Maybe a link to a story about a #1 draft pick quarterback that was national news for weeks is not the best source of information for what happens in the normal course of sexual assault investigations on campus, agreed?
I would have no problem whatsoever with men coming forward if they feel they have been sexually assaulted by a woman. None whatsoever.
For my whole life, young women have been warned that drinking can put them at risk for sexual assault and rape and warned to be careful.
Now we need to warn young men that if they have sex with inebriated women, they may be falsely accused of sexual assault or rape.
Maybe we also need to warn young men that drinking makes them more vulnerable to sexual assault and rape?
I am more than okay with a move to make all these warnings about sexual assault/rape risks less gender linked.
What is this “withdrawing their consent after the fact” of which you speak? If someone can’t consent, they didn’t consent. And if they didn’t consent, there is no consent to withdraw. I get it, you don’t like the rules about consent. But your dislike of the rules doesn’t make them vanish, and it doesn’t mean that apparent consent is the same as consent. If effective consent was never given, it can’t be withdrawn.
If a guy doesn’t like the consent rules at his college, he is free to choose another college with rules more to his liking, where he is free to have sex with extremely drunk women without penalty. He should take responsibility for his choices. If he chooses to go to a college where having sex with extremely drunk people is deemed non-consensual, and then he chooses to have sex with an extremely drunk person, then he should accept responsibility for those choices.
I continue to have a problem with defining drunk consensual sex as sexual assault. Not, let me add before I am attacked, incapacitated or drugged sex.
Also, I was struck by this in the Stanford article:
“While Stanford has a concrete definition of sexual assault, the SARA Office affirmed that before even consulting legal definitions, it is first up to the survivor to define what happened based on how they feel.”
A very general hypothetical based on the last few words above:
Sandy reports she “feels” she has been raped by Joe. Legally, her account does not fit the definition of rape. It does not meet Stanford’s definition of sexual assault either. But she feels very strongly Joe raped her and she does not want to see him on campus anymore.
Should the school accommodate Sandy’s request to remove Joe because she feels this so strongly, that she was indeed raped no matter what the definitions say? What if she becomes the next Emma S. and goes public, saying the school is a haven for rapists? Where does the line between her feelings of having been horribly violated and the fact that Joe has done nothing to violate the law or school policy stand?
I wonder in some of these cases we have discussed previously how much of the outcome is shaped by the way the accuser chooses to define what happened, and how much that personal definition can change over time. Perhaps this is why we see charges brought after months or a year, The accuser’s interpretation of events has changed.
But as momrath mentioned above, over time memories can become spotty and also you or your friends/family can convince yourself of things that may or may not be the truth (like how drunk you really were).
I’ve asked this before, but never really had a response—should there be a statute of limitations on making these complaints (not to the police, but to the college)? Should a 2nd semester senior be able to report something that happened 3 weeks into freshman year?
@Consolation I think the issue you have is with the schools who have the rule that some levels of intoxication affect the ability of a woman to actually consent.
Using “consensual” in that sentence is confusing the discussion using proof by assertion. What’s at issue here is precisely the definition of “consent.” You talk of “drunk consensual sex,” but that’s arguing in a circle. I say the sex here is not “drunk consensual sex” but drunk sex that is not consensual because one or both of the parties can’t consent.
You wouldn’t talk of “consensual” sex between an adult and a child, I hope, because even when the child seems to consent, there is no consent. You may say, and I assume you do say, that sex between two drunk adults is not the same. Fine, but just asserting that drunk sex is consensual doesn’t make us agree that it’s consensual, and it doesn’t make us believe the rules about incapacity are wrong; it just means you are being lazy in arguing. If you believe that the rules are wrong, argue that they’re wrong. Don’t just pretend that the rules about consent don’t exist and people are being unfairly targeted.
No.
@HarvestMoon1, you could call it that. I think that no one would argue that a person who is literally passed out can’t consent. But where is the line?
IMHO the young woman at Occidental, as an example, clearly consented, was actually proactive in the encounter, and it was wildly unreasonable for the college to say that HER level of drunkenness mattered and HIS did not, and expel him. There was ample evidence that she was the sexual aggressor–for which I do not fault her at all, don’t get me wrong–and that he was also very drunk. If she cannot be expected to be responsible for her behavior, neither can he. I would definitely agree that the two of them had no business having sex that night, but they were equally responsible. Counselling, mediation, and perhaps some discipline for underage drinking like probation would have been the way to help both of them cope with and learn from the experience.
Instead they had an administrator who devoted multiple sessions to convincing the young woman that what she had experienced was rape, and who then proceeded to railroad the young man on the–IMHO spurious–grounds that he should have been able to tell that she was too drunk, he bore responsiblity despite drunkenness, she bore none. I don’t care that that was their policy: it’s a bad policy.
On the other hand, we have the Hobart & William Smith case, where clearly the freshman girl, although drunk, did not consent to having sex with multiple partners on a pool table in a public place, ie to gang rape. The injustice of that case is if anything even more egregious in the opposite direction.
To me, the Occidental case is an example of redefining drunk sex as assault; the other is a clear case of sexual assault.
I wish you would refrain from being insulting.
I have argued that the rules are wrong. Repeatedly. You choose to ignore that. Repeatedly. And just cite the rules again. Talk about a circular argument!
All drunk sex is obviously not consensual. Some drunk sex is consensual. If a person clearly and of their own will consented to sex, I do not believe that that consent is invalidated simply because the person was intoxicated. Certainly not for the purposes of defining the encounter as ASSAULT.
Obviously, there are always going to be shades of gray, until the day when breathalyzer standards for safe sex are put into effect. Human relations are messy.
My personal opinion is that the law as it stands - you can’t consent when you are drunk (even if both parties are drunk) is a good one, and I hope it stands. I asked one of my male friends about his opinion on the issue - he too agreed it was a good law and should stand.
In some of the college reports we’ve looked at, colleges have found some people guilty of nonconsensual sex, and others guilty of sexual assault. Nonconsensual sex, which I’m assuming is usually sex where one or both are extremely drunk, carries a lesser penalty. For me, this is a good way to handle the notion that sex with someone who is too drunk to consent but who seemed to consent is bad, but not as bad as sex with someone who gave no indication of consent.
@Consolation, I know that you have argued repeatedly that the consent rules are too stringent. But you also persist in calling sex consensual as if that were undisputed, when consent is exactly the issue. That doesn’t convince; it just serves to inflame people who disagree with you.
One of the problems here is that we talk about these things as if they were laws, or if the offender (virtually always the man) was guilty, when in fact what we are dealing with are administrative rules and findings by panels of who knows what. More importantly, it is obvious that the Fed. Gov. wants a certain result, given the “Dear Colleague” letter, publicising lists of schools who they feel are discriminating, the suit against Tufts, or the fight against Princeton and Harvard. Add that kind of pressure to the fact that these proceedings have none of the safeguards of the criminal process, or the normal civil process for that matter, and you have a dangerous situation. For example, the idea that a woman’s intoxication means she is not reasonably capable of consenting to sex, but a man’s intoxication is immaterial to whether he thought she consented is mind boggling to a lawyer, as is the apparent flipping of the burden of proof, where the process as outlined in the Dear Colleague letter is set up to call the accuser a “victim” or “survivor” from the get go. Forget about the “survivors” having advocates and the right to call witnesses, while the guy is often prohibited from questioning any witnesses, let alone the “survivor”, and as far as I know is rarely if ever given representation of any kind. Now, obviously we only here about the truly egregious cases, and who knows whether the system works appropriately in the majority of situations, but as the father of a son headed off to college next year I have to say the way the system appears to be set up scares the bejesus out of me.
In the Emma Sulkowicz case, Columbia told Emma and the accused that they shouldn’t use outside counsel. Emma complied. The accused did not. This may have impacted the decision in that case. It seems to me it absolutely did.
also:
*Clark mentions receiving many death and rape threats for going public with her assault. *
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/26/the-hunting-ground-sheds-new-light-on-campus-rape-epidemic.html
All our sons need to do is refrain from having sex, or be extremely choosey about their partners. This is what college girls have had to deal with always. Avoiding drunken sex is doable. imho.given
ETA: I have given up on the idea drunken sex is an integral part of the college experience. Our kids will be okay without that experience. Some of them have already caught on to this.
I disagree CF. There are examples of drunk consensual sex every weekend on almost every college campus (as well as in post-bar encounters of adults). Both parties may be considered drunk under some definitions in that they may not be legally allowed behind the wheel of a car, but choose to engage in sexual activity. On some college campuses, but not on others, a young person may later decide they were too drunk to consent, In some cases, they clearly were (virtually everyone in these discussions knows and condemns those scenarios). But in others, the ability to consent is in question. It is those cases, where one young woman may be perfectly OK with what went on, but another may “feel” she was too drunk or decides she would never have consented to that guy if she wasn’t too inebriated, that become the difficult cases. No consent law that I know of draws a completely clear line on the issue of how drunk is too drunk to consent.
The Stanford boy is also in a tough position, but I would not want to see the girl expelled or severely punished. I wonder how involved he was with her on the dance floor before deciding he wasn’t interested. It put him in a tough spot, not wanting to leave her alone but not wanting to go along with her advances, possibly because it could put him in jeopardy for having sex with a girl that was too drunk to consent.
As far as the Sulkowicz case, Columbia permits both parties to have an advisor at the hearing. The guy had a grad student. Sulkowicz had an assistant director of a campus gender studies office. According to the New York Times, Columbia now allows that advisor to be an attorney for both parties. I would think the Facebook messages had a lot more to do with the original decision in that case than the representation. Although I am all for people hiring lawyers.
And yes, we should advise all of our kids not to have drunken sex. But it seems to me the standard in some of these situations is not if the woman is drunk, but rather if she feels later that alcohol lowered her inhibitions. Not sure how to tell my son to guard against that, except by being abstinent. I am all for abstinence, but think it is likely unrealistic. And just to be really cynical, given that some of these situations arise months after the alleged event, a guy could never have sex with his accuser and wind up in the exact same situation.
http://columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2014/10/02/open-letter-president-bollinger-and-board-trustees
regarding the facebook mesages:
http://jezebel.com/how-to-make-an-accused-rapist-look-good-1682583526
No further word from “Adam”
@Ohiodad51 - take a look at the “Dear Colleague” letter. I am not seeing anywhere the words “victim” or “survivor.” They use the words “complainant” and “alleged perpetrator” to designate the parties. Also the OCR discourages the parties from “personally” questioning or cross-examining each other, but they can do so through a third person present at the hearing. Also the OCR does not prohibit or require the parties to be represented by counsel, but they do mandate that the colleges treat both parties equally in this regard.
How drunk? Please tell me exactly how drunk is too drunk, and how that is to be determined.
And then tell me what you think should be done if both parties were that drunk.
Excellent points, @mom2and. Points that CF has decided to refuse exist or have any validity.
BUT…
It doesn’t matter. Once he says no, that’s it. That she was perhaps too drunk to understand his no is no excuse for her behavior, even he had previous indicated or stated a yes. She sexually assaulted him. That is the standard in effect for women, and there is no reason it should be different for men.
That’s the theory, anyway. I venture to guess that if the genders had been reversed you would not have even THOUGHT of asking whether she “led him on.” In the old days, yes, that canard was used to invalidate many rape cases. Nowadays, anyone who suggests that will be villified as a slut-shaming rape apologist. (I am not criticizing you, I am just pointing out the cultural bias involved.)