I had to look up whether she was found guilty because I couldn’t remember… Not.
Why aren’t men more worried about potential copy cats?
of course, I remembered:
Margaret Atwood — ‘Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.’
Men don’t generally live in fear of physical violence from women.
What then happens if an accusation of rape comes up, and the third party judging the case cannot determine who is right when it is one person’s word versus the other person’s word, with no other evidence? Must the person judging the case guess which one to expel (without much confidence of choosing correctly), since either the accused is guilty of rape, or the accuser made a false accusation of rape?
To me, it makes a huge difference. It’s the difference between anyone being allowed to start doing sexual things to me without my permission, and nobody being able to start doing sexual things to me without my permission.
Momofthreeboys is going to pop up that sex isn’t something that a guy “does” to a woman, but I respond that unwanted, unsought overtures are exactly something one person “does” to another unwilling person.
@ucbalumnus I was careful to include the word “verifiably.”
If it can be proved to the tribunal that the accuser intentionally made a false accusation, then the accuser should be expelled.
For example, if text messages, voicemail, hand-written notes, testimony of roommates, etc. show that the accuser falsely claimed rape (due to revenge or morning-after regret), then the accuser should be expelled. Do you have a problem with that?
My post (#508) was in response to the claim that it is not worth expending “resources” to reduce false rape accusations. My point is that colleges could easily hold the accuser, as well as the accused, accountable. They do not do that now.
@“Cardinal Fang”, like I said maybe. I am just going by my own experience. But if “yes” can be communicated “by word or action” in your phrase, I don’t see how it makes a difference. If you are talking about solely verbal consent, then you have the obvious problems of when and how often does it need to be obtained? And as I mentioned before, all the same problems remain in withdrawal of consent, and for that matter impaired consent cases. Personally, I think “yes means yes” is political noise.
@whatisyourquest, I believe that a significant majority of the cases reported by the surveys, and presumably dealt with on campus, involve the question of impaired consent. Not sure how your idea works in those cases. Even leaving those aside, you have issues involving PTSD, threatening behavior, etc where it may appear the woman initially consented. False accusations are a hard thing to prove with any degree of confidence, much like sexual assault. We shouldn’t be randomly throwing women off campus any more than we should be doing it to men
I agree that no one (male or female) should be randomly thrown off campus. But if it is proven that the rape accusation was false, then the accuser should be expelled. For example, “Jackie” in the Rolling Stone article should have been identified and expelled. The UVa fraternity was able to show that her rape accusation was unequivocally false.
“I agree that no one (male or female) should be randomly thrown off campus. But if it is proven that the rape accusation was false, then the accuser should be expelled. For example, “Jackie” in the Rolling Stone article should have been expelled. The UVa fraternity was able to show that her rape accusation was unequivocally false.”
Since she was at UVA, Jackie could have been expelled under the UVA Honor Code for lying. That could happen at a lot of other schools too.
But, as always, the lack of proof renders most such cases moot.
You rarely have solid proof of lying. Just as you rarely have solid proof of consent/non-consent.
Stark – There’s multiple studies that show that the risk of assault for HS women, college women, and non-college 18-24 women are comparable.
Could you share any studies (even just one) that compares those groups apples-to-apples and shows that college women are at higher risk? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that said that.
We’ve heard of some cases of provable false accusations. al2simon talked about a case where a woman (and IIRC, her new boyfriend) had maliciously accused the old boyfriend. Accusers like that, if discovered, should be expelled forthwith.
Colleges can’t expel accusers who make accusations of behavior that is not deemed to be assault, or who make accusations whose truth can’t be verified. And that’s most accusations, I think.
On the other side of the coin, I suggested to my daughter that she not drink (we have a lot of alcoholics on our family tree, and I didn’t drink in college. And that if she did want to engage in a sexual relationship, she be abundantly clear in her assent, and be even more clear if she was declining. (I would add that it would be good if more boys wouldn’t be such colossal assholes when they are turned down - she’s had a guy stalk her and send her little nastygrams, but I think that is much more common online than it is in person).
Re northwesty’s #527: The article “Incapacitated and Forcible Rape of College Women: Prevalence Across the First Year,” by K. B. Carey, S. E. Durney, R. L. Shepardson, and M. P. Carey, Journal of Adolescent Health, 56, 678 (2015) includes the statement below:
“Annual incidence of rape among college women has been estimated at 5%, five times higher than the rate observed among noncollege women [1].”
Reference 1 is to the article “Drug-facilitated, incapacitated, and forcible rape: A national study,” by D. G. Kilpatrick, H. S. Resnick, K. J. Ruggierio, et al., Charleston, SC: Medical University of South Carolina: 2007.
I am not sure whether I can access the original report from South Carolina, however. H. Resnick is a co-author of a report in J. Am. Coll. Health, 58, 453-460 (2010), which I might be able to access. It may carry forward some of the data from the 2007 study.
@Irishmomof2 That’s an ugly bit I’d long forgotten - retaliation for spurned advances. There was a guy on a foreign program I was on who lit papers on fire outside a girl’s door to demonstrate his feelings about the No! While Yes Means Yes is in fashion, a little refresher for guys on No Means No wouldn’t hurt in this context.
Another thought that I’ve had about this thread is there has to be huge numbers of young men at college who receive no guidance from a parent regarding sexual boundaries and the changing legal landscape. Some families are dysfunctional, some pious, some stoic, some workaholic, some …The current curriculum in California HS health classes seems to cover a lot of ground on many things regarding sexual health. I wonder if those kinds of educational efforts haven’t resulted in better outcomes for California students. As I’ve noted before - comparative data would be informative. Kudos to Canada for trying their alternate method and showing results.
I cannot imagine which of my posts you think you are responding to with this.
But actually, I disagree with this to SOME degree. Sure, SOME rapes have literally nothing to do with attraction and are all about power. But others do. The rapist is sexually attracted to the victim and pursues that desire by whatever means: physical force, alcohol, drugs, etc. No doubt, the power trip associated with the act is part of the pleasure for the rapist, but I think that the “it’s only about power” truism applied so absolutely is something that is intended to make the victims feel better and to counteract the idea that the victim may have in some way have incited the rape. As we know, that used to be the first line of defense for rapists. “She was asking for it.” Blech.
As the parent of a son, I answered the question. No one commented on it, that I can recall. Apparently people don’t WANT to talk about it, beyond saying offensive things like “teach your son not to rape.”
I say, teach ALL of our children to respect the worth and dignity of every human being. REALLY, not just mouthing it. That should take care of it.
@QuantMech - I have a copy of the Kilpatrick et al. report (see Exhibits 6 and 7). You have to be careful when interpreting the above statement from the Carey et al. article. They are comparing statistics from a sample of college women (generally ages 18-23) to those from a sample weighted to mimic the general population of all US adult women ages 18-86. This compares a group with an average age of 20 to one with an average age of about 50, and it’s well known that the annual risk of rape for women declines substantially after age 30. I’m sure northwesty is talking about women in similar age cohorts. Kilpatrick et al have the data to compare similar age cohorts but they did not. (BTW - I don’t have links to statistics that I consider semi-reliable handy, but I suspect northwesty is not too far off in either direction).
I’m not terribly impressed with the quality of the Kilpatrick et al. report. But if anyone is curious, here are a few things they write in their report -
More than half of all rape victims experience their first rape before age 18. In the general population sample, for 22% of women the age at first rape was younger than 12; for 28% of the women it was 12-17. In the college women sample, for 12% of women the age at first rape was younger than 12 and for 35% of the women it was 12-17.
Regarding whether or not these surveys are overusing the term “rape”: They asked the women how they themselves classified the incident. In the college women sample, 22% of the women considered the incident “unpleasant but not a crime” (I suspect these are what I call “drunk sex” or possibly involve their regular partner). Only 39% of the women considered the incident “rape”. The remainder considered it “a crime but not rape” (whatever that means).
When alcohol or drugs are involved, overwhelmingly it’s just alcohol. When drugs are involved, overwhelmingly the drug is marijuana. “Date rape” drugs don’t seem to be widely reported in the sample.
The lifetime prevalence of forcible rape among US adult women has risen by almost 30% from 1991-2005.
Lastly, I think the 5% per year incidence of rape among college women is on the high side of survey results that aren’t contaminated with selection bias problems. I think 2%-3% per year is a more typical range … that’s (roughly) 7% to 12% of women over a 4-5 year college career !
This assumes that every woman who is raped during a particular year of college is not raped during any other year. That’s not necessarily valid.
I very crudely adjusted for that. That is one reason it is 12% and not 15% = 3% / year * 5.years (I think it’s fair to say that a certain fraction of the women are at higher risk than the remainder.)
Anyway, I don’t think we know these numbers well enough to do anything other than make rough estimates. The only point I wanted to make was that 2%-3% per year is still alarmingly high.
Actually, that seems to assume that some women are victims more than once. Otherwise the range would be 8%-15%. [EDIT: Cross posted with al2simon, obviously.]
I have a really hard time believing that the 30% increase in lifetime prevalence of forcible rate from 1991-2005 isn’t a combination of increased consciousness about what constitutes a forcible rape (i.e., it doesn’t have to be a man you don’t know who has a knife, it could be what was formerly considered a nice boy who got too excited, or even a husband) and vastly increased percentage of living women who were in their most exposed rape years during post Sexual Revolution years. Not that women born before 1940 were never raped, but I speculate that women born after that date confronted a lot more situations where acquaintance rape was a possibility. And in 2005, they would have been a larger percentage of the total population of women over 15 than in 1991.
I agree with your thoughts JHS. We know that laws have changed and many states have added degrees of criminal sexual assault - those two occurrences would increase the number of cases because more incidents would “qualify” for criminal prosecution. Add to that the expansion of the use of the word “rape” and that makes your suppositions more valid.
Several of us “older” women have more than once expressed that we were involved in incidences that we did not consider criminal, but that colleges/universities have “deemed” punishable those messages would, over time, sway a young women to believe someone was bad enough that it deserved punishment. The tipping point in my mind is whether is is right and just for colleges and universities to be judging and punishing behavior and setting those boundaries. Seems to me that if change is required it should happen at a greater societal level and the focus should be on that…that the minority of kids in college.
@hanna "“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"
This is the first thing I have heard you say on this topic that I don’t agree with.
I don’t have enough information to tell whether she participated in sex and thereby implied consent, or not. I also don’t know how drunk she was to assess whether she had the capacity for consent.
For the people who argue that being conscious is equal to capacity to consent, you need to think that through carefully. For example, if a boy is very drunk (say 0.32% blood alcohol, which is 4x the legal limit) and he asks a girl if she will walk him home. She tells him that she will, if he agrees to pay her 10% of all of his future earnings. She pulls out a contract to that effect. In his drunken stupor, he happily signs it, and she walks him home.
According to your argument, this service agreement is valid because there is no such thing as being too drunk to sign/consent to something as long as you are still conscious. Do you think that a good idea?