. So in some ways i can agree, I’ve always thought the problem wasn’t that there was a rape culture, I don’t believe in rape culture, but i do think we are focused on the wrong issues. But until we as a society can be honest and shake the PC culture enough to look closely at the characteristics of abused and abusers we may never know. We may be trying to “fix” the wrong part of the proverbial plane. It is also part of the reason that i think professional counseling might be an important and often missed part. Not an activist who ends up being a sob shoulder, but therapy where people can look within themselves and fine out what went wrong and learn from it for both men and women - our “friends” used to do that for our generation during endless nights of gab fests, but if our friends aren’t mentally healthy it’s not much of a help.
Another thing that I have concern about is that in this climate we don’t really celebrate diversity, we try mightily to make everyone the same to level everything. What’s so wrong about being different anyway and learning to communicate and live and react to people that are different than you. I certainly had to learn to communicate with men in my life.
Al2simon, lol. My wife’s mom warned me to stay away. Said her daughter is a b@@@@.
LOL my mom always worried I was too hard on my husband she thought i was too direct. But I learned being direct works for me with most men, in general I found they didn’t want the blah, blah, blah…just the blah.
Now I agree with momofthreeboys.
Guys need direct talk. We are kind of simple.
Even the yes talk has issues.
When a guy says something to a guy and the other guy says, “Yes”…that means the guy agrees with you.
When a guy says something to a woman and the woman says “Yes”…that means the woman hears you (and thinks you are full of @@@@)".
Awc said men and women are the same.
Uhhhhhh…no.
I agree that more direct talk from both parties could help. Maybe part of the problem is that we’re forgetting that some of these kids are truly very inexperienced if not virgins.
Here’s an example from the Duke case we were just discussing. I’m sure it’s more complicated, but the following facts seem to be undisputed - in the middle of sex, this McLeod guy thought he saw the girl crying. He separated himself from her and asked what was wrong. She said nothing is wrong, I just have a cold, and then offered to perform another type of sex act on him in order to conclude the night’s activities.
Again, I’m sure there’s a lot of other things that went on, but this is apparently undisputed. I have no idea what to think, but at least in the case of this one specific episode I certainly would be a bit confused too.
Also, he claims that he explicitly asked her and she explicitly verbally consented to sexual intercourse. I think she says he didn’t ask and she didn’t verbally consent.
Yes.
I think it is clear the girl did not want vaginal sex. Might not have been clear to the guy. Tough case.
If they wouldn’t respond to training, why would we believe they’d stop when the woman says that “No” we just trained her to say?
I say, if we train the women, fine. But by hypothesis we are training the women who otherwise would be bringing rape accusations. We shouldn’t train them to say No, we should train them to break the guy’s nose.
In the Duke/McLeod case, I don’t think the woman’s initial “consent” is disputed. What is disputed is whether she was drunk to the point of incapacitation which makes her “consent” invalid. The college committee ruled that McLeod should have realized that she was incapacitated. McLeod – and his witness that were not allowed to testify – say that she was not.
I believe that she does contend she never consented to vaginal intercourse. But if she were incapacitated, it wouldn’t matter, because whatever she might have done would not have counted as consent.