<p><a href=“Legal Aid: Jackie from Rolling Stone story hires lawyer”>http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/legal-aid-jackie-from-rolling-stone-story-hires-lawyer/article_527c8190-806d-11e4-9497-8774be1e8a4e.html</a></p>
<p>Jackie has hired a lawyer.</p>
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<p>TatinG, thanks for the link.</p>
<p>CF,
Do you know the answer to my question about what do raped college women want to happen to their attackers? Do they want them to go to jail? Because if that is what they want, then we need to focus on making the criminal justice system more accessible to them. Of course this does not mean that every or even most cases will be prosecuted, but they should not be discouraged from reporting. </p>
<p>I’m not convinced that jail is necessarily what most college women want, though, but I could be wrong about that. My D thinks that college women who are sexually assaulted often don’t want to get the guy in trouble. Those would likely be the women who probably felt rightly or wrongly, some level of responsibility for it happening, or don’t feel the social and emotional fallout would be worth it. </p>
<p>Spending time reforming access to the criminal justice system wouldn’t help the latter group, counseling would probably help them. </p>
<p>Here is the relevant [California</a> code](<a href=“http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=pen&group=00001-01000&file=261-269]California”>http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=pen&group=00001-01000&file=261-269) as regards to consent and sexual assault:</p>
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<p>The Bader quote (link?) that momofthreeboys cites seems to be concerned about cases where the accuser claims that she couldn’t consent due to being incapacitated. That is not new. That’s always been the law in California.</p>
<p>The new part is the part I quoted above, about consent. Under the California law, people have to indicate their consent. They have to positively cooperate in act or attitude. So she doesn’t have to prove that she couldn’t consent due to incapacitation-- she only has to prove that she didn’t positively consent. And if she can demonstrate (perhaps by eyewitnesses who saw her shortly before the alleged incident) that she was in no condition to demonstrate any kind of positive cooperation, that’s enough to establish the crime. If she couldn’t consent, she didn’t consent.</p>
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<p>I’m sorry, I don’t know that answer. It’s an interesting question. It’s intertwined with the raped women’s expectations of the college disciplinary system and the legal system. We have to consider what the woman thinks is possible, as well as the outcome that she wishes for. </p>
<p>She might think that her rapist belongs in prison, but be convinced (rightly or wrongly) that due to the circumstances of his crime, there is no way he could be convicted beyond a reasonable doubt, so it’s no use going to the police. </p>
<p>I imagine that for a lot of raped women, what they want is for their rapist to be struck down by a thunderbolt.</p>
<h1>1954</h1>
<p>I don’t know how to describe what happened in Steubenville, and the reaction of much of the community, as anything other than rape culture. And it’s not that out of the norm an event as far as I can tell. </p>
<p>Would these young men have been rapists in a different environment/community?</p>
<p>Wow it took me a long time to catch up on this thread. Seems everyone is in agreement that rape is unacceptable. And it seems that in the none he said she said type cases, even if the story is sickening (like Steubenville) the rapists did end up in jail. </p>
<p>So the real problem is the he said she said, those cases somehow need to be reduced (Regardless of how many there are 1 in 5 or .25 etc) while at the same time protecting everyones’ rights.</p>
<p>Seems to me we need to </p>
<p>-keep college administrators out of the process
-keep an eye on some police departments (but that seems to be a problem with other areas of the law as well);
-we need to continue to educate young men on NO means NO (because really the hypothetical examples written by So What about YES means YES are true it would be comical)and No means No is improving things albeit too slowly;
-AND (this is not victim blaming) we need to educate young women too. If I had a daughter I would be telling her to say NO over and over, try punching etc. The “date rape” type of rape is not the violent type done by the sociopath, it is a guy (no excuse) who is too drunk for proper brain processing or too arrogant to think anyone would refuse him. To me if they continue to stand up for themselves it may help to stop it or at least provide evidence. AND Women must come forward and report immediately! I think that will help with how powerless it makes them feel. </p>
<p>I find it instructive to imagine a crime that I think of as equally monstrous as the raping of an unconscious girl in the clear knowledge that she was unconscious. </p>
<p>Everyone here, I assume, agrees that sticking at the very least fingers into an unconscious girl is rape, and is a crime. This is not he-said, she-said. It’s unambiguously a crime.</p>
<p>But in the Steubenville case, a large swath of a community argued that this crime was not a crime at all, but an action that was perfectly acceptable.</p>
<p>If men in a community believe that penetrating an unconscious woman is fine, then when given a chance, they’ll do it, in the belief that what they are doing is just fine. That’s why I don’t accept the idea that rapists are so rare: a segment of the male population thinks that rape is just fine.</p>
<p>Compare that to, let’s say, robbing a convenience store, which IMO is less bad than rape. Some young people rob convenience stores, but when they do, they don’t videotape the action. They don’t pass around pictures. Other people don’t defend convenience store robbers. That’s because we don’t have a substantial swathe of the population that thinks that robbing convenience stores is acceptable. But we do have a substantial swathe that thinks raping an unconscious girl is acceptable.</p>
<p>“Jackie has hired a lawyer.”</p>
<p>And why the hell shouldn’t she? </p>
<p>So are we supposed to rest on what Pinkleton said. she’s our new authority? Yo. As long as we don’t go on what Jackie said or someone wrote, some other complainant or advocate, but we should also hold true what the men say??</p>
<p>mom3: Incapacitated I can understand. It’s a word that I can understand [but]Intoxicated…but 2 drinks is not enough to make me incapable of making decisions Is the gist that intoxicated isn’t necessarily incapacitated?</p>
<p>Because the definition I see of intoxicated is:
of alcohol, a drug, etc. : to make (someone) unable to think and behave normally</p>
<p>And on a different note, considering this thread started with the title "UVA frats suspended I think it is terrible that President Sullivan has not lifted the ban on Greek life in Charlottesville. I understand why she did it in the first place supported that move given the chaos that the article created. What I find most offensive is the reasoning given for not lifting it is to wait until a new agreement is signed with the IFC. She is using this inaccurate article to pressure the IFC which is really unfair… IMO</p>
<p>“So are we supposed to rest on what Pinkleton said. she’s our new authority? Yo. As long as we don’t go on what Jackie said or someone wrote, some other complainant or advocate, but we should also hold true what the men say??”</p>
<p>Everyone says what Pinkleton says. And, all she says is something probably happened to Jackie but no-one knows exactly what it was or where it happened.</p>
<p>In California for all colleges that receive federal funds the burden of proof has now shifted to the accused. Under the new “affirmative consent” law for those campuses it is the accused who must prove that the woman said “yes.” That is a new standard for consent and a significant change.</p>
<p><a href=“Active Consent Bill Signed in California - The New York Times”>Active Consent Bill Signed in California - The New York Times;
<p>“I’m not convinced that jail is necessarily what most college women want, though, but I could be wrong about that. My D thinks that college women who are sexually assaulted often don’t want to get the guy in trouble. Those would likely be the women who probably felt rightly or wrongly, some level of responsibility for it happening, or don’t feel the social and emotional fallout would be worth it.”</p>
<p>This is where I think it gets murky.</p>
<p>A stranger assaults me in a dark alley - I want him to feel the full force of the law. I have no conflicting emotions. I don’t care about him as a person, I don’t care if he had a troubled childhood, lock him up and throw away the key.</p>
<p>But let’s say it was a guy that I had a little bit of a crush on. I thought he was cute. Maybe he took me to a nice dinner, we flirted, he showed personal interest in me and I had a reasonable expectation that we might end the evening with a (fully consensual) kiss or little make-out session. And so now this guy assaults me. </p>
<p>Without going too personal here, though I suppose I already am – this leads to a whole different sort of conflicting emotions – when a guy you liked takes advantage of you - that simply isn’t present when it was the stranger-in-the-dark-alley. And it’s harder to process what you think the punishment “should” be when you have to sort through - did I lead him on? did I send a signal I shouldn’t have? do I really want to ruin his life, even though he’s harmed me? how could he be so nice one moment and then so bad the next moment?</p>
<p>I’m a very straightforward, no-nonsense person; what happened to me was nowhere near what happened to Jackie, and I can *still * feel some of these emotions 30 years after the fact. My perpetrator never was charged and I’m not really sure that what I wanted was for him to go to jail. I think what would have given me more closure was an apology rather than a jail term. There’s a concept of betrayal that is present that isn’t present with the stranger in the dark alley.</p>
<p>This is a long winded way of saying I suspect the above poster is right - it may not be that they really want the guy to get in trouble / go to jail, even as they recognize the seriousness of what happened. </p>
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<p>This doesn’t shift the burden of proof-- that will still be he-said she-said in a lot of cases. Rather, it shifts the definition of the crime. She always had to consent to sex or it was rape, but now she not only has to consent (in her mind) but signal that consent in some concrete way.</p>
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<p>I think it is wrong that she banned sorority activity at all. </p>
<p>With regard to the fraternities, her decision not to lift the ban makes me wonder if UVA has more information on a fraternity other than Phi Psi. For example, if UVA’s investigators have identified the <em>real</em> Drew and he is a member of another fraternity, but they do not want to disclose this information yet, so they are keeping the ban on.</p>
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<p>That is an excellent point and one that I had not thought of.</p>
<p>Why did President Sullivan ban sorority activity? Is there some technicality about the IFC where it would be hard to ban fraternities but not sororities? As far as I know, nobody has made any allegations about sororities.</p>
<p>TatinG, it’s pretty much clear you wouldn’t believe any woman unless there were videotaped, clear evidence of an assault, the woman resisting and being overpowered physically by a man.</p>
<p>All I can say is even if I had called the police 20 minutes later after what happened to me, I would have had zero physical evidence (acts occurred, but no violence / tearing of clothing, etc.). Any case I would have brought would have boiled down to he-said-she-said. And I was a “good girl” (good student, not known to be a liar, etc.) but who knows if I would have been believed against an older man - who was a pillar of the community, a Sunday school teacher, and would have denied it to the death.</p>
<p>I cannot tell you how dispiriting it would be not to be believed. And my family believed me. And I didn’t suffer one-tenth of the trauma Jackie did. </p>
<p>Pizzagirl , I appreciate you telling us your story. I can imagine it is very difficult to bring up your memories.</p>