NYT article: ‘Willing to Do Everything,’ Mothers Defend Sons Accused of Sexual Assault

Parent Cafe
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Re: @mamalion’s post #52, I’ve always thought pornography is a big problem and one that has become a bigger problem because it is so accessible for the computer generation, something they can have easy access to at a young age. For me, it’s not so much that pornography exists but what pornography is being consumed so readily and easily these days - this isn’t your dad’s Playboy centerfold. 99.9% just objectifies women and gives an often very aggressive and always unrealistic impression on what sexual relations between 2 people are all about. I’m sure some will disagree.

Do you talk to your kids about pornography consumption and its effects on having a healthy, equal sex life? Do you talk your boys about healthy sexual values and having mutually pleasing sexual activity that isn’t focused on just their own satisfaction? I really think a lot young people these days, especially males, have developed a very warped idea of what sexual activity.

“Pornography consumption was common among the men in the sample and may further add to the risk of sexual aggression. Specific violent or rape-theme content of the pornography has been associated with propensity to rape and pro-rape attitudes in laboratory analogues, as well as from self-reports of men who have admitted raping. (Carr and Van Deusen, 2004).”

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Ok, I started reading the link, and I read:

Yes, I buy into the fact that 99% of the rapists are male–which should surprise nobody.

But why did they use the term “overwhelmingly white males”? Did they not understand that white males were roughly 60% of all males during that time? Or did they understand that and were intentionally trying to controversy from an audience that didn’t understand that.

The first answer suggests incompetence. The second suggests an axe to grind.

A neutral way to phrase that would simply be: “Sex offenders are overwhelmingly male.”

As the father of a freshman daughter in college, I welcome reading a neutral report on sexual assault. This doesn’t seem to be it.

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There are narratives that must be followed.

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So you are discounting an entire report because you don’t like one word? You find no merit in it whatsoever? Nothing that might be helpful for your daughter to know?

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No, I am not discounting the studies referenced. I have no reason to believe that they are not scientifically valid studies. I agree with many of the overall conclusions of the reports cited.

However, there is dispersion of conclusions even among scientific studies. Given the language choice, what I question is whether this was a biased set of studies. So far areas that I don’t understand well, this is not the set of links I would start with.

I have had long discussions with my daughter about safety and alcohol. She has chosen not to drink so far (and no we are not naive–she knows she can tell us if/when she starts). She knows that the risk of sexual assault increases 17x when a girl has 4 or more drinks, and that the safest thing she can do is go out in groups where everyone watches out for each other. Fortunately, she gets along great with her roommates, none of whom drink heavily, and they usually go out together.

ETA: I have also spent time with her discussing “countable” drinks. A beer, a glass of wine, and a shot of liquor are all easily countable. Not so for things like jello shots or mixed drinks (such as the dangerous long-island iced tea).

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I’m thinking they were trying to head off excuses that it isn’t the “good guys” (read: white guys in a lot of people’s books) doing it. Given how a certain candidate vilified Mexicans as rapists during the last campaign, and a lot of people seem to have bought it, it actually is something that apparently needs to be said. A woman IS more likely to be raped by a white male.

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“Do you talk to your kids about pornography consumption and its effects on having a healthy, equal sex life? Do you talk your boys about healthy sexual values and having mutually pleasing sexual activity that isn’t focused on just their own satisfaction? I really think a lot young people these days, especially males, have developed a very warped idea of what sexual activity.”

And we need to start early. My kids reported seeing it (on the school bus, on other people’s phones) by 4th grade.

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“What if both people have been drinking and one accuses the other of rape and both are men?”

Same-sex accusations are about as common as same-sex encounters, so, pretty common. The rules and proceedings are no different from hetero cases, which is to say that they are all over the map and vary from school to school as well as from case to case.

“I don’t know why the strawman argument of what if they both were drunk always comes up in these threads.”

Because the Kennedy case was unusual in having clear proof that the victim was unconscious. That’s an easy, beyond-a-reasonable-doubt case. That’s why he’s going to jail. There’s nothing for reasonable people to disagree about except the length of the sentence. Difficult cases are difficult because they don’t have such straightforward facts. Those are the only ones worth discussing, because they’re the ones that present tough problems.

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Exactly, @PetraMC ! That combined with an often puritanical reluctance to talk about sex ed either at home or school in detail leads to generations being raised in a society where they glean their “education” from graphic and often violent porn.

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Hazing is an act that may occur between one student and another; universities sometimes do apply penalties against the students it finds to be doing the hazing, regardless of what the police and courts do regarding the act.

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This is a misleading interpretation, as it suggests that if the woman is with a non-white male, she is less likely to be raped. There is nothing to suggest that from the summary given.

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@doschicos Honestly, that would explain the disconnect between the definition of “forcible sex” (which is everywhere in porn) and “rape.”

Just spitballing here.

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  1. @jonri : Apparently we do live in different worlds, or perhaps different dimensions of the same world. In my world, it has never quite been possible to "get a woman drunk" if she didn't want to be drunk. (I will admit to having heard of rohypnal, but I never actually saw any. That's not what I mean.) In my world -- at least the world in which I grew up -- men were certain that it was their responsibility to make everything happen, and women conventionally encouraged that idea, but women were generally the ones making the actual decisions, at least until a relationship was fairly far along. Men would try to "seduce" women, but I don't believe I ever met a woman who had been seduced. They were seduced when they decided, "I want him," or sometimes, "He'll do."

I agree, the women I knew when I was young did not generally get drunk to have sex with someone they had never met. (Except I do know one woman very well who did exactly that, repeatedly, until age and therapy cured her of it. She would go to bars in neighborhoods that were not hers, and give then gave men a fake name and phone number so they couldn’t find her if they wanted to.) But in a college or graduate school situation, they didn’t necessarily target one guy, either. There might be several guys in whom they were interested, and they might run into one or all of them. The first few weeks of college were a special situation, because hardly anyone knew anyone else, and lots of people expected to start having sex in college. And I think women were aware, as men certainly were, that the more they had to drink, the more interesting options there would be. (Which didn’t mean that everyone didn’t harbor a fantasy that somehow at the ball they would meet Cinderella or Prince Charming for the first time, and fall into fairy-tale love. Or maybe Erica Jong’s zipless you-know-what, much the same thing.)

In my world, men would drink so that, if they met someone interesting (whether or not they already knew her), they would be able to overcome their anxiety, ambivalence, fear of failure and guilt to make a play for her. I had heard stories about men who would have sex with anyone, but I didn’t know any of them. The men I knew wanted to be in love (although not necessarily before they had sex, and not that they said so all the time).

It does follow from what I said that men’s sexual aggressiveness, like women’s, would increase with alcohol consumption. Is it believable that a man would get drunk and rape someone, as the studies cited in that Michigan piece suggest? Sure, of course that happens, and being drunk doesn’t make it OK. But that’s different from @jonri’s paradigm of the sober predator cynically getting a woman drunk or high so he can have his way with her. I believe people like that exist, but I have never knowingly met any of them.

  1. That Michigan piece feels like a real mish-mash of studies of different characteristics of very different populations. With different definitions used for the same words sometimes. And conclusions extracted willy-nilly across populations to fit a narrative.

That’s not to say I disagree with most of the conclusions, or even any of them. For example, I am willing to believe that sexual predators are deceptive about the number of victims. (In both directions, by the way. I think both Wilt Chamberlain and Don Giovanni may have inflated their headcounts some.) But I would have to read the study carefully to accept as proof of that the fact that a group of convicted sexual predators confessed far fewer victims to prosecutors – who were likely to charge and seek to punish them more harshly the more victims there were – than they did to therapists – who would no doubt reward them for candor, real or imagined. Any I am not certain how that applies to college students who are not convicted sexual predators. (Not that they are necessarily innocent of everything.) The kind of conduct that turns you into a convicted sexual predator is generally not what we are talking about here. At the same time, I suspect that everyone, not just convicted sexual predators or sexually aggressive college frat boys, tends to play down their responsibility for conduct that may be punished.

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I think one of the points here is that college predators are largely not convicted, but need to take warning that rape on college campuses will no longer be tolerated, and victims will no longer accept the blame because alcohol was involved.

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That is true. But it is also true that if a woman is raped, the rapist is more likely to be white. You are making it sound like it is nonsensical and trying to discredit the study. Isn’t working.

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Re: @mamalion 's post #53. I found this interesting: “The national survey of rape conducted by Koss et al. (1987) revealed that 1 in 12 college men committed acts that met the legal definition of rape, and of those men, 84% did not consider their actions to be illegal.” There is one disconnect - sons (and their mothers apparently) feel as though they are “wrongly accused” because they don’t see their actions as being wrong.

In the original post of the NYT article, Ms. Seefeld pretty much admits that the reason her son was found innocent was because she threatened to blackmail the university: “She wrote that she had hired a lawyer to look into suing the university, and a public relations firm to help her publicize her son’s case …” It does make you wonder if there really were “inconsistencies” in the woman’s report, or if the police were pressured by the university into finding some.

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For reference. Here is what my Son’s school refers to “consent” in the student handbook.

“Consent”
is an understandable exchange of affirmative words or actions, which indicate a willingness to participate in mutually agreed up on sexual activity. Consent must be informed, freely and actively given. It is the responsibility of the initiator to obtain clear and affirmative responses at each stage of sexual involvement. Consent to one form of sexual activity does not imply consent to other forms of sexual activity. The lack of a negative response is not consent.
An individual who is incapacitated by alcohol and/or other drugs both voluntarily or involuntarily consumed may not give consent. Past consent of sexual activity does not imply ongoing future consent.

I will set aside the whole discussion of initiator as that could change during the encounter.

This is how the drinking of alcohol makes this such a problem. The rule above is clear. You need to obtain permission at “each stage” of sex. How one defines this is open to discussion. Many would agree on the so called "first base, second base, etc, but this is by no means the total set of possibilities. It creates these signposts along the way of sex that opens up doors for complaints and accusations. It sets up an almost impossible rule where one has to be in constant communication as to each intimate act and to be fully aware when one begins to venture off one act to another. Where is this line? Do kids get caught up in the moment and just grunt and moan and not talk in clear, affirmative statements?

The myriad of variations to things sexual when two people of opposite sex encounter one another is impossible to ever deal with.

Personally, I find this the most horrific situation to ever be put in. I feel the mere accusation alone is enough to set the wheels in motion to cause great harm. Maybe I am just sensitive because I live in the Boston area where we live under the constant shadow the Salem Witch trials. It was an ugly, dark time in our history that still reverberates to this day.

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If it were that simple, we would not have these cases. While I may not agree with much from the DeVos administration, I find myself in agreement with this particular action on their part.

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@ImUrHuckleBerry " I don’t think consent is as simple as you seem to imply. "

It is pretty clear in most cases, actually. If both parties are actively and enthusiastically participating, there is no issue. If your partner is not enthusiastically participating, and not consenting, you should probably stop.

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Well duh @Much2learn but memories fade in the light of day after a night of partying