<p>“mini, I would be interested in seeing the actual questions used in the Williams study. Do you know if they are available?”</p>
<p>It wasn’t a “Williams study” but a NESCAC one, I believe, and the question asked (I gather), was something like “In the past year, were you ever sexually penetrated without your consent?” At any rate, I don’t find the numbers surprising, not with four students expelled and bunch of others suspended. 4% of females raped (we don’t know how many total rapes there were) in one year would be slightly lower than the national averages I have seen (for how many women are raped during their four years of college.)</p>
<p>The study must have been considered a good one for the college to take such stern action - they’re not a bunch of idiots. </p>
<p>(Note: remember that the legal system does make a distinction between rape and forcible - actually, usually aggravated - rape).</p>
<p>I think there have been some studies suggesting rape in prison is motivated by race in many instances. I can’t find the study I was thinking of but there is one article:</p>
<p>mini, I didn’t say anything about the study. I just wanted to see the questions. Don’t jump to conclusions and impute intent to me that you have no evidence of. There is far too much of that going on around here.</p>
<p>Gosh - I neither jumped to conclusions, and I didn’t even think about your intent! I was just trying to answer your question as best I could. And commenting on my own, without reference to you.</p>
<p>To quote the Williams’ President’s letter: “Some 0.3 percent of our men and 4 percent of our women reported sexual penetration without their consent – rape – in the previous 12 months.” (The rate of sexual assault was much, much higher. Currently, the Williams Record site is down, or I’d go get the data.)</p>
<p>Posts here are very educational. I see some reasons why marriage as an institution is not as strong as it used to be. What happens to a good relationship where one understands another without saying a word in certain situation?</p>
<p>Lake, not sure what you mean, but in the past, rape could not occur in a marriage (gag) because a woman was her husband’s property (gag) so words weren’t needed.</p>
<p>romani, it has been my personal experience that a lot of what goes on in a sexual encounter is wordless. The idea that one needs to get actual spoken permission at each stage of the game lest one be guilty of assault is pretty strange, I must say. I doubt that most couples actually do that.</p>
<p>Cons, I understand. I don’t believe you need to say yes in a relationship (you can absolutely say no!), but what I meant was that she couldn’t say no. I don’t understand lake’s point. Most sexual encounters in relationships are not said yes to, they just happen. Relationships are as strong as they used to be.</p>
<p>Consol – a lot of communication is not spoken. Yes can be communicated by a smile, a touch, by locking a door, by getting birth control immediately before the act. Lying there semi-conscious =/= consent.</p>
<p>I think lake is responding to my post 659. I, in turn, was responding to Hunt’s. He said he wasn’t worried about situations in which the young woman is too drunk to say yes or no. He did worry about situations in which the young woman says yes when drunk when she would have said no if sober.</p>
<p>I said that I think that doesn’t happen much in the real world, PRECISELY because in most cases people caught up in the actual act don’t discuss what’s going to happen next. It’s NOT enough to tell a young man “no means no.” </p>
<p>A rather drunk young man who is sexually aroused may simply not realize that the young woman is so drunk that she is incapable of consent. In some cases, she may actually have blacked out–I mean she seems awake but she will later have no memory at all of what she did. She IS too drunk to say yes or no; she is not unconscious. The young man may simply not realize how drunk she is. Or, the young woman may try to stop him, but her response time has slowed considerably and his ability to respond to non-verbal clues–her trying to push him away, etc., is dimmed by the effects of alcohol. </p>
<p>I think these are the cases that lead to disagreements about whether sex was consensual–not cases in which the young woman affirmatively states that she too wants to have intercourse. (See Hunt’s post 654).</p>
<p>When we discussed this a year or so ago, I seem to recall that someone cited studies of sexual assault on campus in which the classification of non-consensual/consensual was made NOT by the female reporting the sexual encounter, but by those conducting the study, and that if the female reported drinking–possibly above some threshold, such as three drinks-- before the encounter, the researchers automatically classified it as non-consensual. My memory of this is a bit foggy. I believe that mini may have been the one who cited the study in question. Perhaps he will recall.</p>
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<p>Kayf, you know, you really do not need to tell me this.</p>
<p>Jonri, yes there is certainly a risk involved in having sex when you’re drunk. Men need to understand that there could be some severe penalties if they misinterpreted the situation.</p>
<p>Reminds me a little bit about killing someone in an auto accident when you’re drunk. I don’t think anyone intends for that to happen. Some people didn’t realize they were drunk or maybe just buzzed. Some people drove buzzed numerous times with no consequence. Just because murder was never their intent, they don’t get off the hook.</p>
<p>Consol – when you go on about how consensual sex doesnt not always include verbal OK, I wanted to comment on non-verbal consent and the differene between that and no consent.</p>
<p>I’m still waiting for the example of a man convicted of rape, where the woman agrees that she affirmatively consented to sex, but next morning decided that she actually had been too drunk to consent and therefore it was rape.</p>
<p>Posters keep bringing this up as a risk for their sons. But where is the actual risk? Where is the example of a man who was actually punished in this situation? Why is anyone worried about this strawman situation?</p>
<p>I believe Consolation’s story about the data collection. But what difference does data collection for a study mean, as far as risk to an actual male student?</p>
<p>Why are parents of sons emphasizing this strawman situation of their son having drunk sex with a woman who consents but next morning withdraws the consent, instead of the real, happens all the time, danger of their son raping a woman while both are drunk, deceiving himself into believing she consented, when in fact she didn’t?</p>
<p>Here’s what we parents of sons should be telling our boys, in my opinion:</p>
<p>1) Having sex with a woman who very clearly consents, if you think she will regret it in the morning, is the action of a cad, a heel and a bounder;</p>
<p>2) If you are very drunk, and “having sex” with a woman who is also very drunk, you are bad at telling whether she consents. Unless you are absolutely positive that she consents, you might be raping her and you should stop.</p>
<p>Why are parents of sons emphasizing this strawman situation of their son having drunk sex with a woman who consents but next morning withdraws the consent, instead of the real, happens all the time, danger of their son raping a woman while both are drunk, deceiving himself into believing she consented, when in fact she didn’t?</p>
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<p>Cardinal, I suspect it is because many parents can not accept even the thought that their son might rape a woman. It certainly seemed to me that Frey, from his court appearances, could not accept the immoral and illegal acts his son did.</p>
<p>The Frey father is awful, but I was thinking about what we say to our sons before they become sexually active, or before they go off to college. We shouldn’t worry about this virtually nonexistent risk that our sons will be charged with rape even though the woman indisputably consented. We should worry that our sons might rape someone because of drunken lack of judgement. We should worry less about our sons being falsely accused of rape, and more about their being actual rapists. </p>
<p>A lot of women get raped. Each of their rapists is some mother’s son and some father’s son.</p>
<p>Cardinal, I agree. I think that some parents can not accept what their sons might do. I think that Zehnder’s (who seemed like the more redeemable of the two boys) mother said he was a good kid who made a mistake. I actually think that SHE might make a better advocate of what parents should say to their kids – that even if you have a good kid, you need to address x, y and Z.</p>