The report doesn’t say the some detectives won’t arrest at once, when the accuser accuses in an acquaintance case. They say those detectives won’t arrest at all, even after an investigation. Whereas in a stranger case the detectives will arrest once they have probable cause, in an acquaintance case these detectives won’t arrest ever.
Supposedly, one way to solve a rape case is to have the accuser do a “pretext call,” where the accuser calls up the suspect and tries to get him to admit he raped her, while the police are secretly recording. The detectives in the report seem to believe this works often enough that it’s worth trying. But it’s not going to work if the officer doesn’t have the accuser as an ally.
Not in the light most favorable to John Doe, but in the light of reality outside of OCR driven college campuses. Do you think Jane would have a shot in the criminal defense system after she kept having sex with John for months afterwards, and complained of rape only when John dumped her? Juries would see through that in a second. Prosecutors wouldn’t even bring a case.
I don’t think mediation would have helped Jane. What would have helped Jane was a training once she was in 6th or 7th grade to understand that just because she is sleeping with a boy doesn’t mean he is going to love him forever and ever. Sex is just sex, nothing more or less. Sadly, her parents failed her.
What!? You wouldn’t “believe the victim”? Dios Mio!
Next you will say that the 1 in 5 surveys are wrong, too, as anyone can claim incapacitation after the fact without BAC test.
I love this. Let’s make this the law everywhere. Unless the accuser can prove using BAC that (s)he was indeed incapacitated, there is no ground to filing a case. You with me there, Cardinal Fang?
Now about those survey results, why would you believe the women who claim to be incapacitated but don’t provide any proof that they indeed were?
Claimed!? If a man claims that he downed 5 litres of pure grain alcohol before having sex and therefore must have been raped, you would ask him for proof, wouldn’t you?
So why give the benefit of doubt to the woman? Because of her gender?
I am OK with CF’s logic as long as she is OK with men using the same logic, claiming rape by women, and getting women kicked out of campus. To do otherwise I think is sexist.
“Unless the accuser can prove using BAC that (s)he was indeed incapacitated, there is no ground to filing a case.”
There are lots of other kinds of legitimate evidence besides chemical evidence. If ten Boy Scouts testify that they saw the woman passed out on the floor with an empty bottle of vodka next to her, that’s pretty good evidence that she was drunk. You don’t need a breathalyzer for that.
That shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone except someone who has a theoretical view of college campuses far removed from reality.
Anyway, lots of female rapists out there. The guys need to start claiming by their subjective standards that they were so drunk that they will not in a state to give consent.
@JohnDoe4, there is a real problem of date rape on campus (and of sexual assault elsewhere too, but we’re on CC). The second problem is that most schools, like Amherst, saw it in their institutional interest to sweep the problem under the rug until recently and therefore behaved in shockingly immoral ways to female students who had been assaulted. We should not minimize either.
Alas, the solution at the moment seems to be setting up tribunals that are biased to finding in favor of females and ignoring both inherent uncertainty in he said-she said cases and, in cases like Amherst John Doe, in order to reach more politically correct conclusions. Statistically this may be correct, because a) few victims report assaults and b) they are hard to prove given the circumstances. So, tipping the scales toward the female accusers may make the proportion of sexual assaults found in tribunals higher than they would in court and closer to the real frequency of assaults. But, while the solution may be individually correct, it may not be reflect the truth in individual cases (see Amherst John Doe whose evidence is being ignored). I’m quite uncomfortable with that approach.
Although CF doesn’t see it, my sense is that in addition to the current he said/she said dilemma, such a substantial fraction of college sex is preceded by alcohol that we are criminalizing or at least “tribunalizing” socially normative behavior as well as sexual assault. A couple of years ago, I was talking with a college president friend of mine who described the utter craziness of campus drinking and the number of kids who were hospitalized or had to be brought home each weekend evening. He was afraid that a student would wind up dead as a result of drinking. He also said that the biggest change from 15 years before was that a significant percentage of female students were binge drinking to get drunk as well. He in fact brought in every student who was hospitalized or dealt with for excessive drinking for a meeting in his office and decided to allow police to treat underage drinking as a criminal offense (i.e, follow the law). In that context, a high percentage of sex (at least on weekends) is likely to follow serious alcohol consumption. When this is the case, I keep thinking that both parties are sexually assaulting each other in most campus sex. I don’t say this to deny the shockingly high frequency of females being sexually assaulted on campus, but to highlight the difficulty of setting up a non-discriminatory mechanism for punishing those who commit assault.
To the extent that it’s socially normative, that’s a bad thing. If a college says, “Not here,” as many are now doing, good. They should say it. Being accused of rape is one risk of having sex with someone who is incapacitated, but it’s not the only risk, and if colleges are saying that having sex with someone incapacitated is against their conduct rules even if it is socially normative they’re going in the right direction.
Sexual harassment in college used to be socially normative too. So did fraternity hazing.
Yes shawridge, but I sometimes get the distinct feeling that people sometimes don’t understand that women, are indeed, drinking copious amounts of alcohol. it is easy in the current climate to turn I didn’t mean to do that into it wasn’t my fault such and such happened by both parties that fall into bed together. It’s a common refrain in case after case that is public. I find it at times confusing why we are so focused as a society on the end instead of the beginning of these sometimes sordid stories.
That reminds me of something else that I thought was important but forgot to mention earlier today. My DD said today when I asked her to estimate how many of her friends have had sex with a very drunk guy (not just a drunk guy) and she said “well, that doesn’t change anything because nowdays kids don’t drink to just get drunk, they drink to get wasted”.
shawbridge, All we need is men starting to file rape claims en masse, leading to a huge number of women getting kicked out of campus (if the tribunals are gender-neutral, as a feminist would hope them to be). That will fix the current OCR driven madness. Personally, I believe that we should lower the drinking age to 18. Let college kids drink and let them face the consequences. They are adults, after all. Included in the “let them face the consequences” part is taking away the right to claim rape if both the boy and the girl are drunk and no force/threat was used.
If you take that out, then what you have left as campus rape is what used to be the classic definition of rape - use or threat of force/other forms of actual harm (like blackmail). I am sure there are cases like this that happen in college campuses. But if we are to go by what college women complain about most when it comes to rape, and if we are to go by the surveys, I believe that use/threat of force occurs in quite a small percentage. Note that I am excluding body part grabbing from rape. (We should deal with that separately, and apply it equally to both genders, as we have a lot of female huggers too.)
Note also that I would take out coercion as well. If a boy threatens to dump his gf because she wouldn’t go down on him, to me that’s fine. The girl has to have some backbone and walk away from the situation. The same applies in reverse. We all have turned down SOs who wanted something we couldn’t give. That’s just part of growing up into an adult. A jerk, in other words, is not a rapist. A jerk is just a jerk, and many times a jerk is not even a jerk, (s)he is simply someone who has other priorities.
Unfortunately, second wave feminism is dead, and what we have now is a twisted form of feminism that is immensely self-centered and unwilling to take any responsibility or agency when something goes wrong. It is based on faith and not facts (“believe the victim”). It rejects all standards of rational discourse (“to question a victim is to condone rape”). It turns routine relationship issues into rape, e.g., Jane Doe claiming rape when John Doe dumped him. It infantilizes women and prejudges men as the enemy. It is unfortunate.
I just hope it goes away and we can get back to equality.
Does anyone have data about the percentage of rape claims brought forward where the accuser claims that she participated willingly, but was incapacitated? I doubt it’s the majority of claims. Of all the cases she says she was incapacitated, some are cases where she was asleep, unconscious, drugged against her will or unwilling, and those are rape under anyone’s definition.
Of the cases we’ve been discussing, few are cases where she alleges that she participated willingly but was incapable of consent. If colleges get rid of all such accusations, they won’t have gotten rid of many cases.
When I was in college back in the prehistoric times I used to drink to get wasted too. I think the main difference is that then only men used to do it while these days women have joined in. I call it progress as I have many fond memories (and many that of great sex) when I was wasted in college. No reason why women shouldn’t share in the fun.
I guess that means I was raped many a time by my then gf (and now my wife of a quarter century). I should find the nearest college tribunal and report her. Does anyone know whether college tribunals have jurisdiction over professors who raped their drunk bfs 30 years back?
Does this mean in LA I can’t just walk into a police station, claim that certain posters here raped me anally, and get them arrested? What has the world come to these days? No wonder mattress girl had to make a porn tape in order to get justice.
You are the resident expert in 1-in-5 surveys. It should be easy for you to get the stats. Just look up how many women claim rape because they were drunk.
But don’t forget your own rule, that survey respondents who claim they were unable to consent due to high BAC have to prove their assertion.
I happen to agree with you JohnDoe4. I find the infatalizing of today’s young women and of college students in general pretty repugnant and think trying to administrate basic sexual relationships in the absence of force and coercion rather impossible.
I just asked my home for the summer last college son about male and female drinking patterns. He said guys drink to get drunk and mostly drink beer. He’s one of the reviled types on this board - lacrosse playing, 210 lb. guys guy. Girls, and his word was “especially the young ones” drink to get wasted. He says guys drink over a long period of time and girls pound down shots especially right before the parties. It’s pretty much what he told me a couple years ago when I asked him about this when he was a freshman. But he said this time “lots” of girls he knows are switching lately from the flavored vodkas to the flavored malt and beer products (like the limearitas, beer with lemon etc.).maybe because they are advancing in their college years and the thrill of puking ones guts out is no longer attractive and maybe they care less about the calories than they did as fresh(wo)men. He also said everyone drinks less, girls and guys, at small house gatherings when everyone is more likely to just get a buzz going than big blow-out parties.
He says in his college town the cops don’t MIP unless kids are stumbling stupid wandering around and he said he’s been stopped a couple times if he’s walking a girl to her home which on surface is good if the police do this. He said they don’t bust up too many house parties unless they spill out into the street or it’s noisy at 2 AM, but they do break up the fraternity parties around 1 AM. typically. He said there are definitely party “targets” and one of his club sports always gets busted he said because the parties get huge. I find it interesting as there are more kids at some of his parties than were in my entire college when I was in college.
I really don’t know how colleges can wrap their arms around claims of sexual misconduct in this type of environment.
@“Cardinal Fang” , I think that is the rub. On the one hand, you seem to believe that most of these cases involve women who are way over the line drunk. On the other, I hear apocryphal reports of she didn’t think she was raped until she saw this or that person, or we see claims months after the fact. That type of evidence makes me believe that at the time of the act, the woman did not see herself as a rape victim.
I would posit that if the numbers being thrown around (1 in 5, etc) involve a majority of forcible rape or rape while unconscious, etc then we would see evidence of college women generally unconsciously withdrawing from the social scene on campus, because going to a party would put them at a risk of serious harm equal to or greater than front line troops in a war. I don’t think we see that. I also think you would see numbers for forcible rape and violent crime generally spike off campus, which is the opposite of what the current national stats tell us. I think in this sense it is important to remember that “classical” rape is first and foremost a crime of violence.
On the other hand, if the numbers we are talking about involve a clear majority of grey area cases, then I would not expect to see such a sea change in behavior among co eds, because they would still feel in control of their behavior. I would also not expect to see a similar spike in off campus cases, both because of the huge hurdles inherent in prosecuting consent cases, as well as the shall we say unique drinking culture on campuses.
Why would she say that? - she says something like that and her case, in the absence of evidence or force or something else would render her case ineffective. It’s certainly no secret what the “buzz” words are. I said no. I said no numerous times. I drank too much and don’t remember anything. I blacked out and woke up in the morning and don’t remember anything… I never said he could…and so on. Of course there would be no “data”.