I would like to discuss Title IX as it relates to sexual assault on campus. This is one of the most important things you need to know about. I suggest parents Google this and we can discuss. I have just gone through this with my child and it was one of the worst experiences of my life.
A student of mine was sexually assaulted last semester. There were no witnesses and no physical evidence of violence. After she reported to the Title IX Coordinator, and then campus police (they are real police), a group of the rapists friends went to my student’s apartment and tried to intimidate her into recanting her allegations. Again, there were no witnesses.
Our Title IX Coordinator seems very dedicated (I communicated with her throughout this process because I am a mandatory reporter), but without corroborating evidence or testimony, her hands were tied. It was the same with the police. They carried out an investigation, but nothing came of it.
Within a few weeks, my student was so anxious that she withdrew from school. It still makes me wince when I think about it.
Scary and awful, @Rightofway123!
It is. Don’t think it cannot happen your child. Young men across the country are being falsely accused and being discipline for very weak cases. The government wants to.regulate sex on campus. The government will say anything true or not to support their case. Schools are afraid of losing federal funding.
@rightofway123:
The government doesn’t want to regulate sex on campus, what the government is doing is trying to make sure that universities are taking sexual assault seriously and among other things, actually take seriously when there are accusations of sexual assault. You make it seem like this is all about young men being falsely accused, when the reality is that young women (and men) are being sexully assaulted and for a lot of factors they may not be dealt with seriously (meaning the school)
Sorry, but Jameis Winston and others at Florida State (as one example) were not innocent young men, Florida State just settled a lawsuit for 900 grand to the person Winston assaulted, because they didn’t even bother to seriously investigate it (not to mention that the cops in Talahassee, being big football fans, do everything they can to cover up crimes by the athletes) and the same has been especially true with athletes when it comes to sexual assault complaints, this is nothing new.
What schools are trying to do is not regulate sex, but rather they are trying to find a way that if kids are having sex, it is consensual. Personally, I would hope that kids have enough common sense to understand consensuality, but when you mix young kids, with alchohol and/or drugs, it often ends up with a very gray line. I am not saying there aren’t cases where it becomes a they said/they said kind of thing, but what the schools are trying to do is (hopefully) make clear what is and isn’t sexual assault. FWIW, I think some of these cases are very nebulous, and the benefit of the doubt should go to the accused, but I also think that especially a lot of young men don’t understand no means no, especially where alchohol and such is involved, and I also think that a lot of school administrators either want to ignore the issue, or have a “boys will be boys” kind of attitude towards it, still.
I have heard the same arguments used about rape off campus,that the cops have become the morality police trying to regulate sex because the definitions of rape have broadened, I heard people say it about the mutants in Ohio who sexually abused a drunk girl and they blamed her for what the boys did.
This is a very difficult subject from the perspective of the school administration. The “he said/she said” nature of many incidents makes it hard to know what really happened. I think the reason the regulations are in place now is because too many campus administrators and local police did as musicprnt suggests. Had all the accusations that could have been investigated and properly resolved been investigated and properly resolved, perhaps there would not be a need for a federal mandate.
My friend’s D was sexually assaulted on her college campus, and it was not just a he said/she said. She reported it, but administration did not act properly on the report. I helped implement our campus’s policies recently, so she asked me for advice; I gave her passages of the VAWA law to cite and told her to ask for the case to be reopened. In the end, the family retained an attorney and the school conducted a full investigation. The young man received a penalty that he would not have received had they not pushed the issue. This is the sort of thing that led to the law/regulations.
That said, the rules are tough to implement, rough to follow, and may result in innocent people being found guilty. The burden of proof according to the VAWA regulations is different than that of a court of law. I would say I am sorry the world has come to this, but I don’t think it is necessarily any different today than it was in the dinosaur days when I was in school … it’s just that now people are trying to grapple with how to address it.
My son says, “Don’t have sex with anyone from your school, don’t have sex with anyone at your school, and if you do have sex with someone, record everything - including their specific consent to the act and the recording (but don’t post it on the internet or send it to your friends).”
@kelsmom - your post reminds me of something I saw on Facebook a week ago. I can’t provide the link, but here’s the gist. I don’t know why our culture has accepted that it’s always the woman’s obligation to avoid rape risks. It’s about time someone wrote something up like this that points out that it goes both ways (and now I’m sure someone is going to chastise me for sharing this, telling me I have it all wrong). Actually the person I know who shared this on her Facebook page is a professor at a liberal arts college.
Ten Rape Prevention Tips:
- Don't put drugs in women's drinks.
- When you see a woman walking by herself, leave her alone.
- If you pull over to help a woman whose car has broken down, remember not to rape her.
- If you are in an elevator and woman gets in, don't rape her.
- When you encounter a woman who is asleep, the safest course of action is to not rape her.
- Never creep into a woman's home through an unlocked door or window, or spring out at her from between parked cars, or rape her.
- Remember, people go to the laundry room to do their laundry. Do not attempt to molest someone who is alone in a laundry room.
- Use the Buddy System! If it is inconvenient for you to stop yourself from raping women, ask a trusted friend to accompany you at all times.
- Carry a rape whistle. If you find that you are about to rape someone, blow the whistle until someone comes to stop you.
- Don't forget: Honesty is the best policy: When asking a woman out on a date, don't pretend that you are interested in her as a person; tell her straight up that you expect to be raping her later. If you don't communicate your intentions, the woman may take it as a sign that you do not plan to rape her.
@teriwtt:
The problem with that post is it assumes that what we are talking about is forced rape, which is pretty easy to know is rape. The examples in that facebook post are aimed squarely at that, like “if in an elevator with a woman, don’t grab her and force her to have sex”
The kind of sexual assaults on campus we are talking about aren’t always so cut and dried. For example, a young man and a young woman are having a good time (it also could be a man with a man, a woman with a woman, but those are a lot rarer), they have been drinking a big, they go to his room/her room…they are tussling around, and it starts getting heavy, they end up having sex…later on, the young woman wakes up and realize she had sex, but doesn’t remember having it. Is it rape? It could be, if for example the young woman was totally out of it and the boy had sex with her when she was comatose, but what if she was drunk enough where she seemed to consent, but couldn’t remember it the next day and decided she couldn’t have consented? It is in these boundary areas, rather than where a man forces a girl to have sex, where much of this lies, and it is why that facebook post is a bit ridiculous. Among other things, forced rape like that is not some boy or man getting out of control most of the time, it is driven by other factors like rage or power and control (yes, some rape does happen when a man/boy loses control and won’t stop when the other person says “no”, it can be situational, but often isn’t).
It is murky, and I think a lot of it is in letting young people know what the rules are. It would be a pretty dense person who didn’t understand if someone says no, and they drag them to the bed and have sex with them it is rape, but there is a lot of ambiguity. A lot of these cases involved alcohol or drugs, and one thing that students have to understand is that if you are having sex with someone and you are drunk, that that could very well make you guilty of sexual assault if the partner reports you for doing it without their consent, the assumption being that while you are drunk it is likely you could do something like that, and likewise, that if the other person is drunk and reports you, they will assume you took advantage of them. I can tell you, from talking to more than a few kids in their late teens, that they assume that if a situation like that happens, that it will be chalked off to ‘oh, the kids were drunk, those kinds of things happen’, which is what would happen. It doesn’t work like that any more, just ask the idiots in Steubenville, they tried a defense that the girl went willingly will them, and got herself drunk, tried to argue it was just ‘one of those things’ or that it was the girl’s fault, and they ended up in jail (rightfully so, you have to be a first class degenerate to have a girl who is passed out drunk and think it is okay to do what they did). Athletes assume because of their favored status in many places, that that will cover all, and it won’t work any more.
The rule my parents taught me about sex was that the smart route is to assume the other person doesn’t want to have sex, and that unless I was totally sure they were consenting, to assume not to have sex, that if I was drunk or whatnot, to not even think about having sex, that if the other person was drunk not to have sex, and that if we did have sex, it was my job to make sure that my partner was okay, and that if I even thought they might be having trouble, stop doing what we were doing and talk to them (personally, I think that applies both ways, but my parents knew they couldn’t control the other person:).
Stupid things still happen, but one of the problems I think is a lot of young men still have attitudes where they assume they have a right to sex, rather than seeing it as something mutual. I feel sorry for the kids who wouldn’t think of hurting a partner, who really care, because they will be looked at as suspect as much as the more creepy ones will be. Given that most sexual assaults involve heterosexual partners, and usually it is a male accused of assaulting a woman, it often is the old ‘boys will be boys’ crap, which is what is changing. and rightfully so. It is sad if the reason that young men back off is because they are afraid of being accussed, hopefully the programs schools have will help everyone navigate what can be a slippery slope.
Title IX should be the textbook example of mission creep.
There are perfectly fine laws that deal with these issues (assault, rape, etc).
Unless you have been through the.process.of sexual assault on campus, you have no idea what.you are talking about. Whether the accused is guilty or not, they move forward.with the hearing. I hope your son or daughter never has to go.through this. Please stop confusing word sexual.assault.with rape. They are 2 different things.
The problem with the laws that deal with rape is that the burden of proof is pretty much insurmountable in most cases of acquaintance rape, which is occurring in epidemic numbers on college campuses. I used to wonder why on earth anyone would rely on untrained university staff to deal with criminal matters, but in most of these cases, they are the only recourse against what sometimes turn out to be serial predators. I don’t know what the answer is, but I don’t think the courts can do an adequate job protecting students.
I love the absurdity of @teriwtt 's friend’s list – it really makes me think about all of the guidelines we suggest for women, and how many of them put the onus on the woman to try to prevent becoming a victim.
Ten Rape Prevention Tips:
- Don't put drugs in women's drinks.
- When you see a woman walking by herself, leave her alone.
- If you pull over to help a woman whose car has broken down, remember not to rape her.
- If you are in an elevator and woman gets in, don't rape her.
- When you encounter a woman who is asleep, the safest course of action is to not rape her.
- Never creep into a woman's home through an unlocked door or window, or spring out at her from between parked cars, or rape her.
- Remember, people go to the laundry room to do their laundry. Do not attempt to molest someone who is alone in a laundry room.
- Use the Buddy System! If it is inconvenient for you to stop yourself from raping women, ask a trusted friend to accompany you at all times.
- Carry a rape whistle. If you find that you are about to rape someone, blow the whistle until someone comes to stop you.
- Don't forget: Honesty is the best policy: When asking a woman out on a date, don't pretend that you are interested in her as a person; tell her straight up that you expect to be raping her later. If you don't communicate your intentions, the woman may take it as a sign that you do not plan to rape her.
“Please stop confusing word sexual.assault.with rape. They are 2 different things.”
The difference between the two boils down to semantics, in NJ law, for example, there is no wording for rape, sexual assault in various degrees covers the spread of things. In some states, sexual assault is about non consensual sex without force, implied or otherwise being used, whereas rape is if force is used or implied in the non consensuality (so for example, if a boy is having sex with a drunk girl, it may be considered sexual assault, whereas if he pinner her down, it would be rape), other states it is about motive, if it is about sex that got out of hand, it would be sexual assault, whereas if the assumed motive of rape is one of hate and wanting to deliver violence and shame upon the victim, rather than simply wanting to have sex.
The reality is that whatever the motive, both involve non consensuality and both can leave the victims with severe issues, and in reality it may not matter much. It may be a lot easier to define rape (the stereotype of, for example, the guy with the knife or gun forcing a woman to allow him to penetrate her), but the reality is they aren’t that much different, the key similarity is non consensuality.
I don’t know why @RightofWay123 claims they are different, I don’t know if they are saying rape is a lot more cut and dried and sexual assault is murky, but in the end both involve victims. Even with rape it is not cut and dried, often like sexual assault it can come down to he said/she said, because unless they have proof of force or violence (for example, the victim is beaten up or was stabbed or shot), rape can be just as murky, as with sexual assault, for example, there are plenty of cases where a woman has cried rape in revenge for something, that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
I am not saying that schools are necessarily handling these things right, and I don’t doubt there are going to be innocent kids accused of sexual assault, where for example a girl has second thoughts after having sex and cries sexual assault, or where there is a question about whether a girl was drunk enough to consent or not, and I also sadly will not be surprised if schools are going overboard the other way, where it becomes guilty until proven innocent…but that doesn’t make sexual assault any less a horrible thing than it is, it can be just as harmful to the victim as rape is (using the idea that rape and sexual assault are different, which can come down to semantics, or level).
However, there is the other side to that, that based on everything I have read and from what I have heard from people who have been around it, for every wrongly accused kid there are probably 10 cases that either aren’t reported, or ignored. Take a look at Florida State, where not only the school, but the local cops basically looked the other way while Florida State athletes were accused of sexual misconduct (Jameis Winston wasn’t the only one). The reason this has become a big issue is because too many people assumed in these cases it was, ha ha, a boy ‘having a little fun’ or something, or worse, it was allowed to fester, in part because school administrators often shared the same attitude, that this was just part of kids on their own hooking up and ‘things going a little wrong’ (or worse, the misogynistic jerks, not only just men, who assumed that this was just boys having a little fun, so it was okay).
I have heard some of the complaints about the sexual assault issue on campus, and some of it sickens me. “The girl got drunk, so what did she expect” or “She left the party with the guy, went to his room, what did she expect?”, or “so, the boys touched the girl, what is a big deal, no lasting harm”, it leaves out that when it comes to sex, either partner has the right to back out and say no at any point, and more importantly, if a partner thinks the other person is even a little out of it, it is their responsibility to back away, I am tired of hearing that the perpetrator either was drunk themself (so couldn’t tell their partner was saying no; try that with vehicular homicide as a defense, or any kind of crime) or that they didn’t realize she was drunk or out of it, it is the duty of both partners to assure the other is okay, period.
It hasn’t been helped by things like the whole idiotic abstinence only sex ed, since the scope of those programs is basically to talk about how sex defiles a girl who has it before marriage and ‘just say no’, whereas comprehensive sex ed spends time on the risks of having sex, both emotional and physical, and also talks about what consensual sex is. More importantly, many of them teach young women they have a right and duty to say no and how to protect themselves,which is crucial, because many young women grow up with culture and religious belief that makes sex into a woman’s duty to men, if not for the same reasons. (Don’t believe me about abstinence only? In Mississippi, they reported that at one school, they opened a chocolate mint pie, and passed it around, and talked about how the pie becoming spoiled was what happened when a girl had sex before marriage…). Data does suggest that sexual assault rates are higher in places where kids don’t have sex ed, but it is only that, no one as far as I can tell has done a correlation/causation study with that, because those rates also could be caused by other factors, like education level, levels of alcohol use in the community and so forth.
One very prominent school was found to be only reporting a crime as rape if the perpetrator was caught and convicted, and this was just a few years ago. Colleges have historically tried to brush sexual assault charges under the rug – they don’t want the bad publicity. I have taught my daughters a couple of things – make sure the actual police are notified if they are assaulted, not just Campus Security (they are the same thing at some colleges, but not theirs). And say yes to rape kit/testing afterwards – it is intrusive, but their best shot at proving their allegation and keeping their assailant from assaulting another woman.