What do you tell your sons about consent?

Parent Cafe
421

“By the way - I seem to remember another related fact that should disturb all the parents here greatly… It depends on exactly how you model things, but with some more or less reasonable assumptions it turns out that according to these surveys the odds of a girl being sexually assaulted while in the last two years of high school (and presumably being under much closer parental supervision) are about the same as while she’s in college. Again, this is just what I recall, so I might be wrong.”

Al – you are right about this. A lot of the data (rightly or wrongly) shows really high incidence rates during the high school years. Yet we hear no uproar about an epidemic of HS rape when the girls are under the care of the parents. Then there’s also the data that shows that the assault rates for non-college student women of college age are higher than for college women.

Those two data points raise an awful lot of questions about this whole issue. If we really have three epidemics going, why do we only care and do something about one…

422

Yes, two very disturbing things.

In the survey, 28% of women reported experience with attempted or completed rape before they began college, and only about 9% of women experienced such things for the first time the first year after they began college. Half of the women experiencing a completed or attempted rape in the year after they began college had already undergone that experience before college. That’s plenty disturbing.

There’s another side to the coin, too. If 37% of women at the start of their second year of college have experienced an attempted or completed rape, at least half of them multiple times (and probably a much higher percentage than that; half is the minimum that could possibly be consistent with the results), how many men are responsible? What percentage of men – of a subset of men, the men who have been involved with college women – have to be excluded from college in order to rid college of people willing to attempt and complete rapes?

None of us parents here has said, “I know my son is skating on thin ice, is probably committing rapes.” We all are saying, “My son is great, he wouldn’t do those things.” I say that, too. But someone’s son is on the other end of each of those reported rapes, and it can’t possibly be just a handful of predators – the numbers are too big. I submit that if we believe these numbers, we believe there’s a strong risk that our sons are responsible for them. (Yes, there are same-sex rapes, too, and the survey accommodates that, and the numbers are included in the figures, but that’s not the epidemic being reported.)

I tend to be a little skeptical of these numbers for the reasons outlined above – they don’t quite make sense to me – but that’s only quibbling around the edges, comparatively. Eleven percent of women in the study reported having experienced completed forcible rape, half of them before college began – that’s pretty unambiguous. Fifteen percent had experienced completed incapacitated rape, about 30% of them before college. It takes a lot of boys to produce numbers like that. (I wonder what the boys say when they are surveyed about that? What percentage would say they had raped someone by force or threats, or taking advantage of her incapacity?)

423

Lately there have been a lot of different surveys released about college women and rape. They all have different numbers, which are difficult to compare because they all seem to measure slightly different things, but they’re all getting numbers higher than 10% for the number of women who’ve been raped by the end of their college career.

Even if you don’t believe they were actually raped, they believe they were raped. They believe some of our sons raped them.

Allegedly, [this study](Testing a mediational model of sexually aggressive behavior in nonincarcerated perpetrators - PubMed) found that 8% of the college men they surveyed admitted to actions that constitute forcible rape. (I say allegedly because other papers repeatedly cite that paper, but I can’t read the whole paper and the abstract is no help.) And [a lot of guys](http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/vio.2014.0022?journalCode=vio) think that forcing a woman to have sex with you when she doesn’t want it is not the same as rape.

424

One wonders what they think IS rape, then. 8-|

425

One does wonder that. You’ve got to figure that if one of those guys was forced to have sex with some guy they didn’t want to have sex with, they’d think it was rape.

426

This is pretty much what I told my boys. I also told them that if a woman wants to keep a baby that’s their prerogative, and they will be parents for life. Which is another reason for being in a committed relationship and for both parties to be taking care of birth control.

427

Thanks for the links–it will take me a while to go through the one paper which seems to be 100+ pages.

428

In the customer services industry you have customer satisfaction surveys where you can’t necessarily get more detailed information than what was jotted on the survey. It is the job of the VP of Cust Sat to bring good scores up and bad scores down. I think these academic surveys are interesting and another thing to spark outrage (like many things in America - govern by outrage.) But they would hold more value to the outcome of reducing sexual assault if you put someone in charge of seeing the numbers go down for a specific institution. IMO

429

"I also told them that if a woman wants to keep a baby that’s their prerogative, and they will be parents for life. "

YES. Frankly I put the fear of God in my kids on that one. Son, you get her pregnant, she holds the deciding vote and you’re on the hook to man up and do the right thing if she keeps it. That’s far more of a real fear than having him be falsely accused of rape.

Interesting that none of these cases even result in unplanned pregnancies, as even the most diligent use of bc can fail. And presumably that’s the girl using it, since a guy who is interested in rape likely doesn’t wish to use a condom and ruin his fun.

430

How would we ever know this?

431

I always tell my son that “if you make a baby, you raise a baby” and I’m not kidding. My son will not be a deadbeat dad.

432

I stopped believing in the handful of predators theory many threads back, if we are going to use a definition of rape that includes acquaintance rape, and I think most of us here are using that definition. Over and over on these threads we get to the point we have to acknowledge some of our sons are rapists unless we aren’t going to believe in acquaintance rape. If we believe, we better deal with it somehow.

JHS: Do you have a suggestion or plan for this?

Cultural norms may not have kept up with legal definitions. Last year or the year before, on one of these threads, a mom posted that, in the context of an on-going relationship, someone pinning you down to finish was not out of the norm behavior. It was to be expected and not a big deal. (Or at least that was what I understood her to be writing and I’m pretty sure at least a few others were of my mind) Here we have a discussion about whether women can justifiably say “stop” in the middle of an act or whether they should only be having sex with men with whom they are prepared to complete the act, so that saying “stop” shouldn’t be necessary.

I agree, these days and after all these many threads, with saying, “only have sex in a committed relationship with someone you trust” but that doesn’t take into account many of us, especially when we are young, sometimes trust the wrong people. We need to allow for the possibility someone doesn’t choose wisely and needs to say “stop” and get out of the situation. imho. I’m sorry to still be harping on this point, but it seems really extremely important to me when we discuss what we are teaching our kids about gender role expectations and that it may contribute to some of these statistics we are seeing and not able to believe. I could tie it back to the bad boy fraternity party discussion but will spare you that.

433

I don’t much care what the assault numbers are, except as a baseline to try to improve upon. Everyone who’s ever looked at the question agrees that the number of assaults on young women in all walks of life is far too high. “Too many” is as fine a point as I care to put on it.

434

Alright, I am going to weigh in here because I saw this thread and have kept up with it.

I was accused of rape my junior year in high school. I was dating a girl and it had been 6 months, we were both 17.

It was her birthday and we went to get breakfast and then ended up at her house alone.

She told me she wasn’t comfortable doing anything beyond what we had done, so we kissed and were on her bed. We didn’t even take our clothes off and she was on top of me.

There was nothing else after that, then she was very distant and ended up cheating on me and then telling everyone I tried to rape her and that I pushed her against her bed and unzipped my pants.

She cheated on me and wanted our mutual friends to side with her instead of me, in the breakup.

I went through hell, I was harassed for 6 months until we got a lawyer involved and threatened suit. She eventually came out and told the truth. Not before I was already ruined at school and labeled a rapist.

Having experienced this from a seemingly normal girl who I loved and trusted.

To all of those who think we need to teach guys not to rape, even when we listen… we get labeled as rapists.

Please look at my story and understand there is a huge risk, even if you trust them.

I loved this girl, and she forced me to switch schools and caused more harm than to my mental and emotional health than the physical assault I was subjected to from the boys at my school.

Even in the most sober state and one where I listened and was a perfect gentlemen, was I labeled as a rapist and viciously accused.

EDIT: We need to educate girls about the consequences and how a rape claim can ruin someones life. Then only the real cases will come out. NOT THE ONES THAT ARE JUST REGRET.

@Hanna Have you ever had a claim like this in your profession?

435

I could never see my son as a violent rapist. He’s just not a violent guy. HOWEVER, I could 100% see him as the guy who misread cues or created ill will by not being as sensitive as he could (should?) be in a particular situation. Which is why I believe in regular, detailed communication. He can’t know what he’s never been told, and unless told he will never see any situation from the perspective of a woman.

436

Here’s a suggestion: the kind of parent who chooses to think about this in detail and participate in these discussions is the kind of parent who is likely to raise their sons and daughters to be thinking, sensitive individuals whose default position is to respect others. And themselves.

437

@Consolation I agree, but I was raised by a great single mom. I am extremely well mannered, I am very respectful and polite.

I am a poster child for the scholar athlete, straight a’s, 4 year varsity letterman with starting position, and very well liked by classmates and teachers.

My high school life was ruined, even though I had done everything right.

438

I hope so, Consolation. We try very, very hard in my household. In a funny sort of way, the fact that I’m so short and my son has become so tall has been a remarkable way for him to become sensitive to someone whose situation is different from his and to be aware that a small woman could easily be pushed around by a larger man if he were so inclined. One of the things that tickled me most was the first time we were in a parking lot and he walked me to the middle of the row and put himself between me and the cars backing out. He said that people in SUVs would never see me so he needed to be in their rear view mirrors so I wouldn’t get hit. Small thing, but I do think that observing others and noting possible dangers to them that aren’t so for you, are good things for anyone to learn as they grow into adulthood.

439

@ToBeHonestt Did you consider a defamation of character suit? Until women giving false accusations are held accountable, they will feel empowered to make things up to suit their objectives.

An example: even after Mattress Girl’s story unraveled, she was allowed to graduate from Columbia and to haul her mattress on stage, no less. She even attended the State of the Union speech, as Sen. Gillebrand’s guest. It seems that, if the story fits the narrative, the facts don’t really matter, except in a court of law.

440

@whatisyourquest Yes, but she came clean before we went to trail. However the feminist side of my school refuse to acknowledge that and claimed I was using fear tactics to get a confession.

Once a claim like that is made, it cannot be retracted. Even when you are proven innocent and the truth comes out, you are still labeled and it sticks…

Edit: We didn’t end up going to court because it wasn’t worth the effort. We didn’t want to go to court we just wanted an apology and the truth which did come out.

Going after her in court would just have dragged out the suffering and made me look worse in the eye of the student body…

Ultimately not worth it.