“However, one big concern I have with singling out flavored hard liquor is that it will unfairly target women, as women are by far the biggest consumer of such drinks.”
It is gender neutral since all the hard stuff is banned. Guys drink beer and can’t do shots (vodka, tequila, Fireball, Jager, Jack, whatever). Girls drink box wine rather than vodka.
Momofthreeboys, those questions were for momrath. Momrath wrote what I am questioning.
Momrath, the police have done a horrible job investigating sexual assaults in the past. I am probably being kind.
To say that women should have gone to the police in the past when the results were pathetic makes little sense.
I do think things are changing because people are pushing for change. As the police do a better job, more women will go to the police. As schools do a better job more women will report assaults to the schools. This is common sense.
As far as the schools go, more victims are starting to report assaults to the schools.
The schools need to do a better job for both the accusers and the accused. The more people complain on both sides, the better the schools will do in this area. (I can do without the victim blaming though). 
There are so many links of the police ignoring evidence…
I like this one because things are improving.
@sevmom - yes, I know. I was just making a general comment. Kind of talking out loud when I read your post. I am aware it was meant for HSD2 - sorry for the confusion there.
I found this interesting. if they don’t test that is a loophole that can enable rapists to rape again. If you are a typical person walking around they won’t have your DNA in a database to match up to anything anyway, so I wonder why they just don’t test. It’s only important if there is DNA to match. I think you can refuse a swab also unless you are under arrest, and then you must submit.
I get that. Thanks for the explanation.
The DNA testing thing makes sense in that in a date rape case ID is not the question and testing will not prove anything that is in dispute. They have it on file and often use it in another case when there’s a match to DNA in the already in the system. Remember, the Hannah Graham/Morgan Harrington case? They had Jesse Mathew’s DNA unidentified from a previous rape case and let him run off so they could arrest him for running off and get a DNA sample which they fully expected would match. It’s not like testing the date rape DNA sample would move the case along. Everyone agrees on who’s who, just not on what happened.
At the beginning of this thread, I suggested the very competitive colleges could stop campus drinking if examples were made of a few type A students. I am still okay with that idea. ** However, I am no longer conflating the drinking problem with the rape problem.** There are many reasons for this. I understand you are joining the discussion late and it may be impossible to read the whole thread. After two months, some of us have changed our views.
I would like to cut down on the binge drinking because I think students are putting themselves in danger of accidently killing themselves. I think rape is a separate discussion.
Momofthreeboys,
Why weren’t or aren’t the police testing?
One was money. (Money is not a good excuse).
The other reasons were mentioned at the end of the post
If a man says he did not have sex with a woman, and the dna test shows otherwise, the man is caught in a lie.
A pretty big lie.
Rape kits don’t just contain DNA swabs. They also have other physical evidence. In particular, they’ll have evidence about bruising and lacerations, and photos of bruising and lacerations.
http://www2.humboldt.edu/stoprape/sart.html
The physical evidence in some cases will not be consistent with the story the accused is telling: there might be bruising and cuts, or evidence of sex acts that the accused says did not happen. But police are never going to know that if they don’t even look at the rape kit.
So, for example, the Stanford swimmer is charged with, among other things, penetrating the young woman with his fingers. Suppose that he denies this, which I think he does. The physical evidence might be dispositive-- but only if the police look at it. If the police just say, oh, two drunk kids, we’re not pursuing this one, then they could be letting someone go free when they could have obtained a conviction.
(Of course the police are coming down hard on the Stanford guy because of the circumstances. But what if the two grad students hadn’t come along on their bikes, and instead her frantic friends had found her unconscious behind the dumpster after he had left, and several people had seen the accused talking with her outside a few tens of minutes beforehand? Police in that situation are not so eager to investigate. Even though the physical evidence might be there for a conviction.)
I have been on this board 10 plus years. My kids all have finished graduate school. I have been thinking about college drinking a long time.
Many of us posting here have kids finished with college. We have lived the experience. Dstark brings that up repeatedly. 
Believe me I get the money thing with Detroit. A man would not have to submit his DNA unless he was arrested so if he says he didn’t have sex, and he isn’t arrested, he has no legal requirement to submit to a swab. Many women claim rape and the man freely admits he had sex - the issue is often whether it is criminal behavior or not. Aside from the negative consequences of now having your DNA part of some government slush data pile there would be no downside because no one is disputing that the two people had sex - neither the accuser nor the accused. If there’s a relationship pre-existing these are the cases that are rarely criminally prosecutable in the absence of violence or date rape drugs, the very same cases that bedevil colleges and universities.
Yes. CF. Great post.
The accused Stanford guy is using an argument that did not work in the Vanderbilt case. The sccused is saying he did not have sexual intercourse with the victim.
I deleted thr sentence I wrote. Did not know it was a bad word.
Anyway…
Didn’t work too good for Brandon.
The Investigators in the Vanderbilt case did a great job.
At FSU, 55 cases were brought to the police and 2 guys were arrested?
The odds that only two guys should have been areested looks extremely low.
If I was assaulted at FSU, I wouldn’t feel to good about going to the police.
In the Detroit case, they weren’t even looking at rape kits in cases of alleged stranger rape at gunpoint.
A lot of people here advocate lowering the drinking age to 18 in order to cut down on binge drinking on college campuses. The argument to do that would be:
Since the drinking age was raised, binge drinking has skyrocketed on college campuses.
If we lowered the drinking age, binge drinking would return to its former lower level.
If we lowered the drinking age, it wouldn’t have serious adverse effects such as more high school drunk driving.
(1) is indisputably true: binge drinking has skyrocketed. However, no one has offered any reasons to make me believe that binge drinking has skyrocketed because the drinking age was raised rather than for other reasons-- binge drinking has also gone up in both genders as the percentage of women on campus has gone up, for example. And we can easily come up with other social changes that might have affected the drinking rate.
Moreover, even if (1) were true, that unfortunately does not tell us that (2) would be true. Many times rates of bad things ratchet up, and do not go down again even when the cause of their initial increase is eliminated. When we’re in a bad equilibrium, we can’t always get to a good equilibrium.
Furthermore, I’d like to see evidence that letting high school seniors drink legally would not enable more drinking among high schoolers. With a lower drinking age, it would be easier for high school kids to get alcohol from their older classmates, just as it is now easy for college students to get alcohol from older classmates.
To me, “lower the drinking age” is a simplistic argument that doesn’t wrestle with the facts on the ground. It’s a position based on handwaving and hope.
The drinking age was raised to cut deaths caused by drunk driving and arguably it did do this.
However, policies should be reevaluated over time. 18-21 year olds may drive less and binge drink more now.
So What… happened yesterday at UVA?
In particular, let’s look at an example. Sally Sorority wants to be plastered when she goes to a fraternity party, so she drinks five shots of flavored vodka before she goes to it. She knows that alcohol will be readily available at the party, but she nevertheless wants to be drunk when she gets there.
Now alcohol is legal for Sally to drink. How is that going to change her desire to be drunk before she even sets foot in the party?
Actually according to data binge drinking has decreased among males and increased among females. This makes sense because I guarantee you the spirits industry would not manufacture whipped cream vodka and pink lemondade vodka for males. They know who is drinking this stuff.
I’m of the camp to legalize beer and wine at 19 (maybe 18 i don’t know if I have a strong opinion on that).
Momofthreeboys, rape kits were sitting in the dust across the United States of America.
“they are typically quietly settled with the college’s insurer and the grieving family.” I don’t think we know that. Much of what happens isn’t public knowledge. We sit here and assume that what seems possible or probable is how it plays out. Or that a handful of reports or hubbubs are universally representative.
To say that women should have gone to the police in the past when the results were pathetic makes little sense. On this overall topic: thing is, back in the 70’s when I was in college, we knew the big ship needs time to shift position. We knew that as more women (and later, more minorities) grew into positions of influence, the “dominant” perspectives would start to change. Today’s climate can’t really be easily compared to then. And I suspect that, in another 20 years, today will have something of a dark ages feel, too. We aren’t “there” yet. There is still much to change.
Some think it’s as simple as [fill in the blank.] They have to do this or they have to do that. And repeat it over and over. But there are no simple rule changes that can be made and everything falls into order. That’s not considering the whole, the fuller climate and cultural snapshot. And how change rarely happens in a straight line.
No one poster here is the prescient guru.
Funny, but in line with what alh said, “…some of us have changed our views” - - what I’d say is some of us have widened our views, in a good way, been exposed to more detail and taken more time to consider. That’s nice to see.