northwesty, students should not be expelled from college without proof that they committed the offense they were thrown out for. But we need to distinguish the description of the offense from the considerations of how it might be proved.
If a person revokes consent, and the other person doesn’t stop, that is sexual assault. This kind of sexual assault will often be hard to prove.
If a person never consents and the other person forces them, that is sexual assault. This kind of sexual assault is also hard to prove, but that doesn’t mean we stop believing that ignoring revoked consent is sexual assault, and it doesn’t mean we should allow students we know committed sexual assault to remain in college.
If a student accuses another student of sexual assault, and brings enough evidence to substantiate the accusation, the accused student should be punished. If a student accuses another student, but there isn’t enough evidence, then the student should not be punished. That goes for revoked consent as well as consent that was never given.
@“Cardinal Fang”, I don’t think I have seen anyone on any of these threads ever argue that it was acceptable behavior to continue intimate contact after your partner clearly indicated (verbally or otherwise) that she is no longer consenting to the act. I certainly have never said or suggested that such behavior was acceptable, and I am not sure what part of my last few posts would give you that idea?
The devil, of course, is in the details. In the real world, we have all been in situations where, to be crass, no means maybe or not yet rather than stop. Most of us learn to distinguish between the different scenarios based on circumstance, non verbal cues and experience. I would venture to guess that most of us, male and female, gain this experience through a series of encounters and partners, not all of whom were either healthy or pleasurable. The cost of gaining that experience in the real world is not likely to lead to sanction, because of the beyond a reasonable doubt standard and, equally importantly, the fact that people making decisions in the criminal system are vetted to be unbiased. So it is very unlikely that a boorish nineteen year old who needs to be told no two or three times before stopping is going to be arrested. The same is demonstrably not true in campus tribunals.
I want the college to say unambiguously that a person is allowed to revoke consent, that’s all. I want them to say it’s an offense if a partner ignores revoked consent, and if the college has proof that one person revoked consent and the partner didn’t stop promptly, the partner will face sanctions. I want them to say it’s not just “unacceptable,” but it’s also a suspension/expulsion level offense.
I agree that it will often be difficult to prove that A revoked consent and B didn’t stop, but (1) it won’t always be difficult and (2) the college needs to set standards that it expects students to abide by, and “don’t commit sexual assault in the first degree” sounds like a good standard to me.
I have no idea whether hanna’s client’s accuser was telling the truth. But IF she was telling the truth that hanna’s client ignored her pleas for him to stop, then hanna’s client deserved the expulsion. Guys don’t get to practice sex by assaulting women until they learn that No means No. They were supposed to know that already.
And women should know that if they truly do not want to engage in a particular activity, it is primarily their responsibility to communicate that fact clearly and unambiguously. Sauce for the goose.
As I understood hanna’s story, the accuser said she did communicate her non-consent. Her client denies it, and I have no idea what evidence the tribunal used to make their decision or whether it was a good decision, but I don’t agree that there could in principle be no evidence that was dispositive.
A few pages back, a couple of people objected when I said that men think with their ****. Turns out, the well-known psychologist Dan Ariely did an experiment comparing how men think when they’re sexually aroused vs. unaroused.
[Heat of the Moment](http://people.duke.edu/~dandan/Papers/PI/Heat_of_Moment.pdf)
They answered some questions on a scale from 0 (no) to 50 (possibly) to 100 (yes).
Would you keep trying to have sex after your date says ‘‘no.’’ Unaroused said 20, aroused 45
Would you slip a woman a drug to increase the chance that she would have sex with you? Unaroused 5, aroused 26
See? Told ya men are more inclined to morally questionable actions when horny than not. The main thing that surprises me about this study is that it was conducted.
It will always be difficult unless we want cameras and monitors in dorm rooms.
But that’s not what you said and it’s not remotely the same thing. And I would like to know the ages of the men in question. I have been with my husband since we were 16 and 17 and I would respectfully submit that the difference between a man of 19 and a man of 32 is very great in that area, as well as between a man of 25 and a man of 50. But we’re talking specifically about 19 year-olds whose brains are not even fully developed yet, and very sophisticated signaling and messaging. If the girl says “no” and gets up or ends the activity, that’s pretty clear. But if she says “no” and actively moves to continue the encounter, that’s a whole other thing, and as Ohiodad says, it takes some experience to learn the nuances. It used to be that young people could learn (because girls make mistakes, too, but generally aren’t prosecuted for them) to navigate this area and in the gray area that isn’t forcible, coerced, or drugged sex, the worst consequence would be that the other person might not want to see you again. You could learn from that and do better at reading cues next time. There is no excuse for force, coercion, drugs, or incapacitated sex, but beyond that, I don’t think anyone but the couple should be involved.
@“Cardinal Fang” is the example from @Hanna you are referencing?
or this one?
I would like to assume that you would agree that under the facts laid out in example #1, the guy should not have been disciplined by any sane finder of fact, and that the incident as recounted is neither rape nor sexual assault.
As to the second example, let’s assume that the tribunal believes the accuser. Not a wild assumption, given the preponderance standard and the fact that these tribunals are made up of people predisposed to believe accusers. Then the question becomes how much time passed between the first time she said stop and the time he actually stopped. You really want a system where a guy gets expelled because after a half an hour of “enthusiastic” participation in a sexual encounter the girl says stop and the guy continues for some brief period of time before the girl says stop again and he stops? You really believe that professors of gender studies are in the best position to micro manage sexual relations to that level of detail?
I agree 100% with you that a person is allowed to revoke consent. Honestly, I don’t know who disagrees with that. (I also agree 100% with you that men have a tendency to think with their asterisks when their asterisks are, um, engaged, and that’s an explanation but not an excuse for bad behavior.)
But the nub of where you and I disagree is in the first part of your sentence. Why should the college be addressing this particular issue unambiguously, vs. thousands of other issues affecting the lives of students that the college doesn’t address at all, much less offer an extensive set of administrative remedies? On the list of things that pose a danger to the wellbeing and education of college students in general, and women in particular – because, really, this only makes sense as an affirmative action measure to help women, notwithstanding its gender neutrality, and that’s fine with me if it’s worth doing – I can’t believe sex partners who don’t comply immediately when someone revokes consent makes the top 100, or even the top 1,000. Not that it doesn’t happen, although I think it’s probably pretty rare and pretty ephemeral when it does happen.
I understand predatory sex, using force, threat, or intoxication, as a barrier to students’ wellbeing and education. I understand that it’s valuable to police that more effectively than the actual police, and prosecutors and juries. But it doesn’t follow for me that it’s valuable to get out the stopwatch when there’s a question of revoked consent. The criminal statute label is the same, but the practical nature of the threat and what it takes to enforce the norm are different.
Ohiodad, I agree about the first scenario-- there is no offense unless there is some force we haven’t heard about or he drugged her. Uncoerced consent is consent.
As to the second scenario, what is the “brief” period of time we’re talking about? Are we talking about 2 seconds or 2 minutes? The time it would have taken for him to stop if her 6’8" father showed up with a shotgun is the length of the brief period I’d allow him. No means no.
I have repeatedly given examples of what I’d consider adequate proof: admission that he didn’t stop in a matter of second, text admissions of guilt, or someone overhearing the incident, for example. I wouldn’t accept her word over his, with no supporting evidence, on this or any other case.
@“Cardinal Fang” the boy let her go to the restroom, that shows he probably wasn’t holding her against her will, but instead didn’t hear the “no”
Why would a rapist give his victim a bathroom break? That just doesn’t make sense. Especially since that scenario seems to be a sex by force scenario.
I do not think he hear her say stop, given his following actions and how he stopped to let her go to the restroom wouldn’t make sense.
My verdict would be no available proof for expulsion.
The Ariely experiment in #486 was done on college men.
The above discussion is why I really like the affirmative assent idea. Do I think it is all that realistic in real life? no. Do I think many of us over 40 will ever get used to it? no. (though it is what happens more often than not in my personal life and always has) Do I think a college tribunal can enforce it? no. Do I think we can make it the expectation and ideal for children we are raising? yes. Even if they don’t actually ask all the time, even if it doesn’t make sense all the time, it is a different way to teach our kids than to just keep going to till someone says “no” or “stop.”
I want to add affirmative consent to the recommended list of what to tell the kids about consent, because if you can’t ask your partner if they “want to” maybe you shouldn’t be doing. Something doesn’t have to be a legal requirement for me to teach it to my kids. I want them to behave better than just avoiding breaking the law or university rules.
adding: OP is advocating Yes mean Yes
@“Cardinal Fang” If all men forgot how to think when aroused we would see rape in school classrooms. Guys get excited over literally anything, and in their sleep.
We would probably have serial sleep rapists if your preconceptions were true…
ToBeHonestt, if all I had to go on was she said she told him to stop, and he said she didn’t tell him to stop, my verdict also would be the allegation is unsupported, no expulsion.
@“Cardinal Fang” I read your study, it is too small of a sample group to have weight in an actual discussion.
Societal views dictate the non-aroused answer and personal views dictate the aroused answer. It is easy to conduct a counter experiment with more open and willing participants which I can see many of the answers being more similarly related.
I am not saying that Duke has a wrong research paper, but I am not going to give it any weight as it was too small a sample to have definitive results.
35 people do not hold weight to a population of millions.
As an initial investigation into the effect of sexual arousal on judgment and decision making,
our study inevitably suffers from serious limitations.
For example, it is important to note that we did not observe actual
behavior. It is therefore possible that the effect of sexual arousal was not to change the desirability of different
actions and activities, but to make respondents more willing to admit to their feelings. If this were the
case, however, we should expect to see a stronger effect for items that people are embarrassed about (e.g.,
finding a 12-year-old girl attractive, or being excited by animals), but the effects were fairly similar across
these types of items and those that were unlikely to draw much shame (e.g., being attracted to a 40-year-old).
There are limitations at the bottome which you choose to ignore.
Please fact check yourself before backing up a bogus argument with a experiment that did not even have the same conclusion as you.
The main conclusion of the experiment was that men are more truthful aroused than non-aroused. Non-aroused men use societal pressures and expectations while aroused men stated their mind. Neither of which changed the underlying fact that THE MAN HAD THE SAME VIEWS BEFORE AND AFTER.
Then you should have the same problems with the reported cases that the rest of us have, since we have time and again seen examples of college tribunals expelling or suspending men on far less proof than a disagreement over whether she clearly communicated her withdrawal of consent.
I have trouble with innocent people being convicted of murder, but it doesn’t convince me we should dispense with murder trials and murder convictions. I have trouble with black people being stopped for phony traffic offenses, but I still believe in traffic enforcement. I have trouble with students unjustly punished for cheating, but still think students should be expelled for egregious plagiarism. Mistakes in execution do not necessary persuade me to abandon the entire process.
@Consolation I have no ideological blinders. Me and looser were talking over each other’s heads.