Where, by the way, is the evidence that one single person has been expelled from one single college or university for a unwelcome physical sexual overture and nothing more? That is, where the grounds for expulsion was an alleged unwelcome physical overture, and nothing more?
“Bouncy, bouncy?” Never heard that one before.
I believe that as long as the definition of sexual assault uses the words “attempting to” and doesn’t include a requirement of physical contact, as the Bucknell policy does, then yes a bare solicitation absent physical contact is definitionally sexual assault. The UVA policy would call that sexual harassment, which is one of the things defined under sexual misconduct. Do I think a rational person will kiick someone out of school for that? No, of course not. But I don’t find the assertion that it could happen any harder to believe than that Bucknell would let someone admit to rape and get away with it, or that a dean at UVA would say guys admit to sexual assault and nothing happens. And in my example, there is clear written evidence that such a thing exists, which is missing in the UVA and Bucknell examples. My larger point though is that this could be the kind of conduct the UVA dean was referring to when she said guys admit to sexual misconduct. There is far more proscribed conduct in these policies than what old people like me think of when we think of sexual assault or rape.
As far as what I personally believe, of course I don’t think guys or girls for that matter should be free to run around campus coping feels and groping people. I have a feeling that the mediation procedures and informal disciplinary processes were set up to handle just that situation. I think that is probably the right approach. You get some doofus who gets drunk at his first frat party, grabs a girl, sticks his tongue down her throat and grabs her breast (which, being honest, I am sure we have all seen) probably should get dragged into a room and get told to face up to the fact he is a jerk, apologize and go sin no more. If it happens again, then maybe a suspension and on up the chain. Progressive discipline in other words. In that scenario, I am perfectly fine with a preponderance standard, at least up to a suspension stage. I personally think that the standard of proof should be clear and convincing for expulsion for anything.
In cases of physical sexual assault or clear non consensual sex I think the standard of proof should be clear and convincing and that expulsion should be the only option. But I also think in cases where expulsion is on the table, that the accused should have the right to cross examine the accuser (whether by written question or orally), the right to have his witnesses heard and the right to introduce proof on his own behalf (text messages, etc). Personally, I would set the hearing panels up like arbitration. The accused picks one staff or faculty member from an approved list, the accuser picks another and then those two decide on a third. I don’t think students should sit on those panels.
I agree with you up to fealony assault and no I’m sorry I can’t classify goosing someone as a felony. I don’t think colleges and universities should be trying felony issues at all. I think for someone formally charged with felony assault or rape (or whatever criminal definition the particular state has) ought to be put on leave barring the outcome of the trial or the outcome of the investigation if it doesn’t end with charges. I think expulsion should be off the table if the accused is not tried or is tried and found not-guilty. Remediation, mediation, a notation on the file should the same persons be involved in yet another complaint I do agree with. I think there is an equally problematical situation if you have a person making multiple accusations against multiple people - call it serial accuser - as much of an issue as you have when different people making accusations against the same person.
It seems to me you are misinterpreting the Bucknell policy. Here’s the line in question:
You say the “without Consent” there applies to attempting; that is, * attempting, without consent for the attempt, to have sexual intercourse* would be a violation . And therefore, you say, if I attempt to have sex with someone by asking them, and I don’t have consent for the attempt, then I’m guilty of a violation. I grant you that’s a possible interpretation of those words, but it’s strained. If you look at the definition of Consent in the same document, you discover that it applies to acts of sexual touching, not verbal overtures. Verbal overtures are not things that require consent, so it cannot be an offense not to get consent for the verbal overture. Indeed, the verbal overture IS getting the consent.
I contend that the proper interpretation attaches the “without Consent” right where it appears in the sentence, to the sexual intercourse, cunnilingus or fellatio. That is, the offense is attempting to have sex without consent. It’s an offense to have sex without consent, and it’s also an offense to try and fail to do that thing. But it’s not an offense to make a verbal overture to have sex, discover that your overture is unwelcome, and stop-- you wanted to have sex with consent, you discovered that you weren’t getting that consent, and so you stopped, which is all fine.
I concede that your interpretation is logically possible, but do you have any reason to believe that anyone in a position to adjudicate these cases at Bucknell, or at any college anywhere, shares your interpretation? When you look at the lawsuits by the guys who claim to have been unjustly punished, none of them are from guys who were accused of making an unwelcome verbal proposition. In the lawsuits I’ve seen, the offense the guy is charged with is a serious one, but the guy says he didn’t do it.
I also notice a bit of a cavalier attitude toward that drunk doofus, @Ohiodad51. By the way, no, not all of us have been at events where we witness men assaulting women. But you apparently do or did attend such events. I ask you to envision this situation. At one of these delightful soirees, a drunk doofus appears, grabs a woman, seizes her breast and sticks his tongue down his throat. Eventually, he is stopped. Tsk, tsk, you say.
Five minutes later another drunk doofus appears, grabs you, seizes your crotch, and sticks his tongue down your throat. You’re powerless, because he weighs 250 pounds and has muscles on his muscles. You’re choking. You try to pull away, but he crushes you more painfully in his huge arms. You can’t move. He grinds against you. Eventually-- but somehow eventually seems a lot longer when you’re the one who can’t breathe-- he is stopped. Are you still saying, tsk tsk, someone should give that boy a sternly worded letter?
I too think the standard should be clear and convincing. And at one time I thought the only option should be expulsion for non-consensual sex, but I now believe that in some cases, particularly when alcohol is involved, suspension for one or both is a better choice.
@cardinalfang. I have said repeatedly that any rational person would not expel someone for soliciting unwanted intercourse without physical touching. But as you say, it is a “possible interpretation” of the rules as written. I think the rules were written as broadly as possible to grant people like Eramo discretion to act reasonably given the facts before them. But then we have issues like the HuffPo article, or the girl from Bucknell saying some guy admitted rape and two deans let it slide, and all of a sudden the debate gets driven to the margins, and positions harden. I find all three situations equally unlikely. But many are willing to believe one side or the other happens all the time. It’s a huge problem. That’s the point.
And yes, I have been at college parties (bars too after college) when much, much younger where I have seen guys dancing close with a girl who lean in and French kiss the girl and/or “cop a feel” that was obviously unwanted. I don’t condone it, I don’t think I have ever done anything like it, but I won’t ignore that it happens. Of course, that is far different than the situation you describe, which I have personally never seen. Obviously, there is a range of activity from boorish to assault that can be described in the same basic way. The devil, as I believe I have heard before, is in the details.
Like in all things, we need to trust that the adults in the room will use their discretion and appreciate the difference between the two situations. And I think that getting sent to a disciplinary process, and being told in no uncertain terms what you did was wrong and if we find out you did it again you are gone for at least a semester is something more than “tsk, tsk.” If you find that cavalier, I guess I disagree.
As far as impaired/non consensual sex, I don’t know if you are male or female, but speaking as a guy, and a big one at that (I was an offensive lineman at Bucknell), there are just bright lines. I am against a woman who objectively appears competent to consent later withdrawing that consent and saying that her inhibitions were reduced or whatever, but back in the day I walked any number of just flat out drunk young girls home from frat parties (the football team used to provide an escort service for coeds on weekends at night during the season) many of whom were, uh, frisky. You know when someone is too drunk to know what is going on.
LOL, I’ve observed after raising 3 big, tall athletic guys that the girls are alot friskier these days then when I was young so just imagine Ohiodad51 year 2015. Risky Business could be remade with an entirely different theme this decade. Lawyers are trained to assume a position and defend that position within the legal context. Administrators at colleges I have not so much faith in and I feel for them as they try to navigate the nuances with their own predispositions that have little to do with education. They should not have been put in the position of having to do so on a wink and a nod. I’m all for a higher standard and equal rights to both parties in a dispute.
And so am I against women who objectively appear competent to consent later withdrawing that consent. What cases are you thinking of where that happened? Certainly that Occidental woman did not objectively appear competent to consent, unless you think staggering, slurring and smelling of vomit are objective signs of competence. The drunk guy she was with may have thought she was competent, but you and I would have thought she needed to go home and sleep it off.
@momofthreeboys, I agree completely with both your points. College administrators are not judges, and they shouldn’t have to pretend they are. As far as “kids today”, the first time my son went to a formal dance with his girlfriend, I was sitting in the parking lot, waiting to pick them up and thought my wife was going to have a heart attack when she saw the dresses and flat out serious necking going on in the parking lot. And these were freshmen in a catholic High School! It is a different world now.
@cardinalfang, I don’t have the specifics of individual cases top of kind as you seem to. Plus, I am trying to speak generally, and not get bogged down in idiosyncratic circumstance. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, bad facts make bad law. I am more interested in the policy and what it portends.
Ohiodad, I agree with you that we ought to focus on policy. We should look at what’s happening now, the effect of current policy, and see what’s going wrong. But a focus on policy is not served by an interpretation of the Bucknell rules (not the rules for any other college) that you have no evidence anyone at Bucknell is actually using.
We ought to focus on what is really going on, not some imaginary problem. In some cases, young men are being unjustly convicted of sexual misconduct. In other cases, young women who were victims of sexual misconduct are getting no justice. In no cases is a guy being expelled for a verbal sexual advance, so we shouldn’t waste our time worrying about that chimera.
Quick summary of the Occidental case, because it’s instructive: A freshman guy and a freshman woman were extremely drunk. It’s undisputed that she was vomiting, slurring her words and staggering. It is equally undisputed that she clearly, enthusiastically agreed to sex with the guy-- there are texts. At Occidental, it is an offense for a person of either gender to have sex with another person when the person is unable to appreciate the consequences of that act, or when that person is unable to make an informed judgement because they are impaired by alcohol. She later accused the guy of having sex with her without her consent, because, she said, she was too impaired to consent. The independent arbitrator concluded that the guy was so drunk that he did not realize she was incapacitated, but drunkenness is not an excuse, because a sober person would have realized she was incapacitated. He therefore was expelled. He did not accuse her, so whether he also was too incapacitated to have sex was never adjudicated. He’s now suing Occidental. If it had been me, I’d have made the unilateral decision to determine whether he was too incapacitated to consent. I’d have considered suspending both. I find expulsion in this case too harsh, but he absolutely did violate Oxy’s sexual misconduct policy.
PS The “bouncy, bouncy” quote is from Monty Python’s Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook sketch. The most famous line from that sketch is “My hovercraft is full of eels.”
Just to clear things up…
http://www.takepart.com/feature/2015/02/27/college-women-seek-justice-sexual-assault
A definite generation gap is apparent when reading some of the posts on this thread. Looking at the issue of campus sexual assault through the lens of the social norms of a bygone era seems misguided to me. And it makes little sense because those norms were not universal across socio-economic strata; your norms were not necessarily dominant in any given generation. We have to look for solutions to the issue within the context of the cultural norms that exist on college campuses today. It is irrelevant that some find these norms distasteful. It seems some are longing for the “good old days” when you perceive young adults conducted themselves in a manner more consistent with your individual morals. Looking at sexual assault from this perspective is likely going to lead you down the predictable path of placing the blame on the deterioration of the moral fabric of our youth. And in the context of sexual assault, we know whose lap that heap of blame usually lands in - squarely in the laps of women.
I am not sure what was being implied by “girls are a lot friskier these days” and “my wife was going to have a heart attack when she saw the dresses…….” But this is a thread on sexual assault so I have to infer that you see these statements as having some relevance to the subject at hand. My own view is that such statements have no place when discussing solutions to sexual assault as they obfuscate the central issue of unrestrained sexual aggression. Perhaps if you took the time to reflect on what those statements imply in the context of this discussion, you would have written something less awful. I also find it odd that posters try to mobilize their definition of “virtue” and download it on a generation of women who have clearly rejected the roles “assigned” to them in previous eras.
In previous generations when it came to sexual assault women were silenced. That battle was lost so now women are being blamed.
If you truly believe the blame for sexual assault lands in the laps of women, then you are the one who is living in the past. And who exactly is talking about unrestrained sexual aggression? I believe the latest topic on the table was intoxication/apparent consent. Of course the way people dress or act at parties has nothing to do with true acts of violence, like you imply by referencing unrestrained aggression. And of course the social mores of young adults and kids are relevant to the problems with sexual assault investigations, specifically those dealing with drunk, casual sex, on campus. The “hook up” culture, drinking to excess, the very weird idea that certain opinions are “awful” and have “no place” in these discussions, the even weirder idea that women bear less responsibility for their decisions than do men, all these things put young people in situations which are unfortunate. Until there is some acknowledgment that any discussion of sexual misconduct or assault on campus or in the larger culture begins with personal responsibility for both parties we are going nowhere.
What I am I supposed to conclude here? That because young women are “friskier” they deserve to be assaulted? That girls get raped because they wear the wrong clothes? That getting drunk means you’re fair game to be assaulted? That doesn’t sound like a different world to me; it sounds like the same old world of blame the victim, the same old world of guys can’t control themselves so it’s not their fault when they assault.
I imply nothing of the sort. My point is that sexual assault is an independent violent act. No one is responsible for creating the conditions in which other people sexually assault them.
The “hook up” culture and causal sex are what they are. They are certainly not license for sexual assault. Is there any more casual sex now than there was 30 years ago? I don’t believe casual sex is the root cause of sexual assault.
Who said this?
I agree with this statement. But I do not see how comments on the attire of women in a thread on sexual assault gets us any closer to that acknowledgment.
I understood that Eramo meant alleged sexual assault survivors, students that were just coming to her for the first time. (This is the danger of the use of “survivor” instead of "accuser"at this preliminary stage.) If Eramo believed that the students she spoke to had been sexually assaulted then she would have been obligated under Title IX to initiate investigations in every case. It seems to me that she determined that only four accusations fit UVA’s definition of sexual assault and that these four were formally investigated. Maybe she made the right decision, maybe not. We just don’t have the details.
I agree that the terminology used in the interview could have been more precise, but I can’t agree that the absence of expulsion proves that UVA has been negligent. It makes no difference if Yale expelled 3 or 300. The decisions made by UVA’s board are specific to the cases they reviewed. Should sexual assault always and only be sanctioned by expulsion? Because of the increasingly wide definition of sexual assault, I believe that other sanctions like suspension could be appropriate.
And yet, they found the guy
Not sure why that happened and I can’t delete. Anyway, I think cultural changes have everything to do with how we shape societal behavioral expectations and consequently how we addresses campus issues. I don’t see young women as fragile beings that need social protection as we did in the 40s and 50s and earlier and I don’t see making executive decisions so-to-speak as entirely the purvey of men. As the ads in the 70s said “we’ve come along way baby.” This is what shapes my opinions that we need to treat accusers and accused equally…and why I am not fond of calling an accuser “a victim” or “a survivor” until it’s proven that they indeed are a “victim” or a “survivor.” I’m also not fond of rules/dictates/laws that in effect are protectionist of one sex or the other.
So yes, i do think young women are more aggressive than they were in my generation and far more aggressive than they were in my mother’s generation and grandmother’s generation. I don’t necessarily think that is a “bad thing” but it carries some level of responsibility as young women proclaim by action that they are not a protected class and they want to behave in a manner they perceive as relating to sexual aggression. These women are now one to two to maybe even three generations from having to worry about pregnancy and other issues that “shaped” female behavior in earlier generations.
People that work on college campuses in any capacity spend many hours a day with these young people and consequently I’m sure their determinations on these relationship issues are shaped by their knowledge of this generation and the group dynamics on a day-to-day basis.
If anything I think the issue is that in generalities less men are “bothered” by aggressive women or simply go along with it and can compartmentalize sexual experiences but the same is not true for women - women still mentally wrap sex/love/affection scenarios tightly in their minds which is a whole 'nother conversation. The hook-up culture is not the same for both sexes, I don’t really believe it ever can be if it’s still around for another generation or so further convoluting the conversation about what constitutes sexual harassment and and what doesn’t.
@harvestmoon1, please. I assume you used the words unrestrained aggression for a purpose, just like I assume you used the word assault repeatedly. It is quite obvious that what @momofthreeboys and I were discussing was the problems revolving around drunk sex and the issue of implied consent. Climb on as high a horse as you wish, but if you are going to claim that I am awful, at least do so using a position I have actually taken.