If a woman gets rip roaring drunk, all she deserves is a blistering hangover. That’s all that men usually get.
Well, sometimes they end up falling in the river or ocean and drowning. That happened to a young man in our town not too long ago.
There are lots of same-sex assaults, with and without alcohol. My unscientific observation is that they’re about as common as same-sex attracted people.
Drifting off topic again.
I have always tried to impress upon both my D and S that it makes absolutely no sense to get totally obliterated at a party. That advice initially had little to do with the issue of sexual assault but was couched more in the context of maintaining your personal dignity. Having a few too many and getting a little rowdy with friends is a lot different than losing control of your bodily functions, vomiting or being unable to walk on your own accord. At that point you are simply embarrassing yourself and yes there can be serious risks associated with that conduct.
But with the DCL and the increased awareness of assault, I do think that the risk equation for men vs women getting that drunk is becoming more balanced. Many parents used to focus a lot on their girls telling them they risked unwanted attention or worse if they got that drunk. Meanwhile they would gift shot glasses to their boys at high school graduation parties --I have seen that more than once. But with all the press these cases are getting, it has to be dawning on people that more women are starting to report either to the college or to the police. So it should be dawning on these same people that the risks are also very high for men.
When you are that drunk communication can fail, your normal decision making capability is compromised and some people may even become more physically aggressive. These things can lead to an encounter that can change the trajectory of your life whether you are male or female.
What is the DCL?
^^^
Dear Colleague Letter
This case may very well change laws around sexual assault of a passed out person. That is an easy thing to teach and tougher sentencing would add additional deterance to anyone with their wits about them not to have sex with someone passed out.
The laws are already clear on sexual assaults with force. What I don’t think it will achieve is harsher penalties for he said she said cases as I don’t think the public believes that two drunk people can accurately discern each others intentions. And gender biased prosecution is probably not an option politically in this day and age.
Look at the LaBrie case even that jury could not get to rape and those two weren’t drunk and IMO the age of the young women had greater influence on the jury than anything else but of course I didn’t sit in that courtroom.
Here is a list of some of the effects of the Brock case.
https://www.yahoo.com/beauty/brock-turner-going-free-best-144713530.html
The judge…I don’t understand him. He had a case where a woman got beat up bad. With witnesses…and his sentence is ridiculous.
There is a link in the above link that explains this.
I will just post the link.
I think Persky is going to be recalled next year. I wonder what would have happened if Brock had a different judge. Persky would not be fighting a recall effort. Brock would have gotten a slightly longer sentence. Reduced for good behavior. People would not be in front of his house demonstrating. I think Brock would have an easier life.
^^^
My S said the same thing a few weeks back. Said this case would have disappeared much quicker had the judge given him 18 months or 2 years. He didn’t think we’d even be talking about it today.
I often wonder whether Persky had any idea about the force of the backlash that would ensue. Or was he really just that out of touch to think no one would be up in arms about it?
I think it’s fair to say the backlash took many of us by surprise.
“Accountable” to whom? These are 2 separate issues. Crime prevention can be taught without the underlying implication that rape is somehow the woman’s fault. And there are reasons other than crime prevention to advise young men and women to drink in moderation.
We’ve told both our kids (a son & a daughter) that getting drunk puts them at a disadvantage. We live near a college town. My husband has seen young people leave a pile of bills (not singles) on the bar (and they were happy when he asked if they really intended to leave that much of a tip). We see them walk along busy streets and cross them with little regard for traffic. There have been injuries and an occasional fatality.
If you look at college towns across the country, you can find other reasons. Students have been known to get lost. They die of exposure or drown. They get mugged. They die from alcohol poisoning. There are house fires and break ins. There are all kinds of reasons why you want to keep your wits about you. The fear that society will somehow hold you accountable for being raped shouldn’t be one of them.
As time passes people will forget. As far as job prospects for Brock remember Obama told federal agencies to ‘ban the box’ on federal job applications. I doubt California would be the place to stay but I bet there are other places that he could go. Not everyone pays attention to the news.
“Ban the box” is about the conviction, NOT about the sex offender registry. It’s a rare employer that will ignore that.
@fallenchemist :
Nicely put, I don’t think anyone is disagreeing there is something to be talked about with personal safety that involves in turn personal responsibility, but when people bring it up in a discussion about a case like this, it comes off as blaming the victim. The analogy I would use (flawed as it is) is in an auto accident, when you have an auto accident they have this concept of '% responsibility", for for example if someone rear ends my car, but they find I jammed on my brakes at the last minute at a red light, I will bear some culpability in the accident. When someone mentions the behavior of the victim like that, it comes off as “well, if the victim wasn’t drunk, they wouldn’t have had that happen” or “if the victim hadn’t been partying with those people, it wouldn’t have happened”, and especially in a case like Brock Turner, it sounds like “well, the perp got 1 year whereas if they had raped the victim it would be two, but since the victim was drunk they share 50% of the responsibility for what happened to them, so a year is fine…”…which obviously is ludicrous. There are time when a court takes contributing factors into what happened, if for example someone gets beat up because they had done something to the perp like fighting words or some sort of other act, courts will take that into consideration (as well as the perps background and whatnot), but this is not the same thing, the victim in this case did nothing to hurt the perp or otherwise make him do it, like a mugger in a bad neighborhood, he simply took advantage of a situation to commit a crime.
I think there is a real discussion about avoiding harm in situations like this, and it involves both would be victims and would be rapists, and that is about avoiding the things that lead to this kind of situation. Maybe because I have lived in bad areas, maybe because I have commuted at night during dangerous times on the NY subway system,but I learned when I was pretty young to be aware of what is going on and the risks. Knowing you will be going through a bad area, know basic precautions (don’t wear any fancy jewelry, don’t wear fancy clothing, wear sensible shoes, stay to well lighted areas with people, know the route in advance, know the area itself). With alcohol, the talk should be about safety, and where drinking, especially excess drinking, is dangerous. It is a lot safer to get drunk at home alone; I would say with people you know, but a lot of sexual assaults and other kind of crimes happen with people you know, precisely because people assume the other person is safe). Drugs and alcohol also can lead to violent behavior in general and the key thing I think isn’t being emphasized (or maybe it is and I am not aware of it) is the emphasis on not being a victim of a crime by getting drunk, rather than emphasizing that you can become a victim of alcohol and be the perp, too. It sounds common sense, but I wonder, for example, if Brock Turner’s dad ever talked to him about what can happen when you drink, or was he one of these guys who sees drinking like that in college as some sort of rite of passage, good clean ‘dirty’ fun and so forth? (And I have my suspicions,based on what the father said about the case…).
I am not sure why you use the word “but” when you are referencing my post. I said the exact same thing, up to that point. When you use the word “but” it implies I said something different. I could not have been clearer that one should never blame the victim for the rape. Maybe that is not how you meant it.
I would, however, disagree that the woman shares any % of the responsibility for the actual crime. Your analogy
is completely wrong because the law says that as the following driver, you are always supposed to leave enough space for any reaction time. What if suddenly a child runs into the street to retrieve a ball? It doesn’t matter if it is a red light or that situation, you are not supposed to follow so closely that you cannot stop.
That would all be off topic except it does follow in that analogy that it doesn’t matter if the victim is sober or drunk or having an epileptic blackout (there is not always wild twitching) or any other situation, a person is never supposed to rape or assault. There is no shared responsibility for the crime itself, period. It all falls on the rapist. Now just like the driver can help reduce the chance of any accident by driving super defensively, there are things to be done to reduce the risk of assault. But when it happens, whether they acted defensively or not, the fault and liability falls completely on the criminal. Just like a defensive driving class is a separate issue from another party driving too closely behind you, even though learning to be aware of such drivers would be part of the class, learning that one should not drink excessively or should have a sober companion if one does, it is a separate issue from being raped. Just like one is not responsible for the person rear-ending you even if you were not driving defensively, one is not responsible for being raped because they got drunk. In either case, ignoring the more prudent path increases the odds of a bad outcome. That is quite different than sharing legal culpability.
@fallenchemist:
I was totally agreeing with your post, when I said “but when people talk about the victim’s behavior” I was saying the same thing you did, that it comes off as blaming the victim.
My analogy about the accident and % to blame was on what happens in the real world, where people comment on the victim being drunk or being in the wrong place and in effect saying that the perp wasn’t totally to blame (and I am talking in the legal sense). When the football players were convicted of rape in Steubenville, Ohio, a lot of the townspeople in defending the offal that did the crime, said in effect the girl went with the boys,‘knew what would happen’, and thus the boys weren’t really guilty of rape…and I also pointed out the fallacy of that argument, that what applies in a civil case (for example, % guilt in an accident) does not apply to a criminal one…and I also agreed that personal responsibility as a means to protect oneself (from being a victim or being accused of a crime when drinking or doing drugs) needs to be seperated out for the reasons you mentioned. It is pretty obvious from my posts on this case that I think Turner is a whining, despicable piece of crap who got off with a too light sentence because the judge saw him as a Golden Boy who ‘made a mistake’, and that I would never, ever blame the victim of any kind of crime.
OK, good to clear that up.
" It’s a rare employer that will "
I’m not so sure about that. There are quite a few guys on the sex offender list where I grew up. Somehow or other they all seem to be employed. Not at high paying jobs. But there are jobs that don’t care about the list, just like there are jobs that don’t care about citizenship.
@fallenchemist, I love your post #75.
@musicprnt, reading about Brock, I don’t think the alcohol made a difference in Brock’s behavior. There are people who do things drunk and think that behavior is ok when sober.
I knew these people growing up. They knew Tuesday… Sober… What they were going to do Friday… Drunk.