“When guys are horny, they think with their ****s.”
Wow, way to stereotype half of the world! And, based on past comments, it appears that you are a woman, so not only do you make absurd blanket statements like that, you profess to know what it’s like to be a man. Astonishing.
Re #459 and date rape
A subset of date rape is committed be sexual predators. A common method in college environments is to get the victim very drunk, possibly with additional drugs (often called date rape drugs) put in her drinks when she is not looking. This is obviously different from the unclear consent cases that seem to be more common (and provide a smokescreen for the predators to rape).
Obviously, it would benefit everyone if the serial date rapists were arrested and prosecuted under the law.
@ucbalumnus it seems that universities are categorizing miscommunication and date rape in the same boat. This is why I am calling them date rape cases. Even though they clearly may not be.
HarvestMoon: If you are still reading along (and I hope you are) of course I’m wondering what you think about JHS bringing up Erica Cristoskos’s letter since you and I discussed it some on the other thread. Where should we draw the line on subversive behaviors? Who decides? I am voting for protecting potential victims but also protecting those who may, in some circumstances, make victims of others. I would like to protect these accidental rapists from themselves. I think maybe we have failed them.
adding: I am not suggesting it is possible to have enough tribunals, or police, or courts to make people behave correctly. Ultimately, I think education is the only way. fwiw
This is emphatically not true.
I think it would be helpful to be honest about things men and women could do to prevent criminal or harmful behavior. I’ve seen some things posted on this thread that are straight-out hateful by people who I know are the farthest thing from hateful. Maybe everyone needs to consider their own biases and preconceptions so we can all hear each other with respect.
My best advice to the people making decisions on these people.
It is better to punish 90% of the criminals and set free 10% of them, as compared to arresting 100% of the criminals and 10% of the innocent.
In a fair society we will have all innocent people walking around. In a communist society we wouldn’t mind having the innocent locked away for the greater good.
I fear though, that the best way is to punish fewer and let the innocent or on edge “aggressors” free.
I wouldn’t be able to sleep at nigh knowing I punished innocent men. I’d sleep much easier knowing I only punished guilty men.
…
Here’s one way to think about the problem.
Traditionally in this country, we’ve said that we’re willing to let anywhere between 10 and 100 guilty murderers go free instead of sentencing one innocent man to lifelong imprisonment. You have to make some tradeoff like this because no system is perfect … we will always punish innocent people. For example, as far as I can tell, before the days of DNA at least 10% of people convicted of rape in the criminal system were innocent. That’s with all the due process we can provide, including judging people against a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard.
So what everyone has to ask themselves is this: how many guilty college rapists are we willing to see go unpunished instead of expelling one innocent guy?
Since being sent to prison for life is much worse than being expelled from college, I’d say most people would say it’s ok for the ratio of innocent guys being expelled to guilty guys being sent free to be higher than 1 vs. 10-100.
If anyone wants my personal opinion, here it is. Suppose the accusation stems from what I call “drunk sex”, where both parties fell into bed after drinking, no force was used, the girl wasn’t deliberately plied with drinks, the woman could clearly walk a 1/8 mile under her own power, and she took off her own clothes. Then we’re mostly debating the consent standard. In that case, I’d say one false expulsion = letting 10 guilty guys go free is about right. Honestly, I’m not sure we can do better unless we just let everyone go unpunished.
I think most people would distinguish between “drunk sex” and “forcible rape” when making this tradeoff. If the circumstantial evidence points to forcible rape, then we’re probably willing to tolerate a higher rate of false expulsions (though if we have evidence that a forcible rape occurred then the chance the guy is actually guilty probably goes up too).
Every single case you read is a case that went to trial, and in every single trial the defendant is going to put on a defense. There are essentially three theories on which to fight a rape charge: Someone else did it, it didn’t happen at all, or the victim consented. Most of the time, there will be pretty strong proof to negate either of the first two, so defense counsel is stuck with trying to create a reasonable doubt about consent. So Every. Single. Rape. Trial. has stuff about consent in it. That’s not the same thing as saying the rapist actually believed it. In many cases, the rapist won’t even testify; it’s just his lawyer trying to create an issue about consent through questioning other witnesses.
By the time I got to know her – about eight calendar months and maybe 20 consciousness-years after the fact – my wife was a BWOC, a public leader of the university’s radical feminists. She was deeply involved in fighting for improvements in the university’s sexual harassment policies and procedures. She was more concerned about abuse of power than about peer-to-peer relationships, but she certainly would have expected the policies to apply to anything like systematic intimidation by a classmate. She believed that the university had a duty to restrain its faculty, administrators, and TAs from using their leverage to get sex from students, and she wanted the university to dismantle obvious barriers to full participation by women in the life of the university, but I don’t think she had any interest in paternalistic protection from peers who weren’t threatening her. She made a decision not to be a named plaintiff in a Title IX suit filed against the university. She certainly thought her ex-boyfriend’s assumption that he was entitled to sex from her had a political component that it was important to struggle against, but as far as I know it never occurred to her to try to get him expelled or suspended, or to expose her private life to administrative review. She just wasn’t ever going to talk to him again. But that hardly distinguished him from the 4,000 or so other male undergraduates at the time, few of whom she had any interest in talking to.
I don’t know what she thinks now. She’s a socialist central planner at heart, so she probably thinks it’s good that DOE is holding universities’ feet to the fire, and there should be a convenient remedy for women who want/need it. She would probably have a zero-tolerance policy for fraternities – a fraternity party would pretty much be her idea of hell on Earth.
“Suppose the accusation stems from what I call “drunk sex”, where both parties fell into bed after drinking, no force was used, the girl wasn’t deliberately plied with drinks, the woman could clearly walk a 1/8 mile under her own power, and she took off her own clothes.”
I’m dating myself, but I don’t view this as sexual assault at all – in either direction. I think walking, talking, undressing adults can make their own decisions, even if they are drunk. Intoxicated and incapacitated are not the same thing to me or to the law. I think it’s a strategic mistake in the fight against sexual assault that we have begun calling this rape. I sure don’t think that young women who’ve been having fun with this kind of behavior benefit from being told they are rape victims. So I don’t think we ought to tolerate any number of expulsions on these facts. I don’t see why anyone deserves punishment for this. But no one is asking me.
We have to tell our kids to expect these encounters to be treated as rape. But I don’t lie to mine and tell them that I agree with the current rules.
Excellent post @hanna. We do no one any favors by defining rape downwards to situations we have all been involved in at one time or another.
My personal opinion is that there is a great deal of tension between telling young women that they can behave as they choose, unbounded by what some think of as outdated societal norms and a system which removes responsibility for the actions taken by these young people. At some point everyone, male and female, should be held accountable for their own behavior.
I’m all for promoting responsibility, @Ohiodad51, but I’m not sure what sort of possibly outdated societal norms you mean here.
That you are responsible for your own well being. That drinking to excess is not a good idea. That being involved with someone who you do not know well is not likely to lead to positive social and sexual experiences. That decisions you make have consequences.
Just stuff like that.
Thank you, @Ohiodad51.
In forcible rape cases, the evidence quantity and quality may be better than the unclear consent cases, so there is probably a lower chance of getting the “incorrect” verdict. The same may be for serial sexual predators, if multiple victims report and point to the same suspect, or evidence of date rape drugs is found with a single victim who reports.
I doubt anyone considers “roofied sex” as what al2simon called “drunk sex.” Sex under the influence of drugs not consumed voluntarily is forcible sex. Or something worse.
Probably most cases of what we’d all call forcible rape- she said no and struggled- don’t produce good forensic evidence.
“Suppose the accusation stems from what I call “drunk sex”, where both parties fell into bed after drinking, no force was used, the girl wasn’t deliberately plied with drinks, the woman could clearly walk a 1/8 mile under her own power, and she took off her own clothes.”
We need to separate those cases into
… they had enthusiastic sex and the next morning she decided she had been too drunk to consent
versus
… they started off enthusiastically, but then she clearly indicated her desire to stop (because she saw the whips, or he opened up the gerbil cage, or she needed to shampoo her hair, or any other reason at all) and he didn’t stop.
Ohiodad, are you really going to give the guy in the second case a pass when the kid in the adjoining room said he saw the two people go into the room all over each other, but then ten minutes later he heard her yelling NO, NO, and a fifteen minutes after that she left his room and went straight to the RA to report him?
Probably depends on what took her 15 minutes to leave the room I would think. Clearly someone heard her say no…after that it will depend on what happened.
“but then ten minutes later he heard her yelling NO, NO, and a fifteen minutes after that she left his room and went straight to the RA to report him?”
That’s an easy open/shut case. Because there’s pretty good PROOF of non-consent.
But if there’s not any good PROOF of non-consent, then all your hypotheticals turn out the same. It is pointless to keep posing and discussing them. Nothing happens (or should happen) because nothing can be proven. Regardless of the actual facts. Regardless of the procedures used by the court or school tribunal.
The more typical case, however, is where the girl (due to fear, intoxication, freezing up, etc.) does not so demonstrably indicate non-consent. In those cases, the rapes and the regret sex and the drunk sex and the consensual sex all look exactly the same. So they (unfortunately but rightly) all get treated the same.
OhioDad is right. His hypo is one where (i) there’s proof that things started off consensually and (ii) there’s no reasonable proof that things later turned non-consensual. At best, what happens later is disputed or ambiguous. So that’s also easy open/shut as well.
If you want this situation to change, you have to effectively teach girls how to loudly resist. Speak up girls!!! That creates proof and (even better) often ends the assault in its tracks. At least one study shows that training can be done fairly easily.
Teaching boys to not go there is a fine idea. But where’s the data that that works?