I think people here are using “forcible” to mean the guy in a ski mask holding a gun. The better term for that scenario is stranger rape (less than 20% of all incidents). Stranger rapists may claim consent, but those claims will often be less plausible. Few student/campus rapes will be stranger rapes.
Acquaintance rape situations (which are the vast super-majority of incidents) will very frequently have a consent defense. Those consent claims are going to be much more plausible.
@northwesty, precisely correct. One of the problems we have in talking about this is that we do not have the language to differentiate (1)stranger with a weapon who accosts a woman from (2)angry sometime boyfriend who holds a woman down and goes farther than the woman intended from (3)drunk college kid who assumes that the girl he has just walked across campus with and whose hand is in his pants is competent to consent to sex. I think each scenario requires a different reaction, but slicing and dicing this issue in that way is not helpful to those who are running OCR at the moment.
Re: #761
There is also the situation where the rapist gets the victim more drunk than she wanted (or drugged with “date rape” drugs). It is most like scenario (1) above, although the method differs (the “weapon” is alcohol or other drugs).
I, too, think restraining orders are an option for women. An in-court, sworn under oath testimony is all that’s needed in most jurisdictions – clear and specific allegations that you have been victimized and are in danger and fearful of it continuing along with any documentation, witness information etc. and a decision will be made pretty quickly. This is NO LESS than what any accuser should be prepared to do if they are making a serious allegation against someone to a college administrator. A protective order is a much stronger legal document than anything a college might be prepared to do. I think if we can talk to our sons and daughters about the seriousness of both getting in a situation where they may be victimized or be accused along with a well prescribed path utilizing the existing criminal system we will have moved forward.
Frankly any grievance less than one that meets a clear and present danger to the accuser or the campus society or meets the test of criminality through a thorough investigation by police in my opinion can be handled by mediation and intervention and education. Who believes which story should really have a very minor part in any of this in the absence of evidence which is why the current standard being pushed by the OCR is too low. In those cases the effort should be in helping the person filing the grievance regain their emotional stability. Take Jackie, Emma and Lena…all three did alot of harm to other people through their anger and/or their emotional instability or confusion about the precipitating situation. The focus should have been on helping them work through their personal issues about whatever they perceived happened to them. Retaliation is never right, irresistible I will argue, but never right. and also covered under OCR guidelines. One person’s grievance can easily be perceived as retaliation by the other in a vacuum of no evidence supporting one side or the other. Pretty easy to cop to the you hurt me, now I’m going to hurt you in relationships. Happens all the time.
It is obvious that I am not a lawyer. I wrote “temporary restraining order.” Is that what I intend? Or did I mean “personal protection order?” Or is there some other term I probably meant?
zoosermom’s commented: “I think we have all repeated countless times that in cases of force, drugs, extreme drunkenness the perp should be handcuffed, prosecuted and punished to the full extent of the law. Which means that we all acknowledge that forcible rape happens on campuses.”
The reason that I no doubt come across as a broken record is that this does not happen. The woman can report the assault to the police, and take all the necessary steps, but in all the cases that I have known where this happened, the prosecutor declined to bring a case. So that is multiple victims in multiple states, and zero (count 'em, zero) charges filed. I don’t know whether the police even interviewed the men in the cases.
So the “leave that to the police” suggestion just rings totally hollow to me. It means that in many cases, absolutely nothing will happen. There are some egregious cases where the police are able to take action. And if the perpetrators are stupid enough to videotape the encounter, then there is objective evidence. But often there is no hard evidence of a lack of consent, and no case brought.
This is why I think that an “only yes means yes” policy is the only way to protect women on campus. I have reached the point of suggesting that a time-stamped video recording would show the woman’s consent, not needed if the man knows the woman well enough to know that he does not need a recording.
When I use the term “forcible rape,” I do not necessarily mean rape by a masked or armed stranger (though the Girton cases involved that). I just mean a case where the man overpowers the woman by physical force. I would tell my son about the strength differential. I would also tell them that there are many reasons why a woman might not knee them and then give them a karate chop to the throat, and most of them do not involve attraction on the woman’s part.
I understand the central issue of the thread. If I had only sons, my principal concern would probably be false accusations also.
But if you do not explain the circumstances that have led to college policies, your sons will probably wind up just being resentful of the “gynocentric” atmosphere on campuses.
Once again, it seems that the police and DA in your area are lazy compared to those at Cornell, Tennessee, and perhaps other places where they actually investigate, arrest, and prosecute.
Sure, but not reporting to the police guarantees nothing will happen.
Two comments, ucbalumnus: First, the cases that I am familiar with, where no charges were filed, occurred in three different states. All cases of forcible rape; no strangers; but no instances of previous encounters; so “date rape,” but more accurately “first-date rape.” (There would have been more states if I had included the women who did not report the assault to the police, but I am obviously leaving them out in my count of zero prosecutions). I do not fault the police and the prosecutors, nor consider them “lazy.” I think they just don’t have sufficient evidence to prosecute.
Second, the difference in our viewpoints is (probably) that I think the university judicial process can play a role for women in this circumstance. If a case is brought in the university setting, then something may well happen–if the accusation can be proven at the “clear and convincing level”–even though the police and/or prosecutor would take no action (and/or it’s not reported to the police).
This thread is so long that it’s worth repeating that I do not advocate the “preponderance of the evidence” standard that is essentially being required of universities. I understand the arguments in favor of it (mostly, anyway), but I don’t think they override concern about imposing sanctions on a man who is innocent, when one drops the standard of proof to “preponderance.”
Exactly.
i have to believe that if two people have gotten to a point where one presumes consent and one claims non-consent that investigators can obtain enough information leading up to the point in time where the two were alone and enough information after the incident to make a fairly calculated judgement whether something criminal occurred. We can talk ourselves blue about consent or not consent but frankly there’s a major process between meeting someone and ending up alone and whatever leads to sex . Most people are free agents and should have the capacity to say no and to extricate themselves from a given situation short of constraint or being drugged or crazy drunk. There are no laws that say if someone tries to get you to do something sexually you aren’t comfortable with that the “doer” is criminal. Adults know when to say no, stop and extricate themselves. If a person is constrained or drugged or passed out drunk that is a different matter and is covered by law in probably all states. Simply having a claim that you did this or that but you didn’t want to do this or that and you never said no but you never said yes simply isn’t criminal or saying it was just easier to go along is not prosecutable. I have trouble digesting the “fear” excuse. If you are afraid of someone or you don’t know them well enough to know what they are like you probably shouldn’t be in an intimate situation to begin with but again it is poor decision making by one or both of the involved and not criminal. Not all situations are criminal. Not all situations need to be "adjudicated’ to identify some fault. People can’t simply “blame” other people if they make a bad decision and expect to get their pound of flesh.
I’m quite confused by what young women want so I can’t imagine what males feel these days. I “get” that young women want free agency, that they want to be “equal” in their sex lives with guys and not be classified as a you know what. Been there - done that. What I don’t get is when things don’t go the way they expect in the absence of any activity that society would deem “criminal” that they feel they have been wronged. If in their minds sex that isn’t the way they want it or the foreplay isn’t to their taste and they don’t do something about it at the moment that amounts to rape, then we have alot of education to do. Don’t stick around until morning and then text a goodbye and then go stew about it for days, weeks, months. Don’t ask a guy if he has a condom if you have no intention of following through. If you think you are being criminally assaulted say a firm no, yell, scream if you have to and at a minimum GET OUT OF THERE and TELL someone. If you are both drunk off your butts and neither is thinking straight, then lesson learned. Drunk people do lots of stupid things including things that can kill them. If you aren’t drunk, stay away from people that are and that goes for the guys and the gals. I have to believe that most prosecutors are pretty clear about what constitutes illegal activity and what does not. It’s their job.
When I write that the “Patented Tortoise of Fury Move” is not a thing, I mean that a woman cannot get away from a man who is overpowering her. If only it were possible to GET OUT OF THERE!
To repeat: One woman that I know had military training in hand-to-hand combat, and it was not enough to extricate herself.
“Also”???
I’m a woman. You think that I’m not concerned about women being assaulted, that I only care about false accusation, just because I have a son and not a daughter?
This reveals a huge, fundamental gap in understanding, an assumption that seems to distort every single one of these conversations.
I am uncomfortable with the way the term “forcible rape” is being used in some posts. All rapes are forcible unless they are statutory.
I’m sending my son the link to this discussion to read this summer before college. He’ll certainly find it to be an eyeopener. That’s what I’ll tell him.
“All rapes are forcible unless they are statutory.”
Many researchers distinguish forcible rape from incapacitated rape. I think it’s helpful way to get at what’s really going on on campus.
I have daughters as well as a son. I am very concerned about their safety and would focus on that in a thread on that topic, but since THIS thread is about what we tell our sons about consent, I’m focusing on that. There have been threads about daughters and safety and could be again, any time someone wants to open one.
The failure of the justice system is a wholly different issue from your prior contention that people on this thread don’t recognize the existence of forcible rape. We did, we do, we keep repeating it.
If you would like to discuss the failings of the justice system in these cases, I’d be on board with that because I do, in fact, recognize that women are often failed. However. I think that is a separate discussion from what we tell our sons about consent, which is also an important topic.
Apropos of my last post on another thread, we should probably tell our sons and daughters that BDSM in the college context is extra risky, no matter how carefully they document consent.
Twenty years ago, there was a BDSM CLUB on campus at Oberlin that had kink parties in college-owned spaces; I don’t know if that’s still going on. (No, I didn’t go, but my then-boyfriend was invited, which is how I saw the invitation.)
@Muchtolearn, not trying to pick a fight, but I think statements like “all rapes are forcible” is part of the problem, and you see it running through all of these threads. Every time someone who is not 100% on board with the tribunal system posts something, the response is 'women have the right to say no" or “without the tribunals, college guys would be having sex with unconscious people all the time”. Sorry, but two drunk nineteen year olds having sex is not rape. Neither is some guy fondling a bare breast, or a guy continuing to have intercourse although the women “meant” to withdraw consent but for whatever reason did not. Yet all of these things are and can be treated as rape in many campus sexual assault policies.
@QuantMech, I do not understand why you feel yes means yes policies would be effective, particularly in light of your stated experience of multiple cases of rape where the female was simply not believed. How does a yes means yes policy change the dynamic? Won’t the guy simply lie about whether the woman consented? And by the way, California is trying to make it illegal to record a consent negotiation. I think it is worth pondering why that is if this whole system was really about the inability to prove things.
@hanna, I would really prefer to never mention the term BDSM to either of my kids in any context. There are some things Dads are just not meant to know
“Also”???
I think @momofthreeboys is one poster who seems obsessively worried that one of her sons will be falsely accused. I definitely get the sense that she thinks there is a pervasive problem of false accusations on college campuses and that if women were really sexually assaulted they would be knocking down the doors of their local police station, rather than seeking help from the college they are paying to house and educate them.
I think that it is way too easy as a parent of a boy to think that my child would never do “X” and to therefore focus only on the possibility that he might be falsely accused of X. But I don’t think that the parents of many who have made horrible choices, either in the moment, when intoxicated or peer pressured, or even fully premeditated, ever thought that their child would do such a thing. You think the parents of the priests who have molested children thought they were raising serial sexual abusers? No, they thought they raised good men who were devoting their life to God. The mother of one of the two Columbine killers just wrote a book. She never thought her son would take the life of others. It is much harder to see inside the hearts and minds of others than we think, especially as our children grow and separate from us.
I don’t think the college standard should be by a preponderance of the evidence and I do worry about my son in this current climate where some school are trying to over compensate for years of neglect, but I worry more about my daughter and I feel truly sorry for young college women who are forced to spend years on a college campus with the fear of running into the person who sexually assaulted them.
“@hanna, I would really prefer to never mention the term BDSM to either of my kids in any context. There are some things Dads are just not meant to know”
I wholeheartedly agree with you, and I don’t even have any kids. I’m 40, and I still wouldn’t want to talk about this with my dad!
I have two boys well past their college years and one a junior so I’m not too concerned and colleges are losing the lawsuits lately so adds a sense of relief. I do know two males who were falsely accused, one in 2012 and one more recently, so that definitely contributes to my thinking. But thank you for speculating about my personal beliefs @pittsburghscribe. I think the government is vastly overreaching these days and I have a strong abiding belief in personal freedom. Period. Drives most of my thoughts about things related to government oversite but that’s for the Parents Cafe not this forum.