A bright-line rule for inability to consent? At what BAC? It’d have to be a lot higher than 0.08 to make sense.
I’m not in favor of distributing breathalyzers to students. I imagine what would happen in frat houses: nothing good.
I don’t see blaming someone as the same as defending oneself from an inaccurate accusation. I think it’s a fine distinction. Blaming is assigning fault for an action, most of the he said/she said cases the accused is defending and saying it didn’t happen the way the accused is stating not blaming someone for something. A fine distinction but important. It’s entirely possible parents are blaming accusers, or the university or in the case of Drew Sterrett, the accuser’s mother, for all the trouble that has gotten stirred up, or the legal bills or whatever, but I don’t see the accused heaping blame on the accusers…mostly trying to defend themselves and never set eyes on the person (unless you are the field goal kicker and his GF). If I had to fork out a ton of legal bills because the uni played fast and loose with the facts, I’d probably go after the university and blame them for doing a crappy job through a civil case. .As a mom, I’d probably just mentally write off the accuser unless the accuser defamed or harassed or continued to defame and harass as in Mattress Girl situation, then my gut would want to go after that situation figuring the cra-cra crossed the line.
This is blaming:
“In my generation, what these girls are going through was never considered assault,” Judith said. “It was considered, ‘I was stupid and I got embarrassed.’”
^^^
Yep and for any self respecting woman with basic standards when it comes to how they expect to be treated by men they would look at that statement and call it “cra-cra.”
momofthreeboys, here are a few more examples:
She lured me in.
She was asking for it.
She is such a tease.
She was wearing a tight outfit.
She was wearing a short skirt.
She was wearing a low-cut blouse.
She touched my six pack.
She was dancing suggestively.
She got me aroused.
She came to my room.
She got into my car.
She was out alone late at night.
She was in a bad part of the city.
She was drinking in a bar.
She came to the frat house, and she knew what happens here.
And the greatest example: And the man said, the woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.
Yes, but the school didn’t launch a separate investigation of the son’s claims or the dad’s claims about the son. The son was only interviewed in the context of the investigation where he was the respondent.
Let me try posting this again…
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/health/men-rape-sexual-assault.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&referer=
As I think it adds to the discussion on some mindsets about consent and sexual assault.
Thanks, tonymom, that is the New York Times article. I feel as though it appeared in the print edition the next day–though maybe that applies to us out in fly-over country.
I think you are misreading Judith’s statement. I think she is talking about women consenting to engage in drunken sexual activity with someone they would not choose while sober. Certainly many women (and men) have done that, and felt embarrassed about it after the fact.
I don’t think that’s “blaming the victim,” because there is no victim.
If she is talking about women who got drunk and were then the object of non-consenting sexual activity because they were too out of it to consent, defend themselves, refuse, or leave, that’s another matter altogether.
At least I hope that’s what she meant.
I found Judith’s statement ambiguous, without knowing what her son was accused of doing. But consider this sentence from the same article: “Their sons may not have been falsely accused, the mothers said, but they had been wrongly accused. They made a distinction.”
What is the distinction to be made here? I can’t think of any. Their sons were accused of having sexual activity with women who didn’t consent. Either an accusation is false because the woman did consent, or the son was rightly accused because he did in fact engage in sexual activity with someone non-consenting. There is no middle ground here. (Unless we’re talking about a case where the woman was in a blackout state and able to consent, but refused, and had no memory of the event-- then she would have been wrong to accuse, but right that she had been raped. But I don’t think the mothers here are saying, “My son raped her but he should have gotten away with it.”)
Judith was clearly blaming the accuser, though. Then again, if the accuser knew that she consented, but thinks she wouldn’t have consented if she had been sober, then she deserves to be blamed.
I’m appalled to hear that colleges would deem someone responsible for sexual assault because the other person didn’t remember the events, with no other evidence.
Getting a little Bayesian here, if you, Consolation, said that women nowadays won’t take responsibility for drunken sex, I would think you were saying that women who consented while drunk can’t revoke that consent later. But a lot of the guys who were accused of sexual assault in a college tribunal are guilty. So a mother of such a son has a substantial likelihood of being the mother of a someone who assaulted someone. In her case, I’m much more suspicious that she is defending sex with a semiconscious woman.
Well, you may be correct.
But the statement is indeed ambiguous.
When I read it, I think of something like the Occidental case, where both kids were drunk, and the female clearly consented. In fact she actively pursued the encounter, even after being taken home by her friends. Later, she felt bad about it, and the college staff person convinced her that she had been raped because she was too drunk to consent, despite all of the things she did to indicate willing and eager participation. Neither of them were sober enough to make fine distinctions about how drunk they were.
I would say that when I was in college, I and my friends would have acknowledged that we were fully responsible participants in the whole episode–choosing to drink, getting drunk, choosing to have sex–and might possibly have felt regret or embarrassment, but would never have accused the guy of rape. That’s what I thought Judith was suggesting.
If so, I agree with her.
If she is talking about a guy who knows what he is doing pursuing sex with a girl who is clearly incapacitated and not consenting or participating but merely incapable of organized resistance, then I don’t agree with her. We might not have actually called him a rapist, per se, back in the day–I actually didn’t know personally of any such cases, and it’s hard to judge in retrospect–but we would definitely have considered him an exploitative 6$$&8!#, a bad guy, and someone to avoid.
Now, I would definitely call him a rapist.
I thought of the Occidental case. I also thought of the Vanderbilt case and the Steubenville case, where drunk men/boys raped unconscious women, and, in the Steubenville case, townspeople defended the rapist. That’s why I thought it was ambiguous.
Here, I think, is where we differ on that sort of case. I don’t care if he knows what he is doing. If he is pursuing sex with an incapacitated or unconsenting woman, he is raping her, whether he knows what he is doing or not. And if she is pursuing sex with an incapacitated or unconsenting man, same thing.
That is a slippery slope when two consenting people who are drunk are then informed that one of them is a victim because they were drinking and therefore could not give consent.
This is really, really scary stuff.
Informed by whom? You are grossly misrepresenting what I am saying. Roughly speaking, I say people who can’t consent don’t consent. If we have two consenting people, then we have two people who were physically/mentally able to consent. If they were able to consent (and they were both adults, non mentally disabled, not unwittingly drugged) and they did consent, I am not informing either of them that they could not give consent.
I’m saying if you can’t possibly consent, then you did not consent.
Sure, no one, at least that I have read on this forum has ever excused sex with a passed out woman as anything but rape. No one has ever defended a rapist who was proven in court to have raped. But I absolutely and totally get what Consolation continues to explain and much better than I. It is morally and ethically corrupt to agree to do something and then excuse your decision with a flimsy excuse and simultaneously blame someone else that is absolutely unsustainable based on what came before and what came after… and yes, I call that blame. It is indeed scary scary stuff and concerning to me that there is a prevalent subset of un-empowered women who seem to think they have no agency and feel that it is a position of strength to claim victimhood rather than to live and learn from bad decisions. And it’s not just the college ones…
I was commenting on this posted above.
“When I read it, I think of something like the Occidental case, where both kids were drunk, and the female clearly consented. In fact she actively pursued the encounter, even after being taken home by her friends. Later, she felt bad about it, and the college staff person convinced her that she had been raped because she was too drunk to consent, despite all of the things she did to indicate willing and eager participation. Neither of them were sober enough to make fine distinctions about how drunk they were.”
Scary stuff.
As I recall it, the Occidental case was even a little scarier than that. The young woman in question wasn’t convinced that she had been raped by anyone at the college. Her mother read her journal when she went home for Thanksgiving or Christmas, and her mother decided that she had been raped. The mother showed up at the college to demand action.
It was my impression – maybe wrong – that the freshman woman was never a fully enthusiastic participant in the Title IX proceeding. But of course no one really asked her what she thought; that was irrelevant.
Occidental is one of, if not the most egregious cases I have read about. I wonder whether it’s just a bizarre outlier, whether any other college would reach the same result in that situation. Hard cases make bad law, but easy cases that come out the wrong way make really, really bad law!
@JHS, I may be wrong, but I don’t think that is what happened at Occidental. There may have been a case like that at U Mich.
@“Cardinal Fang” I agree that a guy who has sex with–or more accurately uses the body of–an incapacitated, non-consenting woman is raping her, whether he thinks so or not.
It is particularly heinous, IMHO, if he is aware that she is incapacitated. That is part of the mindset that says that it is fine for men to try to get sex from any woman, and it is her job to resist: if she doesn’t resist, he’s in the clear.
The Occidental case was one of the early, early ones files by men - 2013. Here’s an Esquire article about the Occidental case…love the headline: When drunk sex meets academic bureaucracy. That case and the UofM case that had me going “wait a minute here, what the heck is going on.” Kind of says it all.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a33751/occidental-justice-case/
The case has been progressing and I believe is still pending.