You are right. I was wrong. The Oxy case was the one where the counselor told the “victim” that her sex partner was a classic rapist because he was rich, white, played a sport, and got good grades.
“What is the distinction to be made here? I can’t think of any.”
It is a crucial distinction: one phrase disputes the facts alleged; the other disputes the facts AND imputes dishonesty to the accuser.
“Falsely” accused means that the accuser made it all up and is intentionally lying about what happened. I believe that fact pattern is quite rare.
“Wrongly” accused allows for the possibility that the accuser is acting in good faith. I think that is true in most Title IX cases I see.
Human beings are wrong frequently. Most of the time, when we are wrong, we are not lying. The law recognizes this distinction. It’s a crime to make a false report to the police. There’s no such crime as making an incorrect report.
When multiple people observe the same event, they all describe it differently because they honestly remember it differently.
Here’s where I defend Occidental.
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Colleges are allowed to have rules that say certain behavior is expulsion worthy, although clearly legal. For example, it’s not illegal to fail all your classes, but you can get expelled for it. It’s not illegal to have sex outside the bounds of marriage, but colleges can expel people for it.
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Colleges are allowed to punish people who are accused of infractions, and not punish people who were not accused of infractions even though the other people also committed those infractions. For example, if I plagiarized in class, and in my disciplinary hearing I produced persuasive evidence that other people also plagiarized in class, my college can punish me and not go after others. In general, this seems to me to be a poor idea, but colleges are allowed to do it, and after all, they have limited time to pursue disciplinary cases and other accusations to deal with.
So we have Occidental following rule (1) and saying that it is expulsion-worthy to have sex with an extremely drunk person, even if they consent. The Oxy guy clearly was guilty of having sex with an extremely drunk person-- no one disputes that-- and therefore Occidental was within their rights to expel him.,
But, you say, what about her? She also had sex with an extremely drunk person. I don’t dispute that. I merely refer you to rule (2): a college can choose not to discipline people who have not been accused of infractions. She was not accused of an infraction, even though apparently she committed one. Therefore, Occidental is not required to consider whether to expel her.
Occidental would have been better off to suspend both of them for a year, because Oxy clearly stated that it was an expulsion-worthy offense to have sex with an extremely drunk person, yet both the woman and the man did so.
I wouldn’t use the language that way. Suppose a woman is brutally raped by a stranger. Later, she makes a positive identification of a guy in a police lineup; she is certain that is her assailant. The guy is convicted . Later, DNA evidence reveals that her identification, though given in good faith, was wrong; the guy was innocent.
I would say he was falsely accused and falsely convicted, because the accusations against him were not true, but false.
I did a poll of people in my house. Fang Jr. agrees with me that the falsity is in the accusations, not the bad faith of the accuser. Mr. Fang agrees with @Hanna that a false accusation implies bad faith. So I’ll have to be aware that not everyone uses the language the way I would.
That may be true with respect to plagiarism, but it’s not true with respect to sexual assault. For sexual assault many university officials are mandatory reporters. That is if various university officials, such as those on a disciplinary committee, become aware of persuasive evidence sexual misconduct took place, then they are required to report it to the Title IX office. Title IX does not allow a university to ignore information about sexual assault the way they might ignore information about plagiarism or cheating.
Ah, but in the Occidental case you and I both agree that no crime took place, therefore no report would be necessary.
@“Cardinal Fang”
I don’t agree with your assumption no crime was committed against John Doe in the Occidental case. Even if it were true, Title IX requires colleges to address conduct that may not be criminal, as long as it has the potential to create a hostile environment.
Am I, at Fang Bible College, allowed to have stricter rules about sexual conduct than Title IX requires? If I discover someone may have violated Fang Bible rules about sexual conduct, is that always Titile IX cognizable? That is, if I have a rule against a consensual peck on the cheek, and I find evidence that someone has kissed someone else, am I required to report it to the Title IX office? Assume that I don’t think the kiss creates a hostile environment.
Suppose Occidental believes that two students had consensual sex while both were very drunk. Occidental has a rule against having sex with someone while very drunk, no matter how consensual the encounter, and James, who is so far in the closet he has passed the lamppost and is approaching the White Witch, accuses Joaquin of having drunk sex with him, an accusation that is true. James says that he would never have done this while sober, also true. Is Occidental required to report James to the Title IX office for this consensual sexual encounter?
I have to say that I love your metaphor about James being in the closet, Cardinal Fang. It’s brilliant!
“I wouldn’t use the language that way.”
That’s fair. Would you agree that it’s valuable to have different terms for an untrue accusation the speaker believes was deliberately falsified and for an untrue accusation the speaker believes is made in good faith? What should those terms be?
I’ve been beating this drum for a long time: I think our lack of adequate vocabulary to distinguish different fact patterns has real impact on our ability to prevent and justly punish sexual misconduct.
Definitely it’s useful to distinguish accusations made in good faith from accusations made in bad faith.
For accusations made by someone who knows they are untrue: Fraudulently accused? Maliciously accused?
Liar works. If we are so quick to brand someone a rapist, a term just about everyone understands, when nothing they did even meets the legal definition of a rapist then it seems appropriate to use the word liar for someone who knowingly falsifies an accusation. Liar is a term everyone understands. On the flip side accuser and accused seem to fit any situation…not victim and assaulter or any other presumptive terms. I totally agree with Hanna that we have totally added fog to the system by playing fast and loose with the language.
Looking at this again, I’m not sure Hanna’s interpretation is correct for this story. I think the mothers are saying that the accusers accurately described what their sons did but the behavior described should not have been deemed an infraction. Their sons were not “falsely accused,” because they did what they’d been accused of doing. They were “wrongly accused,” not because the women made untrue allegations because they were befuddled or didn’t remember, but because there is nothing wrong with what the sons did.
Notice what comes next:
We don’t know whether Judith’s son had sex with a very drunk young woman who nevertheless consented, or a young woman who was so drunk she couldn’t possibly consent, but clearly Judith is saying that the accusation was true. Her son did have sex with this woman, and this woman was very drunk. The dispute here is not about what the son did, but about whether it should be prohibited.
We thus have three different cases to name: the maliciously false accusations, the factually false accusations, and the accusations of something wrongly characterized as an infraction.
Maliciously false: You accuse me of stealing your bike, but you know I didn’t steal it.
Factually false: You accuse me of stealing your bike because you saw someone riding your bike and she looked like me. The lookalike, it turns out, was someone else.
Wrongly characterized: You accuse me of stealing your bike. I took the bike to escape an approaching fire. This should not be called stealing.
In all three cases, say they happened on a college campus the bike rider should not be expelled or even suspended. That is the huge difference here. If you agree that you, as a woman, have agency and decide to drink and hookup with some guy, that’s on you. If you are passed out you have been raped. If someone is forcibly holding you down in some manner and you cannot extricate yourself that is either assault or rape. If you wake up and can’t remember why you went along with whatever happened at the big tailgate that you pre-gamed for and then continued on drinking at the tailgate, and you can’t exactly remember why this guy, that’s on you. The only reason, I believe that colleges did this sort of shenanigans was they were under pressure regarding federal aid and wanted to appear “tough” on sexual assault because of all the misleading statistics and articles and stories in movies and books…some of those stories that were found to be not exactly true.
You know, momofthreeboys, that’s not entirely the picture. There are a lot of college-aged women I have met whose lives have been adversely affected by an actual assault. If it takes place on or connected with a college campus, it does deny the women an equal opportunity for an education, among other difficulties that it creates. I am inclined to think that now more young women are talking about the assaults they have experienced. It may have reached a tipping point where the colleges realize that they really need to do something about it. (I don’t totally disregard the financial incentives, but I do not think they are the whole picture.)
There are multiple cases in the press now of powerful men who have behaved reprehensibly over a period of many years, and are finally experiencing the consequences of boorish behavior (and worse). Peggy Noonan had an interesting column in the Wall Street Journal today about the down-the-road impact of these cases: that men who might be inclined to act similarly (surely a small subset of all men) will think twice about the consequences in the future, and maybe they will be restrained by that.
While we’re discussing language, I wish people wouldn’t use “boorish behavior” to describe what these accused workplace assaulters are accused of. They’re accused of sexual harassment, sexual assault, child molesting and rape, not “boorish behavior.” Please don’t use minimizing terms.
Accused is the operative word, as I said before some consented (and now wish they hadn’t), some probably were harassed, some may have experienced jerk behavior (I won’t use the word boorish) and some may have been assaulted or raped. If it makes all of us wary of each other, I’m not so sure that’s a good thing… But it is not a fait acompli simply to claim it is so.
We return to, If they can’t say No, they can’t say Yes.
-Submit or you’ll get fired and never work again.
-Um, OK.
That doesn’t count as consent to me, any more than “Submit or I’ll shoot you with this gun I’m holding to your head” counts as consent.
Some of you may remember that I went to a law library and read up on sexual assault cases. Some of the defendants were making arguments that were scarcely better than this. One rapist claimed a pre-schooler consented; another claimed a woman whom he’d been imprisoning in his house for days (at knife-point or gunpoint, something like that) consented.
I take your point, Cardinal Fang, though I think boorish is the right word for the behavior that some famous men have been accused of. For example, I think about Justice Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. That was harassment, as I see it, but it was well short of Harvey Weinstein’s abominable behavior.
And all too true, the comments in the final paragraph of #379.
“Boorish” to me sounds like something that is bad but allowable. The least bad accusations I’ve seen are of sexual harassment, which is both bad and prohibited.
Do you say that boorish behavior in the workplace is always harassment? Hmm, maybe, but I think not.