What do you tell your sons about consent?

Parent Cafe
241

It involved voyeurism and also harassment to keep the complainant from filing a complaint. Actually, I got the sense that this committee – like most tribunals – saved its harshest punishments for people it thought were interfering with the work of the committee.

I’m not arguing that a systematic voyeur shouldn’t be expelled. I don’t think we need a Title IX policy to do that.

I wonder whether the number of cases in which the Yale committee was finding insufficient evidence is itself evidence of vast confusion over all the issues we have been discussing. Women were bringing complaints to the committee in the hope of getting redress of some sort. Going through the complaint process can’t be pleasant, and I don’t think there are enough malevolent shrews to generate such a high rate of patently false accusations. All of the complainants had received counseling and vetting from the Title IX coordinator. Then why are so many of the complaints being dismissed?

242

@JHS see the below link for the guidance you were looking for in the last paragraph of your post #234. Yale provides hypothetical examples of scenarios of what they would consider non-consnesual sex, and then tells you the range of penalties one might expect.

http://smr.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Sexual-Misconduct-Scenarios.pdf

243

I thought the committee was dismissing those cases not because the alleged infraction wasn’t an offense, but because they didn’t find probable cause that the accused person committed it. The Yale guidelines HarvestMoon linked to (which we’ve seen and discussed at length before) seem to me to be clear enough.

244

I would support that hypothesis. It’s certainly a stretch of imagination to think that it is now the job of colleges to manage the sex lives of young adults. Wonder how kids that don’t go to college manage?

245

Nope. Grossly inadequate. There are many different acts that fall under the umbrella of “having sex.” You have to get specific consent for each of them. Not only that, but you have to be prepared to stop on a dime if your partner decides they don’t want to do it after all.

In addition, I have read the details of at least one case–Colorado,maybe?-- where the woman says she did not consent and was raped despite willingly going to his room, having every opportunity to leave, leaving and going back, undressing and getting into his bed, and never saying or indicating that she didn’t want to have sex. Nonverbal assent is supposed to be good enough, is it not?

OR unless she was the victim of AN EARLIER ASSAULT which was Hanna’s entire point in the first place, despite your efforts to twist it into some kind of excuse for rapists. In support of her hypothesis is the fact that various studies have apparently found that girls who were assaulted in HS were more likely to be assaulted in college.

246

Assault victims could get PTSD and allege they’d been assaulted again, when objectively they hadn’t. Another explanation for assault victims being more likely to be assaulted again, though, would be if they had practiced and continued to practice risky behavior that put them in harm’s way. Some young women with serious alcohol problems report being raped more than once.

247

I think Cardinal Fang’s explanation in #245 is the more likely, though of course I don’t know.

Consolation, I have to bear in mind that Hanna is a lawyer who defends young men who have been accused of rape. Her theory has the effect of discounting PTSD in the victim as an indicator of anything, with regard to a specific encounter. I’m not twisting it into an excuse for rapists–not at all–it is just hard to deny that Hanna’s scenario, if true, raises doubts about an allegation of rape. Is that not the whole point of her actions as a lawyer for the young men?

248

I actually thought Hanna’s response was intriguing and there is that Canadian study…at minimum it is one of several reasons why some women might level a charge that is simply not sustainable. There has been some huge governmental over-stepping and unfortunately the kids are caught in the middle that’s my biggest beef. The second being that I’m not in favor of a punitive system of any sort in any environment where one person is presumed guilty from the get-go in the absence of incontrovertible evidence. That is what I tell my boys, my husband and anyone who is interested. That is my political and emotional position.

249

I think part of the dynamic here is that there is a wide swath of non-uncommon human experience which under current standards one person could define as an assault, and another as a mistake, based on personal factors. One could interpret the data about women who were assaulted in high school being more likely to be assaulted in college as indicating that they were especially vulnerable to assault, or that their prior experience made them less able to object years later because of PTSD. Or it could mean that a woman who had processed a prior marginal situation as an assault in which she was the victim is much more likely to process the next marginal situation as an assault, compared to a classmate who had previously processed the same general situation as something other than an assault and herself as something other than a victim, or who faced that situation for the first time with no personal precedent.

My memory of collegiate sex is that there was always a high risk of ambivalence, insecurity, and disappointment on both sides (or even, in some cases, all sides). It was easy to feel threatened; it was easy to be wrongfooted. It was easy to drink to get yourself to do things you knew you might not do if you didn’t drink. Expectations – about the sex itself, and about the relationships in which sex took place – were often unrealistic. Especially in the early college years, people didn’t really know themselves, and they didn’t really know each other, either. Everything was trial and error, and error was a pretty common outcome. This isn’t the kind of thing I discuss in granular detail with my kids, but I don’t think their entry into adulthood was all that different from their parents’.

As I have said a number of times already, I don’t think all that much has changed. Every Saturday night on every campus there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of sexual encounters, some aspect of which doesn’t go well. There aren’t dozens, hundreds, thousands of sexual assault complaints getting generated by that. Like their parents and grandparents, I think the vast majority of students think “Well, I learned something about myself and that other person there. I’ll handle things better next time.” Both (all) participants. They don’t think it’s necessary or appropriate to call on college administrators to referee their sex lives. But every once in a while, someone does, and it’s happening enough that the colleges are becoming sex referees.

(I do not at all mean to be complaining about disciplining conduct that all of us would agree is deeply anti-social: Use of physical force, threats, intimidation, putting drugs in people’s drinks, deliberately incapacitating people to exploit them, deliberately exploiting people who are clearly incapacitated, harassing. stalking. Conduct to which no reasonable person besides an S&M enthusiast would consent – that’s not what I am calling “marginal.”)

250

Those are possible reasons why a charge is not sustainable, momofthreeboys, #247–but a major reason why a charge would not be sustainable is that–while the charge is true–there is no objective evidence: the woman is insistent, but the man is firm in denial. Even under the comparatively weak “preponderance of the evidence” standard, there’s probably not enough to sustain a charge.

251

“Consolation, I have to bear in mind that Hanna is a lawyer who defends young men who have been accused of rape. Her theory has the effect of discounting PTSD in the victim as an indicator of anything, with regard to a specific encounter. I’m not twisting it into an excuse for rapists–not at all–it is just hard to deny that Hanna’s scenario, if true, raises doubts about an allegation of rape. Is that not the whole point of her actions as a lawyer for the young men?”

Hanna is a lawyer by training / trade, but her role right now is college admissions consultant. AFAIK, she is not defending them in courts of law (either civil or criminal).

252

In the Sterrett case, IIRC the woman asked Sterrett for a condom and he went and got one. That seems to me a type of consent to sexual intercourse. We aren’t talking about a sexual assault in which a victim pleads with an assailant to use a condom.

253

In fairness, Sterrett is the most extreme case I’ve read about, by a considerable margin, and he’s pretty much won a complete victory, albeit after years of effort and at a lot of personal cost. That’s the case where the complainant was credibly the initiator of sex, and she seems not to have withdrawn consent until four months later when her mother read her diary. It’s not exactly typical or representative of decisions being made day-to-day on campuses across the country.

254

Fair enough.

255

I don’t know any details of the Sterrett case, and have no comment on it. However, if a woman, in attempting to protect herself, persuades her rapist to use a condom, that in itself is not consent and doesn’t turn a rape into a non-rape.

In California during the AIDS crisis, there was a famous case where a rapist was acquitted on appeal because his victim managed to persuade him to use a condom. I don’t remember the exact details, but it was something like the guy, a stranger, breaking into her house in the middle of the night and raping her at knife point in front of her toddler. The guy was freed on appeal, because she’d managed to get him to use a condom so she wouldn’t get AIDS.

There was an outcry, and in response, the law in California was changed. Now, in California, condom use is specifically not evidence for consent in a rape case:

256

“she seems not to have withdrawn consent until four months later when her mother read her diary.”

Seriously?? How can ANYONE entertain that someone has the ability to “withdraw consent” four months AFTER the event. Ok, even if it’s an “extreme case” it’s beyond reason that college administrators would ever act on such belated “withdrawn consent.” I find these “extreme cases” very instructive because they illustrate just how skewed and irrational the response to Title IX can get.

257

In the Sterrett case, she was not asking him to use a condom in the sense of “oh, dear god, if you’re going to rape me, at least please use a condom so I don’t get an STD or get pregnant.” She proactively asked him if he had a condom on hand presumably for their mutual use as she gave pretty clear signals that she was interested in engaging in sexual activity with him.

258

I’m glad you said that, JHS, because we need to be wary of judging a policy by the worst cases. After all, I’d have no trouble finding bad cases of schools and communities protecting students who were subsequently convicted of brutal rapes. That’s why I was hoping we could hear, from someone with inside knowledge, what the typical cases of expulsion look like.

Yale seems to expel one or two undergrads a year for sexual assault. That doesn’t seem to me to be a ridiculously high number. Rapists exist.

We cannot then conclude that the complaints are without merit. There are thousands of encounters where something doesn’t go well but where there was no assault, and so no complaint should be generated. And then there are a few encounters where there was assault, and where a credible complaint might be generated. That most bad sex doesn’t involve assault tells me nothing about whether a particular case of bad sex was assault. The vast majority of domestic arguments don’t involve assault either, but that doesn’t inform me about a particular case where a complaint of domestic violence was lodged.

259

I am not concluding that every complaint is without merit, not by a long shot. But my response to some of the complaints I read about – and granted, these become news because they elicit this sort of response – is that this sounds like it falls into the realm of bad sex, not what most people think of as rape, or even “sexual assault.” For what it’s worth, that’s also the response of my twenty-something, thoroughly feminist daughter (who is also thoroughly educated in feminist theory).

And the Yale guidelines absolutely support that. Their clumsy proposals for regulating intimate behavior would seem like a comedy sketch if they didn’t have serious penalties attached. It’s not surprising if the actual work of the Yale committee doesn’t necessarily jibe with the guidelines.

260

Which of their expulsion-worthy examples do you object to? Ryo and Casey, where Casey says to stop but Ryo doesn’t stop? Devin and Ansley, where Ansley tells Devin to slow down, inches backward, never cooperates, yet Devin does not stop? (And that’s not a definite expulsion, like the other expulsion examples.) Certainly not Tyler and Jordan-- Jordan is extremely drunk, never indicates any consent, and tries to go to sleep yet Tyler has intercourse with Jordan. And obviously not Cameron forcing Jamie to have sex.