<p>07Dad, I am using the statistics I see cited and also those that were used to form 1 in 4. I surely HOPE it is not accurate, but I have no way of knowing, as so many rapes and sexual assault are NOT reported. I’m not sure that you have any better way of knowing any more accurate number either.</p>
<p>I spent a lot of time ALONE in rooms with a single male or sometimes several males when I was in college and since. It was often my dorm or apartment or his/theirs. It does boggle the mind that the first reaction many have are, “What did the victim do to provoke the rape.” I actually dated many nice men rather casually in college and law school, as well as when I was a young professional as well–people I met in class, sometimes people I met at parties, sometimes through sports, sometimes through mutual friends. I did from time to time enjoy alcohol with some of them also. Some of the relationships progressed to beyond friends and some did not. Never did any of the men pressure me to have a more physical or intimate relationship than I was comfortable at any time or use their generally greater strength against me. I enjoy a continuing non-intimate friendship with quite a few of them.</p>
<p>I was fortunate that all of my experiences with men were positive and pleasant. I never accepted invitations that made me uncomfortable in any way. There were several that did set off my radar and I declined. Did I potentially miss out on some fun and great experiences? Maybe, but I have no regrets. I could easily have been fooled by some of the men who were in my life as well.</p>
<p>You’re right, Nrdsb4, it is certainly depressing that we have not advanced beyond blaming victims and continuing the character assasinations that played out against victims over the millenia. </p>
<p>I guess if I was raped, they would say I was a tease for having dated so many men and stupid for trusting myself and them to be alone with them. Very depressing! My life would not have been nearly as rich if I didn’t have these solid friendships with the men and women in my life.</p>
<p>07Dad, you should take a look at the numbers from the Princeton study they buried, which was just leaked. I linked it a ways back. Or the numbers from Nescac. They did their own studies.</p>
<p>The one in four is not that one in four will be raped, though the way this is distinguished is rather interesting, but that one in four women will be the victim of an unwanted sexual assault. If we include the number of times the woman is successful in preventing the unwanted assault… as if being assaulted but not penetrated was some sort of great situation… it is one in four, and maybe more.</p>
<p>I think it is possible to have a sea change in this only if woman are encouraged to report and we remove the rapists from the campuses. The less rapists on campus, the less rape on campus.</p>
<p>In my experience, the boys who assaulted me in middle school were people I didn’t even know. I was waiting by myself outside in the snow & the dark for the activity bus. its possible onlooking back that the boys knew it wasn’t coming and so weren’t worried about being caught. The building was locked by the time I got away, so I just walked home- there wasn’t anything else I could have done.</p>
<p>I did tell my mother & I remember talking to the counselor at school. But I only knew the names of one of the boys, and he was considered " popular", so it is possible I wasn’t believed, especially as as far as I could tell, nothing ever happened to them and I wasn’t questioned again.</p>
<p>Why is it, that an adult cannot believe that a gang of boys would assault someone they didn’t know, but they can believe that a young girl would make up a humiliating story about being sexually assaulted?</p>
<p>I did know the people that assaulted me when I was older, but only once was it someone I was " out on a date" with. The other times it was when they knew I was alone and in a vulnerable position ( which they maneuvered me into)</p>
<p>^^^^^I just read in one of the many links provided here (I think) that the majority of rapes are planned in advance, not the result of a heavy necking session that “just got out of hand.” Scary.</p>
<p>EK4, It is awful that your case was not investigated more thoroughly. I have been subjected to the pack mentality all through grade school, where I was the preferred victim to the bullies. None of the assaults at that time were in any way sexual, an am grateful to have been spared that.</p>
<p>It is awful that people maneuvered you into vulnerable and solitary positions where you could be attacked with impunity.</p>
<p>The rape culture we live in makes me unwilling to leave a single person (or even just two teens) sitting at a desserted, darkened bus stop or other location for their parents or ride or the bus to come and get them. It infuriated my S, but I always insisted we transport these people elsewhere or wait until their ride arrived. S finally got the idea we wouldn’t leave and would engage them in conversation to pass the time. I know I would have felt awful if any of these young people had been assaulted or harmed and I was the last adult to see them before they were harmed. It made HS years rather tiring because it was very common for the parents of these people not to arrive for some length of time after the events ended. I made sure that H also would not leave either. When our kids wanted to go out at night, I insisted they stick together and have us pick them up in a busy, well-lit location. </p>
<p>Stranger or virtual stranger rapes and assaults do indeed happen and it is cold comfort to the victims to know that %wise, they are less frequent than acquaintance rape. Once S got the message H & I lived about desserting vulnerable people, I hope he has followed it in his personal life, which I cannot control from 5000 miles away.</p>
<p>There is a growing movement that teens need more education on the issue of consent, see this petition:</p>
<p>WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO:
Make Consent a Mandatory Part of Sex-Ed in Public Schools.
There seems to be a huge misunderstanding concerning what consent is when it comes to sex. And yet – when discussed with teenagers – the idea that “unless someone says ‘yes’, it’s not consent,” is easily accepted. It’s not a hard conversation: Unless you get a “Yes,” assume “No.” Uncomfortable, maybe, but difficult? Hardly.</p>
<p>Please make the line between a clear “Yes” and anything else – whether it be someone drunk, asleep, or otherwise unable to say “No” – something schools must cover in health or sex ed.</p>
<p>If STI information and methods of contraception are standard fare, consent should be, too.</p>
<p>Created: Mar 21, 2013
Issues: Education, Human Rights, Women’s Issues
Learn about Petition Thresholds</p>
<p>^^^^We did the same thing. If there was a single girl waiting on the steps for her parent to come get her after soccer practice (at school or at the club), we would always wait until her parents arrived. Same with dropping off any kid at home. We never pulled away until we saw them go inside and shut the door.</p>
<p>You WOULD feel horrible if you drove off and learned later that something had happened.</p>
<p>poetgrl–I did read it (this was at the end of the article) and it looks like the percentage for rape is overstated. The link within the story seemed to confirm that fact, but not in a way that allows for a calculation of a “true” pecentage. Also, did you see anything to indicate whether the inquiry was conduct by other students or on campus property, or was this the overall experience during the time period? If it isn’t by other students or on campus property, I’m not sure what the college can do directly.</p>
<p>Yes, we hope that the years of us waiting with people made an impression on our kids. It seems to for D–not as sure about what S does when he’s not around us. Kind of amazing that it appears there are quite a few people that incapacitated people are “fair game” to whatever assault or battery anyone wishes to commit.</p>
<p>07, every single one of these colleges discourages women reporting on campus rapes or off campus rapes to the local police. ALL of them say they want to handle it “in house.” Well, of course they do. But, they aren’t handling it “in house,” they are hiding it in house.</p>
<p>No, we have NO accurate numbers. Why on earth do we have NO accurate numbers at places that have accurate numbers for everything in the world? because they do not want to have accurate numbers.</p>
<p>So, if you believe that the colleges and universities, who have been actively discouraging women from reporting rapes to the local police, have been handling this in the best interest of our daughters, you are welcome to your opinion.</p>
<p>I disagree. Many disagree. You, however, are free to believe it has all been handled quite well.</p>
<p>DOJ disagreed in 2011 and required new reporting standards, standards, which, if the idea was to figure out how to fix some of this problem, would have been accurate to begin with. I know your opinion on this.</p>
<p>In light of recent research, you may well change your mind, or not.</p>
<p>Either way, the young women are not all right with the way they are being treated anymore, and hopefully they will stop reporting to campus the crimes they should be reporting to the police.</p>
<p>We waited with all kids until their parents were there, boys, girls, didn’t matter.</p>
<p>If you were at my house, I walked you out to the car to make sure whichever car you were getting into had the right person in it, boy or girl, didn’t matter.</p>
<p>We also waited until kids we dropped off were safely in their house. Male or female.</p>
<p>Got to thinking about a few things today- one is that with the benefit of the Steubenville audio/video/text evidence, maybe as odd as this might sound, girls at parties (or wherever they may feel in need of extra safety measures) should turn their smartphone recorders until they are home safe.</p>
<p>Side thought-- its sad that even history, in its accounts of the chastity belt, suggests in part that the female was somehow the “temptress” and that the belt was necessary to keep the men from being “tempted”. So, we have a long way to go to break the cycle of the belief that somehow the females are to blame if the man “can’t help himself”.</p>
<p>Jym626, another lesson that always got to me in Catholic school was about St. Maria Goretti. She was made a saint because, as a girl of about 12 or 13, she preferred to be killed rather than raped. She was held up as a model of admirable virginity for all Catholic girls to emulate. Her story was one that my mother, in particular, repeated often.</p>
<p>“No, we have NO accurate numbers. Why on earth do we have NO accurate numbers at places that have accurate numbers for everything in the world? because they do not want to have accurate numbers.”</p>
<p>Sorry, but we do have accurate numbers. The NESCAC survey was pretested, and there is an entire scientific methodology to confirming survey numbers. We know both how to test for, and correct for, lying. We know with certainty what the standard deviation is, given the number of people surveyed. (We also have comparative numbers that confirm the range.) The Presidents of both Williams and Amherst are senior scholars in the social sciences, and they not only believe the numbers, they are acting upon them.</p>
<p>As to the 1 in 6 number, it is probably correct if the question was “have you ever been raped”? The campus average seems to be around 3% of women are raped per year, give or take. But 10.1% of women have been raped before they get to college. Some of them will be the same women. So a 16-17% number is entirely within bounds.</p>
<p>It actually depends on the definition of rape. If you go by the legal definition, penetration when the female is too incapacitated (whether sleeping, drugged and/or drunk) the number increases. There are a significant number of women who have had this happen to them but did not think it was rape. A significant number of men also didn’t consider it rape.</p>
<p>This is another reason for differing stats. Depends what the question included.</p>