Binge drinking has been part of college for a long, long time, long before my time, my parents time, and yes it is a problem. Someone asked what is someone to do to avoid being accused of date rape when having sex, all I can tell you is what I told my son, that if he had any inkling whatever that the girl he was with was not functioning, even mildly drunk, to hold off having sex until she (and he, if he happened to drink like that, fortunately he doesn’t make a big deal about drinking) were more in control, that to prevent this kind of thing drill into their heads that drinking and sex is a minefield, pure and simple, always has been and always will be.I think we should use the model of what happened with drunk driving, where between enforcement and with massive publicity campaigns about drinking and driving, the amount of accidents and fatalities due to alcohol has declined significantly. Back in the day, people out with friends, or at a party, would drink and drive, and of the 55k road deaths each year, somewhere around 35-40% of those involved alcohol, these days the day rate is about 33k, with the number of driving miles soaring, and the percent involving alcohol has lowered significantly, because people changed from assuming DUI was no big thing to it becoming drilled in how dangerous it is and how high the consequences are of DUI. With sex and drinking, the S/M community, because of the risks of what they do, have pretty strong culture against drinking and doing what they do, a lot of the parties and events are alcohol free, and at the very least it is all over that drinking should be after the activity, and given what alcohol does in terms of non consensual sex, I think we could learn a lot from the S/M people and drill into the kids heads the consequences and reasons for being careful with drinking and sex, it is that mindset change that will change this. It will take time, but I think the well publicized cases, both those pretty clear (Brock) and cloudy (like this one) eventually will open up the eyes of the kids that ‘this could be them’.
“In the Stanford case the accused was found having sex with someone who was totally passed out, which under the law means he was guilty of rape. If he started having sex with her while she was conscious, even if she had consented (which may or may not be true, depending on how drunk she was), once she passed out he was guilty of rape, because once she passed out she could not say “no”. Consent doesn’t just mean when you start having sex, consent means that you implicitly consent to having sex by not saying no, whether at the beginning , in the middle or 5 seconds before the other person finished. Once you cannot say no, that is the end of having sex, period, for the other person. So even if there were questions about whether she initially consented, Brock was guilty of non consensual sex once he continued to have sex with someone who was unconscious. It is a similar concept in S/M where the bottom has the right to say no and stop the action at any point (a safeword), in any kind of sex either person has to have the ability to say no at any point, if not, it is over the line.”
Is this a legal understanding of what happened in the Brock Turner case, or just your personal lay understanding of what you think the law is?
“I stand corrected on my statements in post #9. Early research was only done on alcoholics. They now know that even social drinkers can black out.”
Blackout of memory is mostly a function of a high quantity of alcohol consumed over a short period of time. For me (200+ pounds), four strong martinis in an hour could easily do that. Even though I’d still be able (at least for a while) to talk, walk, drive and consent to sex. It would be extremely hard for me to black out on just beer or wine.
For a 130 pound girl, five shots of straight booze at a pre-game alone is more than enough to do the trick. She essentially “self-roofied”. Sounds like she was blotto but consenting. But even if she didn’t consent, there’s absolutely no proof to back that up. I’ve clipped this article to show it to my daughter who will be starting college a year from now (quite likely at UVA coincidentally).
Legal drinking age for beer and wine should be the January 1 of the year after which you turn 18. And then have colleges crack down on handles of vodka and Fireball like they were cocaine. Worth a try.
Agree. I think there are conceptual differences that are at the heart of the scrutiny these days. Some women are mad at themselves if they drink to much and do things they normally wouldn’t do if they were sober and some men are mad that some women want to shift the blame. Until we get away from the concept that women never lie and men always lie, nothing will happen. Until we are willing to say that alcohol plays a huge role in these situations…and that often both parties are pretty darn drunk, we won’t find solutions. That is the benefit of the criminal justice system which works very hard to peel away all of that to get at the real facts and at what point someone actually crosses the line from bad behaviors to criminal behaviors.
To me that is the difference between the Turner case and this case. Turner crossed that line when she passed out. At that moment, even drunk, he could have made a different choice. That evening could have ended quite differently. None of that happened in this UVA case. Witnesses claimed she acted and spoke as if she was engaged and even the cop didn’t give her an MIP when they saw her staggering home and figured she’d get home and sleep it off. This evening ended like it does for many young men and women on college campuses. I applaud UVa for working more closely with local law enforcement to bring legal scrutiny and clarity.
The saddest piece of the original link is this quote by the young women who still hadn’t come to grips with her drinking that night. They both suffered consequences, but I can’t see it reaching criminal behavior short of them both drinking underage and engaging in sex they probably wouldn’t have had if they both weren’t drunk. Quotes like this are very immature in my opinion, but then these kids are for the most part “immature.”
Here’s the follow up article which is interesting
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/07/15/readers-respond-who-should-adjudicate-cases-of-sexual-assault-on-college-campuses
@musicprnt said:
So, how long do you think Amy Lind should be put in jail for having sex with a guy was not sober enough to consent?
Bottom line, even if he had been charged, there was plenty of reasonable doubt in this case. He probably wouldn’t have been convicted. Were I juror, I would’ve voted not guilty.
Have the statements of 25 people and the report of the investigation been released to the public?
Because something is not provable in court does not mean the event did not happen.
Many fellow athletes of the accused said he was lucky. I would love to read the report.
Because somebody is ignorant or does something that is really stupid, doesn’t give anybody else the right to harm that person.
LInd probably drank more in one night than I have in 60 years. Way too much drinking for me. If she was sexually asaulted, that is a crime. We may not have a crime here. We may have an unprovable crime here.
It’s hard to tell from reading two pages in a newspaper.
“Is this a legal understanding of what happened in the Brock Turner case, or just your personal lay understanding of what you think the law is?”
I am not a lawyer, I was going on what the reported facts in the case were, that Brock Turner was found, by witnesses, having sex with a young woman who was unconscious. I can’t speak for California, but back in the dark ages when I was in school I was on a school disciplinary board and we had training on legal issues around incidents involving sex, plus I also have a sister in law who was a DA in NYC dealing with sex crimes, and based on that I am pretty certain that consent does not end with saying yes once, that if in the course of sex someone cannot say no that at that point consent is not present,that legally someone has to be in control of themselves during the sex act. This isn’t a big stretch, there already is plenty out there that if you are having sex, and your partner at any time says no, that you have to stop, so if a partner cannot say stop,. because they are out of it, it makes sense that that constitutes non consent. With the UVA case, it is unclear whether the girl gave consent or was so out of it she couldn’t say no, with the asshole at Stanford he was having sex with a woman who was totally unconscious, whether she once had agreed to sex or not doesn’t matter, because once she is unconscious she has no choice in the matter, no control, and that is non consent.
Put it this way, without drinking, people change their minds all the time, people hook up someplace,decide they want to have sex with each other, go someplace, then one or the other or both change their mind. Let’s say the girl in the stanford case said yes, went off with the DB, they get undresed, then said to him “you know, I don’t want to do this, I want to stop” and he kept going, he would be charged with rape because she said no. In this case, she couldn’t change her mind, which is a fundamental right in having consensual sex, so from what I have been taught and read about, it is no different.
I would like to know why the guy banged on the bathroom door after they entered, then went onto the roof to bang on the window. I have never known there to be sex police at college parties. I he think suspected she was very drunk and didn’t want anything unseemly to happen.
It sounds like almost of the individuals involved in this matter from the primary players to the witnesses were student athletes. I don’t find any of them credible. They are more likely to lie to protect the AD or be pressured to lie.
How did Lind’s wrestler friend find her? Pure chance? It’s much more likely that someone who knew Lind was highly intoxicated and sought him out so he could help her.
Young women should always have a buddy system in place. When my daughter took a self defense class, the instructor said it was perfectly normal for a young woman to want to find some private time away from a party with a man. The woman and her buddy should have a code word. After five or ten minutes (whatever they agree on) the buddy should check on her friend. If the woman doesn’t provide the code word to the buddy, the buddy should bust the door down and make every kind of commotion so people will help her get her friend out of that situation. Is it a perfect system? No.
Perhaps because we live in a day and age where a boy’s life can be ruined just by allegations. There is zero evidence here, just some “feeling” by Amy Lind.
@MaterS the problem with the “buddy” system is that in many of these cases the buddy is getting tanked as well. So no one accountable.
If, in your scenario, the guy was banging on the window, then good on him. He probably thought what they sere doing was stupid. If they keep going and ignored him what makes one of them a criminal? It doesn’t. She drank alot. He drank alot. They had sex in a bathroom when they’d only known each other a half hour. None of that is illegal. If he felt badly that she was unhappy about what happened or agreed with his buddies to go talk to her. Good on him. That is compassion or maybe he was feeling as stupid as she was and felt if they talked it thorough they’d both feel better. If she’s twisted it up in her mind that she was assaulted, then the police have set her straight. Not all drunk sex is illegal. We do women absolutely no favors by implying if they drink all sex is assault and they are hereby absolved of any guilt…sometimes a Zebra is just a Zebra…drunk sex. I’m all for the buddy system…sometimes it the best thing in the world for a friend to say “don’t be stupid” but if your friends are all drunk, you’re on your own.
@MaterS that isn’t what the article said. It didn’t say anyone banged on the bathroom door. It didn’t say that the same person who may have tried to open the door (possibly without knocking, as knocking or banging on it was not mentioned) was the same person as the one who climbed out onto the roof and banged on the window. I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t have specified if it was the same person.
It also didn’t say the wrestler was a friend of hers. Maybe he was. Maybe he just wanted to help. Maybe he was a guy who didn’t want the party busted up and underage drinkers arrested so he got her dressed and hustled her out of the party. We can only speculate based on the little in the article.
Anyone else wonder what this will do to Haley Lind’s future job prospects? Whenever a potential employer looks her up, the first thing they will find is that she drinks to the point of blacking out and that she accuses people of sexual assault without evidence.
Which employer would want to hire this train wreck?
She didn’t falsely accuse anyone of anything. I wouldn’t want to work for anyone who couldn’t understand that. She didn’t know what happened. She didn’t remember. That was not a lie. Not once has anyone shown that she lied. She didn’t turn him in to authorities. Not school authorities and not the police. Someone else did that (as required by law when her friends told that person what happened). She cooperated with the investigation and that is supposed to make her a train wreck? Should she have lied and said she remembered coming on to him? Geez.
People make mistakes, but most don’t compound them by going on record with the Washington Post.
Sorry here is the quote, "At one point, according to the report, the freshman athlete attempted to stop because he believed he heard someone try to enter the bathroom. He told investigators that Lind put her arm around his waist and said “keep going.” So the guy on the roof was there because of? He wanted to watch random people take a pee? Okay slight chance.
As to the wrestler, “She reached out to the wrestler who had found her in the bathroom, and he told her that she was “very out of it” when he found her.” So maybe not a bff, or maybe yes, but she knew how to contact him.
The Brock Turner case was different, he willingly made a statement to police about his actions.
This investigation played out over several months. Memories fade. Witnesses just want the matter to go away.
A good friend is a high level hiring manager in a secure government capacity. He planned to hire an applicant and then he Googled her. She was in a “Girls Gone Wild” video. He didn’t think that was a reason not to hire her. Bankruptcy or criminal cases? Yes.
I feel for her if she honestly was assaulted but her case is weak. Also how does she know the wrestler that found her and took her home didn’t rape her, since she can’t remember anything?
I’m not victim blaming but you can’t make a shot schedule, get totally trashed, clearly lose your inhibitions, but not accept any responsibility.
I agree with that mom2twogirls. I think she said some very naive things in that newspaper article and she may wish someday she hadn’t, but we don’t know if the media reporting took anything out of context. If I were her mother and to hebegebe’s point, I’d be beyond upset at the underage pre-gaming that went on before she even left for the party and I’d be afraid that she was someone who conceivably has “blackouts” as that is pretty serious stuff and she should probably “cool it” on the alcohol consumption.
Here’s what was reported about the other people who intervened:
One has to assume that if UVa had a 96 page report on this and the prosecutor is not charging that those statement were corroborated or this would be a “true” scandal.