What about violence to ones feelings? Like sleeping with someone for a while and then dumping her? Or doing nothing for the woman after she has just blown the man? Shouldn’t women be allowed to file rape charges for such jerkish behavior?
What say you, Cardinal Fang?
I am aghast that you think women may lie in a rape case. Isn’t it true that only men lie and woman are delicate virginal roses who always tell the truth and must be protected from the evil men in this world?
Damn, I sometimes wonder whether I live in Victorian times or the 21st century.
I asked about the reports to colleges, not the answers to survey questions. I already know about the answers to survey questions. Again:
Does anyone have data about the percentage of rape claims brought to colleges where the accuser claims that she participated willingly, but was incapacitated?
We know that in the Syracuse study, 6.6% of freshman women said they’d been forcibly raped, and 9.6% said they’d been raped while incapacitated. “Aha,” you say. “See, more women say they’ve been raped while incapacitated than forcibly raped.”
Not so fast. Recall the prompt from the survey: Taking advantage of me when I was too drunk or out of it to stop what was happening. To be sure, that includes women who say they were too intoxicated to consent, even though they appeared to consent. But it also includes women who say they were unconscious, or who were barely conscious and didn’t in fact consent, or who were roofied, or who were asleep. We don’t have data about how many of the women appeared to consent, and how many were in no condition to appear to consent.
Furthermore, we know that the number of women who say on this survey that they were raped is way, way, way bigger than the number of women who went to Syracuse and filed a college rape report. We can’t conclude anything about the filers, just by looking at the survey.
@Ohiodad51: I’m not sure why we care whether an accuser initially thought she was raped. If the given act meets the criteria then a rape occurred regardless of any subjective belief in it.
Nah. People never think the bad thing is going to happen to them. They can look at the numbers, but they never think they’re going to be the unlucky one. Texting while driving, for example, is exceedingly dangerous, but many people still do it, in the belief that the risks of texting while driving don’t apply to them.
I think we care only in reference to determining how many of these cases involve people who were truly, legally, incapacitated, and how many were rather “out of it” to use the term from the survey everyone is throwing around. But yes, of course the mental appreciation of the victim is not germaine to whether the crime occurred. But let me ask you this. if a victim comes into your office, and says that two months ago she had sex with a guy, that she didn’t think anything of it until she spoke with her friend who told her she was really out of it that night and the guy never should have taken advantage of her, would you reach the conclusion that she was likely clearly incapacitated on that evening?
Cardinal Fang, Anyone can ask for any data, but I will just stick to what I said instead of going down the rabbit hole that I am being invited to. I don’t know the Syracuse study, but it serves the purpose well. 2/3 of all self-reported rape come from drunken sex, where odds on the guy was drunk as well, and hence the two of them raped each other.
As for forcible rapes women need to file police complaints immediately and get a rape kit done. They should do this if they care for society, as otherwise they are letting rapists go free. Evidence of physical trauma is hard to ignore (or fudge).
That only works when the “victim” believes that she has not been raped. If the “victim” believes that she has been raped we should “believe the victim”. To do otherwise is “to condone rape”.
In theory yes and is the reason why some states don’t have a statute of limitations on rape. I’m good with that. I do think though that colleges and universities need to tighten up the period of reporting related to student claims. It’s rather ludicrous for a senior male to be accused two to three years after a supposed assault. Clearly in the absence of other accusations the kid has not been a “threat” to the pursuit of happiness of the rest of the campus just the person that is angry. It doesn’t need to take two years to determine if you’ve been raped or assaulted. You either were or you weren’t. And frankly if you can’t figure it out you probably weren’t and it’s really not a badge of sisterhood to claim something that didn’t really happen. The days of glorifying mattress girl have already waned. It might take a few months to wrap your head around the evening, but a year or more is ludicrous. Plus you wait that long as an accuser you’ve pretty much killed any good evidence with the police.
I’ll be happy when being drunk is “uncool.” Apparently it’s not “uncool” to be crazy drunk. When we were young adults our crowd could party pretty hearty and inevitably someone would be named the king and queen of the party…it was NOT the label you wanted to wake up and find had been bestowed and you learned the lesson pretty quick. Demonizing college students who take pictures of drunk classmates and shoot them out on Instagram is probably the exact opposite of what should happen - and I’m being alittle facetious, but alittle truthful, too. So I don’t believe much of the surveys, because i think people shape answers in their head to fit their own sense of self esteem and awareness.
But the days of making porn videos to reenact alleged rape may be here.
She might have been incapacitated, or not. If she persisted in reporting, I’d have to find out.
Why is this woman reporting, though, if she “didn’t think anything of it”? She is entitled to report, of course, but why is she reporting? Usually women who come in with rape reports weeks after were distressed by the incident either at the time, or the next day. It’s not that they thought the incident was fine. They thought it was horrible, but it was only later that they came to think it was not only horrible, but also a crime/offense.
Contrary to what some people are saying here, many women don’t want to think of themselves as rape victims. Say her boyfriend comes in, chokes her, throws her down on the bed and has sex with her while she is trying to fight him off-- she’ll make excuses, he had a bad day, that’s just his way, he’s showing he loves me, it wasn’t rape… but she didn’t like the sex or want it. When she tells her friend about it, her friend is going to say, shocked, “He raped you!” At some point weeks later, if she comes to think she was raped, well, she was, and it’s about time she realizes it.
If she thought it was fine at the time and the next day, (not said it was fine, but thought it was fine) and only accused weeks later, I’d be suspicious of her motive. I’d wonder whether she was concocting something to get revenge.
You won’t “believe the victim”? Do you not trust mattress girl?
I don’t think we should be as quick to denigrate potential victims as I hear in the tone of a couple of the other posters. I think the problem is severe and that far too large a percentage of female students are indeed sexually assaulted, especially when they are drunk and likely especially in their first semester.
My point is that it is very hard to prove in the vast number of such cases when there was a sexual assault and so they won’t go to court. And, until recently, schools saw it in their self-interest to sweep the incidents under the rug. So, I fully understand the felt need for a better procedure than that which we currently have. But, creating a star chamber that is biased toward the female when there is no real evidence seems really problematic to me as well and even worse are the star chambers that ignore the evidence because it doesn’t lead to the desired conclusion (talked with a senior at Harvard whose ex-GF accused him and later admitted to his friends and then to the star chamber that she had made up the charges because she was angry at him but the star chamber continued with the case for months thereafter, with his life in limbo) .
And, CF, I didn’t say that having sex with incapacitated women was socially normative (though it may be in some fraternities) but that getting drunk was socially normative and sex usually followed getting drunk. You guys were being definitional before and I wasn’t following, but drunk and incapacitated seem different to me. That seemed like a recipe for guys to start claiming rape – if what is in the press is true, I think the Amherst kid should – which would bring the pendulum back from immoral treatment of women (what we had before) to painfully politically correct to perhaps something more reasonable.
I will caution that I am not infrequently involved in things that get press coverage and I have never been in a situation on the inside where the press coverage is accurate.
I’m sorry, shawbridge, I didn’t quite understand what you were saying here. Earlier you said:
But what is “criminalized” or “tribunalized” is not drunk sex, but sex with people who are so drunk they were incapacitated. I understood you to be saying that sex with incapacitated people is “socially normative.” If you merely meant that sex with drunk (but not necessarily incapacitated) people is socially normal, I agree but I don’t see why that is a problem for this issue.
I think the line between drunk and incapacitated is fairly tricky to navigate (she says she was incapacitated and he says she was drunk just like he was). You won’t be there with a breathalyzer. A tribunal that is eager to make amends for its past can be pretty accommodating in its definition of incapacitated. It will all be pretty subjective. At that point, I think we could be sweeping in a fair bit of socially normative behavior.
Colorado State (http://www.wgac.colostate.edu/consent) says, “If they are drunk or high, they can’t give consent. If YOU are intoxicated, you can’t give consent.” Can you be drunk but not incapacitated? I would say so. But, in Colorado or at least at Colorado State, drunk and incapacitated treated as the same with respect to consent. (Maybe at that altitude, you can’t). Anyway, that’s the sexual activity I was highlighting that seems to be difficult – kids have a bunch to drink but are not incapacitated and have sex. Given today’s collegiate behavior, that is probably a large subset of sexual activity on campus.
That is not, in fact, the actual policy of Colorado State. This is:
[quote]
Consent to sexual activity is informed, knowing
and voluntary. Consent is active, not passive.
Silence, in and of itself, cannot be interpreted as
consent. Sexual activity with someone known,
or who should be known, to be mentally or
physically incapacitated by alcohol or other drug
use, unconsciousness or blackout, or otherwise
unable to give consent, is in violation of CSU
policy and the laws noted above./quote
I know, because I looked it up on the page where Colorado State gives their policy on consent:
http://oeo.colostate.edu/title-ix-sexual-assault
It’s unfortunate that the Women’s Advocacy Center says, hyperbolically, that “if you are intoxicated you can give consent.” But the Women’s Advocacy Center is not the place where the decision to suspend or expel is made.
Another point to bear in mind about the how-drunk-is-too-drunk-to-consent dilemma is that the adjudicators’ task is not just to determine how drunk/intoxicated/incapacitated the accuser was, but also that a normal person (presumably not intoxicated) should have been able to detect that the accuser was too drunk. This deflection from the person who was actually drunk to the person who should have known – the accuser is the one who may or may not have been too drunk, but the accuser is not the person being judged – complicates the decision process enormously.
Barring hard evidence like a video, in she said she was drunk / he said she seemed fine situations the panel must rely on third parties’ impressions and memories of of the accuser’s physical and mental state during events that often took place weeks or months in the past. These “witnesses” who may not have actually witnessed anything may themselves have been under the influence of alcohol, or they may be biased toward the accuser or accused (often roommates, friends), or they may be total strangers (bar tenders, taxi drivers) who wouldn’t know how the accused would behave normally. Contemporaneous texts and emails can be ambiguous and subject to interpretation. (Remember the Vanderbilt prosecutor who argued that one of the perpetrators couldn’t have been as drunk as he said he was because he could spell “quesadilla”?)
With this kind of unreliable evidence, the adjudicator may as well toss a coin.
Another point to bear in mind about the how-drunk-is-too-drunk-to-consent dilemma is that the adjudicators’ task is not just to determine how drunk/intoxicated/incapacitate the accuser was, but also that a normal person (presumably not intoxicated) should have been able to detect that the accuser was too drunk. This deflection from the person who was actually drunk to the person who should have known – the accuser is the one who may or may not have been too drunk, but the accuser is not the person being judged – complicates the decision process enormously.
Barring hard evidence like a video, in he said/she said situations the panel must rely on the impressions and memories of third parties of the accuser’s state of mind during events that often took place weeks or months in the past. These “witnesses” who may not have actually witnessed anything may themselves have been under the influence of alcohol, or they may be biased toward the accuser or accused (often roommates, friends), or they may be total strangers who wouldn’t know how the accused would behave normally. Contemporaneous texts and emails can be ambiguous and subject to interpretation. (Remember the Vanderbilt prosecutor who argued that one of the perpetrators couldn’t have been as drunk as he said he was because he could spell “quesadilla”?)
With this kind of unreliable evidence, the adjudicator may as well toss a coin (which I guess preponderance of evidence comes down to).
I don’t think it complicates the decision process enormously, or, really, at all. In fact, I think it makes the job easier. The evidence the adjudicator has to evaluate is usually going to be evidence from other people anyway. All the adjudicator has to do is decide whether, if they saw what the witnesses saw, they’d think the person was incapacitated. Say the witnesses testify the person was walking normally, speaking normally, able to engage in normal conversation. Well, the adjudicator would think, *If I saw someone who was walking and talking normally, would I think they were incapacitated? Nope. Done. *
Or if the witnesses testify the woman couldn’t walk by herself, was giggling aimlessly, and couldn’t seem to talk. If I saw that person, would I think she was incapacitated? Yep. Done.
The adjudicator doesn’t have to know what was going on in the supposedly incapacitated person’s brain; that would be difficult. All they have to know is what the witnesses saw, because that’s what the accused person would have seen too. Are there close cases and gray areas? Sure, but there are always going to be gray areas in any kind of adjudication.
No, I don’t think it’s that simple. The adjudicator asks the third party to describe the accuser’s physical state at a point of time in the past. If the third party says that the accuser seemed drunk because s/he was A,B,C, then the adjudicator has to 1)establish that the witness is credible, 2)assume that the accuser’s physical characteristics equal too-drunk to consent and 3)superimpose the witness’s opinion onto the accused. The adjudicator has to make the leap of faith that the accused would have perceived the accuser’s state the same as the witness did. Because why exactly? Because the third party is a totally credible everyman, whom the adjudicator – who wasn’t present – believes is more credible than the accused?
It would be one thing if the witness’s testimony were merely used to determine the level of the accuser’s intoxication. For example, should the accuser have got behind the wheel in his/her perceived condition? But no, the witness’s testimony is being extrapolated onto the accused’s perception of the accuser’s level of intoxication.
The witness says accuser was too drunk. I believe the witness, therefore the accused should have known that the accuser was too drunk. To me this is a highly subjective, unreliable chain of reasoning, especially when there are multiple witnesses who may have interacted with the accuser over a period of several hours and who may have different opinions of the accuser’s physical state.