awc: Although it is certainly your right, I am not really comfortable with you speaking for these women. In my mind, this is usurping their voice. That may very possibly be a misreading, on my part, of your post.
adding: Maybe you are describing what you see as women’s reactions, not speaking for them, not telling us what they think. In that case, I am misreading you.
Here is a woman’s voice:
http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/06/i-was-raped-its-not-a-coveted-status.html
I think the same admonitions could be applicable but getting these changes to happen might be next to impossible.
-Stop drinking to excess (fewer bad decisions will be made by the males)
-Stay with your friends (might be better stated as “watch out for your friends”. If you see them doing something stupid that involves a woman, or a drunk woman, speak up.
-Keep an eye on your drinks (might be better stated as “keep an eye on the drinks your friends serve”.
Guys have to be more willing to take a potentially unpopular stand. The guy who knows that a friend is serving roofies but doesn’t say anything is as culpable as the guy who participates in an assault or rape, or who films it and sends it to friends. I think too many guys are afraid of getting ostracized by their fellow friends/frat bros. etc to say something.
There also has to be a change in the culture. Guys need to be educated and there needs to be a shift in the paradigm that it is not only ok to get girls wasted so you have a better chance at “getting some”. Bartenders don’t serve patrons when they are too drunk. Frats/party hosts shouldn’t do it either. Maybe we need a few well publicized lawsuits by coeds against people who served them so much that they became endangered. The threat of punitive damages might force some changes to that dangerous thinking.
While I like your post very much, I would prefer we find a way to educate our young men so they behave as we want them to, because they are mensches, not because they are worried about being punished.
Remember the alleged gang rape that allegedly occurred at William Patterson college in New Jersey? It was in the news shortly after the Rolling Stone article hit the news.
The grand jury did not indict any of the 5 students. The article doesn’t say why but it appears that the prosecutor and the university failed to interview key witnesses. The men are still expelled from the college.
One has to wonder why.
[/quote]
HarvestMoon wrote:
TV4caster: I really do like your post. However, the bolded sentence once again shifts responsibility to women. I have been doing that, too, repeatedly, on this thread. It is difficult for even the most well-intentioned of us to think outside our cultural norms. imho
I am also a thread hog and will now take a break.
@alh that highlighted sentence is just one small part of all the changes I suggested. Almost all were focused on the guys. Also, I don’t see bringing lawsuits as shifting the responsibility to women. Shifting the responsibility to me means before the fact. I don’t see lawsuits after the fact as any different than pressing criminal charges. We don’t say that going to police is putting the responsibility on women and taking it from men.
TV4caster: Just to be very clear, you are one of “the good guys” in my mind. One of the very best guys.
There is a very low threshold for grand juries, so if the grand jury decided no, there was virtually no case. Also the lawyer is saying they were expelled from the college with no hearing no nothing so oh, oh, oopsie. One has already filed a civil lawsuit according to the newspaper. I don’t understand why these colleges can’t get it through their thick skulls - suspend pending the criminal outcome - expel if found guilty and then they won’t get sued.
The article also mentions that the college administration called them criminals. Not ‘alleged’. So the college could be sued for defamation. I don’t know if they were exonerated because there was no sexual contact at all or if the woman consented. Either way if she is found to have lied to the police, she should be the one expelled. As the saying goes a grand jury can indict a ham sandwich so there must not have been any credible evidence of rape to warrant bringing the case to trial. These men were low income students who had made it to college. None had a criminal record and they were jailed and expelled.
Don’t call female students"coeds." It is a dated, insulting term that implies they are add-ons to the real business of the institution: educating men.
And honestly, suing someone who “over-served” you at a party? Are you not responsible for your own behavior? You need a man to tell you how much you should or should not drink? Unless someone held your nose and poured it down your throat, drugged your drink, or deliberately added a lot of vodka or the equivalent to your drink alone, no one forced you to consume anything or got you to do so by subterfuge. Grow up. Manage your own drinking. (This goes for males as well as females. The Dartmouth plan includes, as the fraternities suggested, paid bartenders and bouncers at parties. Something that many here scoffed at when they proposed it.)
Not to mention that this whole idea ignores the reality of female pre-gaming, often with flavored vodkas, that is widely acknowledged as the norm by college women themselves. (An area where an enforced campus-wide ban on hard liquor could help a lot. The Dartmouth plan includes specific steps to monitor this in the dorms, as well as in the frats and sororities and coed societies. Which has a better chance of working than anything else I’ve heard lately.)
Let’s not infantalize young women.
And before someone leaps to accuse me of victim-blaming or implying that I am saying that if you get drunk and are assaulted it is your own fault, NO, I am not saying that. Because you fail to manage yourself properly does mean that it is ever acceptable for someone to take advantage of your state to perpetrate a crime against you.
At least suspensions are ok now…we don’t have to wait for convictions to suspend. 
If the guys want to sue, they should sue.
Momrath, I was talking in general terms. Maybe my subconscious is talking. If a witness sees a couple 6 hours before, 3 hours before, 1 hour before an attack and the couple were laughing and dancing, it doesn’t matter what they saw.
Things can change quickly. People can become intoxicated quickly. People can be drugged. Something happens and people who were lovey dovey an hour earlier may not be too lovey dovey an hour later.
The way I read the Duke case is the woman did not want to have sexual intercourse. The rest of the case, I have no idea.
The more I read the more the term “unsupervised mayhem” mentioned upthread keeps coming to mind. And for this high school students kill themselves for an acceptance letter and parents get the privilege of paying close to $250,000 for an “education.” The “education” part seems to surely have taken a back seat on many of these campuses. I for one just don’t hear or read all that much about that part of college.
Personally, I’d want the college to give them a leave of absence, but leave of absence/suspension their attention isn’t going to be on classes anyway (the accuser and the accused).
@dstark, she says she didn’t want to. He says that she said she did, then changed her mind, and he complied. She says he didn’t. He says that he didn’t think she was incapacitated, and had several witnesses to that fact up to moments before and a short time after their sexual encounter, and that those witnesses were not allowed to testify.
It appears to be one of those gray area cases. About the one thing that is clear is that–if his complaint is accurate–the hearing was not conducted in anything approaching a fair manner aimed at discovering the truth. (Note that he might be guilty anyway. But he didn’t get a fair hearing.)
The Dram Shop Act has been on the books for a long time.
“a statute (Dram Shop Act) or case law in 38 states which makes a business which sells alcoholic drinks or a host who serves liquor to a drinker who is obviously intoxicated or close to it, strictly liable to anyone injured by the drunken patron or guest.”
Slightly different, but the concept itself shouldn’t be a surprise.
Mom3: liked this and think it hits it, at least for me:
“I believe the investigations relate solely to whether or not colleges and universities had processes and procedures in place that met the directive of the OCR AND if the college followed those processes and procedures when handling the specific complaint. The OCR has not directed specific punishments for specific allegations in any of it’s correspondence with colleges and universities to the best of my knowledge.”
In the William Paterson case, it sounds like the university separated the boys from the school without an investigation. It is not clear what happened, but seems as if the prosecutor (a woman) decided that the story did not support an indictment. Of course, we don’t know if that is because the alleged victim changed her story and there actually was no crime, or if the evidence to indict was just not there but she was actually assaulted. Sad for everyone involved.
Consolation, he changed his mind after he was already in her. She started to cry.
That is her story.
I am not sure why intoxication plays a part in this. If a woman says no to sexual intercourse and the guy does it anyway, I thought no means no. I don’t care anout the level of intoxication. The level of intoxiccation is irrelevant. The witnesses are also irrelevant unless they were in the room.
I have no idea what Duke is doing and why the school ruled the way it did. This is s tough case from the information that is public. I think we are missing some information.
The guy may not be guilty.
Duke may not have followed proper procedures.
Pretty much the same as you cited for the women, except the eye on your drink part, as that is definitely goal-directed predatory behavior.
However, to solve a problem one must look at the problem and solve that problem specifically, not all the other things around the problem. And as long as there is a question around what people are saying, regardless of the reason for those questions, then problem will never go away, unless the source of the questioning is addressed.
The Vanderbilt case, Stanford case and others show that colleges do not have much problem going after rape cases that are reported judiciously and it can be discerned what has happened.
In contrast, the problem for the colleges arise when the clearest fact is no one knows what happened, and then a tribunal tries to fill in the gaps, with fuzzy memory accounts, from both parties.
I understand @dstark’s sentiment that he does not care about intoxication etc. because no means no, or the female never said yes, and the female ultimately says she did not consent to sex, yet the male says he received consent. And it seems logical, right up until the question of accuracy enters the equation. That is why a intoxicated person will insist that he / she never ran the red light, until shown the videotape. The person is not lying because he believes it, but he is also not accurate.
The point is intoxication matters because it does go directly to the accuracy of what happened behind closed doors. An individual may not care about accuracy questions brought on by intoxication, but the jury sure does and justice sure does. And in these cases, accuracy matters the most, as there is rarely another sources of info.
Intoxicated people often think one thing and often do another, and not sure why people think that scientific fact is irrelevant when trying to decipher truth, since accuracy is the only thing a court or tribunal has going for it to get to the proper judgement. Most importantly, if accuracy is in question, then a lot of other things are in question, particularly the decision.
If intoxication matters then it matters equally for males and females. Perhaps if the males were not so blasted out of their minds they would make better decisions as well.
I am betting that the Vanderbilt boys would agree with me right now.
@alh re: #5046…I knew that already, but thanks