Title IX. What Parents Need to Know

musicprnt
Fri, 29 Jan 2016 22:23:50 +0000

“Please stop confusing word sexual.assault.with rape. They are 2 different things.”

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2011/02/whats_the_difference_between_rape_and_sexual_assault.html

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.