Title IX. What Parents Need to Know

musicprnt
Thu, 28 Jan 2016 19:53:51 +0000

@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.