CaliCash, I was molested as a teenager by an (adult) family friend. I don’t really need to be lectured about this.
@Pizzagirl Then surely you should have more sympathy.
“I want to believe and i think I do that young women should know how to handle a come on unless they’ve led an extremely sheltered high school life.”
Maybe sheltered, or maybe traumatized. One of my going theories is that a lot of accusers were assault survivors before they got to college, which is contributing to maladaptive responses to uncomfortable situations. Some may be having flashbacks to prior rapes during innocuous sexual situations. This is the best theory I have for why someone would (according to her) participate in consensual sex for a good while and then abruptly panic in the middle of things.
The Canadian study found that women who’d been assaulted prior to college were 6 times more likely to state that they were assaulted during freshman year.
This issue is best resolved if the parents impose strict morals on the son with iron fist beginning from an early age. I know liberals will be giving me hate-mail and even death threats for this (trust me, experience…) but it works (trust me, experience…)
Ohiodad51, I genuinely do not understand: What is the point of reporting a rape to the police, if there is no evidence that there was a rape?
My university’s policy on response to reports of sexual assault actually instructs faculty members not to tell the victim that the rape should be reported to the police.
That surprises me @QuantMech. I am pretty certain that puts them in direct violation of the DCL:
I think faculty members are supposed to suggest that the student go to the appropriate university office, which I presume does tell the victim about the right to file a criminal complaint. Or at least, we can mention the existence of the office. However, faculty members are definitely not supposed to suggest that the victim go to the police. Frankly, I was surprised by this, when I read the latest version of the policy.
Perhaps advising the student of the right to file a criminal complaint is reserved for your Title IX coordinator. They usually prefer one dedicated person for DCL compliance so detailed records can be kept of how the complaint was handled.
ESPN OTL Report: Baylor faces accusations of ignoring sexual assault victims & violating Title IX
Baylor. Remember this?
http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/21/us/baylor-football-player-guilty-sexual-assault/
@QuantMech, I believe it is a terrible idea to not report serious crime for a couple reasons. The most obvious is that our society exists in a primarily peaceful state because of the strong cultural tradition of professional law enforcement keeping the peace. The farther we stray from that model, the more violent and dangerous our society becomes. Look at Chicago, a city where large parts of the population do not trust the police to do their jobs.
Just as obvious to me is the concept of due process. Our legal system only functions because it is viewed, generally, as fair. People voluntarily submit themselves to the judgment of the courts because in the main we believe that the courts strike a balance between protecting the rights of the innocent while still exacting sanction on the guilty. When you remove the protection of due process from the system of determining guilt, no one will trust the process. Look at the uproar over Mizzoula, the Baylor case, the FSU case, Mattress Girl and the Rolling Stone article. Neither side trusts the process that exist on campuses, because both sides know that the process is primarily a political one, not a legal one. That’s a problem.
On a practical level, I have always struggled with the idea that our colleges are hotbeds of actual sexual assault and rape. I do not understand how that can be but at the same time we should not involve the police because doing so may be too traumatic for the victim, or that “everybody knows” that the police and prosecutors don’t care about rape anyway. It seems to me that if someone truly believes that the types of events discussed in the surveys which find such high incidence of sexual assault on campus were really serious issues, then one would do everything they could to make sure that the perpetrators were locked up. In my opinion, if it is true that 20% of women on campus are sexually assaulted, and that most of those assaults are carried out by “serial rapists”, then a college telling a victim not to report her assault to the police is kinda complicit the next time something happens, aren’t they? Or is it maybe that people know many of the cases that make up this “epidemic” of sexual assault are either in no way “assault” as that term has been understood for the last several hundred years (let alone rape) or that it is far from clear what occurred?
Ohiodad51, I am a strong supporter of due process–that goes without saying. I am also a strong supporter of the standard of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that applies in the courts.
I just do not see the point of reporting an assault to the police, if there is no objective evidence of a lack of consent (and the person assaulted is not a minor, so statutory rape charges are not possible). In a “he said/she said” case,where the people are acquaintances, how could there be proof beyond a reasonable doubt?
(I am female, for those who do not know.)
Well if I were the police and several women came in complaining about the same guy, I might begin to take them seriously even if I dismissed the first one.
The problem as I see it, mathmom, is that there is very probably no more proof (that would be useful in court) in the nth reported instance than there was in the first. The other allegations cannot be brought up at the trial in any given instance (as I understand it).
I was called for jury duty in a child molestation case, and dismissed by a peremptory challenge before being seated on the jury. However, another member of my department served on the jury in that case. The jury found the defendant not guilty. After the trial, the jury was informed of previous violations by the man, which they could not have been told about during the trial. The other member of my department felt really awful about this, but he felt that the jury had acted to the best of their ability based on the information presented at the trial, and the burden of proof on the prosecution. It still was not comforting to him.
Sorry this is not directly on the topic of the thread, but it troubles me a lot. I feel personally committed to fairness and due process for the accused, either within the university or in the courts. Yet it seems to me that this necessarily means that we have to reconcile ourselves to having men get away with rape.
@QuantMech A third option would be developing best practices among schools. Since it appears difficult to get victims to report and the one-in-four, one-in-five statistics are coming from retrospective questionnaires - use such questionnaire results as a metric to improve. The goal should be to continually decrease the number of women (or men) who felt in any way abused during their college years. These should be wonderful years expanding horizons - not marred by sexual assault. As it stands - we have no sense of what the numbers look like from one college to another except at the police report level. Perhaps some schools are doing a far better job than others in educating and supporting their students than other schools. An individual school that shows one-in-four should aim in subsequent years to get to one-in-five, one-in-six etc. Ask for feedback from those who fill out the questionnaires what they think would have helped. Act on their suggestions. Title Nine administrators may not have all the answers. Some schools may need to improve orientation or pre-attendance communications, others need better counseling, better trained RA’s, more sensitive police or rape crisis counselors.
To date it seems to me like the one-in-four reports end up being used politically and aimed at declaring crisis and outrage to the end of funding certain groups. Similar reports came out 40 years ago and not a lot has changed. If data could be used toward prevention then fewer would be the times of needing to reconcile a crime for procedural protections.
I don’t worry too much about finding ourselves in that place @QuantMech. Women will continue to look for solutions. Equally important is that men, who are handling many of these cases in the initial stages, won’t reconcile themselves to that either.
Despite what you might read on this forum, our nation’s police departments are acutely aware of their failings in handling sexual assault cases. Philadelphia’s Police Commissioner, Charles Ramsey, testified before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee at a hearing titled “The Chronic Failure to Report and Investigate Rape Cases." He didn’t hold back in highlighting the problems, and argued that a cultural change was needed within police departments nationwide. He promised to convene a summit that included police commissioners and police chiefs nationwide for the purpose of finding solutions. His comments did not fall on deaf ears. Less than a year after his testimony, Joe Biden and his colleagues issued the Dear Colleague Letter officially giving college women a civil remedy through their universities as well as the traditional criminal remedy through the courts.
Ramsey did convene that summit in 2012 and they issued a report “Improving Police Response to Sexual Assault.” The report is interesting because these are the voices of the men (and a few women) who are actually responsible for setting departmental policies relating to processing sexual assault cases. They also did not hesitate to highlight the systemic problems nor is there any indication that they believe the issue is overblown. In fact, quite to the contrary.
The report itself is worth perusing - in addition to proposing solutions, it provides insight as to how these cases are actually “coded” and addresses the “unfounding” of rape cases within departments. All new issues for me.
Sometimes, the police do investigate and arrest. Go back to [reply #74](What do you tell your sons about consent? - #75 by ucbalumnus - Parent Cafe - College Confidential Forums) and follow the links to the articles about the arrest of a suspected sexual predator (who was a student at UIUC, but allegedly committed the sexual assaults during the summer near his hometown, allegedly by intoxication, a common mode of sexual assault on college campuses).
Of course, not all police may be as willing to investigate the crime (the investigating police department in this case was not a college-associated one). But not reporting it means that there is zero chance of any police action on the matter, which is a lower chance than if it is reported.
And there is certainly nothing preventing a woman from reporting to both the police and the Title IV coordinator at her school.
@quantmech, I think you put your finger on the issue. In all aspects of criminal behavior, our society accepts a reduction in our ability to punish offenders in exchange for a certain level of protection for those who are innocent. We have, from time to time, adjusted our expectations as to what that appropriate level or protection is and our system is frankly set up to deal with those issues in what is generally a sober and rational way. Frankly, the publication posted by @harvestmoon1 is an example of the system doing just that.
One of the problems some of us have with the college tribunal system is that it is a political short cut which does absolutely nothing to address the problems advocates say exist in the legal system. I say this because within the larger culture, the tribunals set up as a result of the current political climate have no positive impact on the ability of police and prosecutors to put rapists in prison. Our constitution, and the legal system we have operated under for hundreds of years, simply will not permit a system where advocates act as fact finders and judges, where arbitrary decisions are made about which evidence or witnesses to hear from, etc. It is just a different model of guilt determination.
Think about it this way. On a macro level, what does the college system actually accomplish? Sure, you can throw a guy out of school. And if he was in fact guilty maybe that means he won’t assault that particular woman again. But why would you assume that means he won’t assault another? Are we really only concerned with protecting mostly white, generally privileged young women? To the extent that the tribunal system “works”, isn’t that all it is doing?
Ohiodad51, I appreciate the points that you are making. I don’t think that a “right” answer exists at the moment. Within the university, I am not comfortable with the standard of “preponderance of the evidence” for expelling a student, especially if some of the evidence has been excluded.
I want to go back for a moment to an earlier post by Hanna:
“One of my going theories is that a lot of accusers were assault survivors before they got to college, which is contributing to maladaptive responses to uncomfortable situations. Some may be having flashbacks to prior rapes during innocuous sexual situations. This is the best theory I have for why someone would (according to her) participate in consensual sex for a good while and then abruptly panic in the middle of things.”
Normally, I would have thought that if an accuser has PTSD, this probably suggests that the person was in fact raped. From a purely logical viewpoint, separated from concern for the accuser, I have to admire how deftly Hanna has defused PTSD as indicative of anything–she can suggest that perhaps the accuser was raped previously, and experienced a flashback during a consensual encounter. And evidently Hanna knows at least one case where this did happen–though it is not clear that the person who panicked then claimed to have been raped; she seems to have been pulled together enough to say that the sex was consensual. If one buys Hanna’s theory, then PTSD means nothing with reference to a specific instance. The prosecutor could have 1000 women testifying that they had PTSD, but they were never confused as to what incident caused it; but that would not be persuasive, because they might have been suffering from flashbacks during a consensual encounter. I don’t know what to make of the Canadian study.
I think it would be essentially impossible for a prosecutor to counter Hannah’s theory. This returns us to the situation that if there is no objective evidence and no witnesses, then the perpetrator is free. I think this is a cost we have to bear, but some bear it more heavily than others.
Thanks to harvestmoon1 for posting the link, which I have not yet followed, but plan to.