The estimable legal journalist Stuart Taylor, doing the job (along with blogger and historian KC Johnson) that few people are willing to take on, in or out of academia – monitoring the madness. This link won’t stay up permanently, but Stuart’s take on Duke’s latest effort not to learn from Duke’s mistakes is well worth reading.
You might think that a university whose students were victims of the most notorious fraudulent rape claim in recent history, and whose professors — 88 of them — signed an ad implicitly presuming guilt, and whose president came close to doing the same would have learned some lessons.
The facts are otherwise. They also suggest that Duke University’s ugly abuse in 2006 and 2007 of its now-exonerated lacrosse players — white males accused by a black stripper and hounded by a mob hewing to political correctness — reflects a disregard of due process and a bias against white males that infect much of academia.
In September, far from taking pains to protect its students from false rape charges, Duke adopted a revised “sexual misconduct” policy that makes a mockery of due process and may well foster more false rape charges by rigging the disciplinary rules against the accused.
Meanwhile, none of the 88 guilt-presuming professors has publicly apologized. (Duke’s president, Richard Brodhead, did — but too little and too late.) Many of the faculty signers — a majority of whom are white — have expressed pride in their rush to judgment. None was dismissed, demoted, or publicly rebuked. Two were glorified this month in Duke’s in-house organ as pioneers of “diversity,” with no reference to their roles in signing the ad. Three others have won prestigious positions at Cornell, Vanderbilt, and the University of Chicago.
John Thacker says:
So then it’s not just Duke’s refusal to learn, but the rest of the academic community, no?
December 20, 2009, 12:31 amCornellian says:
My rule of thumb for anyone heading to college – stay far away from any department with a name that includes the word “studies.”
December 20, 2009, 12:33 amCato The Elder says:
Wow! From Cornellian? I’m impressed.
December 20, 2009, 12:42 amtheobromophile says:
My second major was in “Classical Studies.” I think it may be the exception to the rule. :)
Back to Duke: this is the kind of thing that makes a mockery of feminism and also makes it difficult for legitimate victims to come forward, seek justice, and be treated with respect. Far from creating an environment in which allegations of rape are taken seriously, the utter refusal to condemn egregious conduct undermines the legitimacy of other accusations.
December 20, 2009, 1:55 amneurodoc says:
I couldn’t care less about how Duke’s teams fare. I’d still be curious, though, to know how their at the time very competitive lacrosse team is doing now. Were they able to get it together afterwards, recruit new talent and return to their winning ways, or have they yet to recover? What happens to Duke lacrosse might not be very consequential except to those immediately involved with the team, but if Coach K finds it hard to recruit basketball players because prospects come to see Duke as unfriendly to athletes, then there might be some real pushback against the “sexual misconduct” policy and its backers. At Duke, basketball rules.
December 20, 2009, 6:47 amStuart Taylor on Fresh Rot at Duke | Liberal Whoppers says:
[...] here to see the original: Stuart Taylor on Fresh Rot at Duke Share this [...]
December 20, 2009, 7:10 ama.b. says:
and whose professors — 88 of them
I could not find it in a quick google, but how many faculty are there at Duke? 88 seems like a pretty small minority. Obviously the rest of them have failed to denounce the Gang of 88, and thus have not drawn a line between them selves and political correctness, so I’m not sure it matters, but does anybody know?
December 20, 2009, 8:06 amFen says:
Accuse each of the 88 with rape. Run them through their own system.
December 20, 2009, 8:24 amlgm says:
To offer a few of the obvious counter arguments:
1. Presuming guilt is not unique to college professors at Duke. There are innocent people in the Guantanamo Bay detention center, who have lost more than a semester at college. Why don’t you take issue with conservative talk show hosts who would prefer to dispense with trials of the Guantanamo detainees and proceed directly to the executions?
2. Conservative lawyers often advocate relaxing legal protections in extraordinary circumstances. As Justice Scalia famously put it: “The constitution is not a suicide pact.” The extraordinary circumstance on college campuses is an epidemic of rape.
3. Here’s a challenge of your even handedness: condemn the incident a few years ago in which the coach of the University of Nebraska football team got a vital player out of jail for an important game. The player was in jail for rape.
December 20, 2009, 8:28 amMithras says:
The widespread practice of calling rape victims liars predates these events. If people generalize from this high-profile incident to all rapes, then it’s the fault of the people doing the generalizing. When high-status men are accused of rape by lower-status women, the more common practice is for their community to rally around them, which I would think has a far greater deterrent effect on rape victims reporting.
December 20, 2009, 8:28 amMarilyn Mann says:
“None was dismissed, demoted, or publicly rebuked.”
Wait — dismissed or demoted for signing a petition? Seriously? Even if they were wrong and misguided, what possible basis could there be for that?
December 20, 2009, 8:56 amPeteP says:
“When high-status men are accused of rape by lower-status women, the more common practice is for their community to rally around them”
Yeh, that litle ‘presumption of innocence’ thing really sucks.
BTW, this same kind of anti-white bias in academia, both faculty and student bodies, was most apparent during the election of 2008, where it was often accused that ‘anyone who doesn’t vote for the black guy is racist’, as if ‘being black’ was a qualification for President all by itself, regardless of his complete lack of any record of accomplishment in any area like legislation, business, or leadership ( except his one skill, ‘getting himself elected’, which he is very good at ).
December 20, 2009, 9:00 amMithras says:
Poor oppressed white men, always being denied the presumption of innocence. War is peace, ignorance is strength.
December 20, 2009, 9:12 amgrichens says:
“To offer a few of the obvious counter arguments:”
Translation: “To offer a few of the obvious strawmen which have nothing to do with the conduct of the Duke Faculty:”
December 20, 2009, 9:12 amjoel says:
Then they worry there are too few males going to college.
About Duke basketball, not to worry. Aren’t most of the players black? This is anti-white male we are talking about.
My take on the matter. Not to worry. With the dropping male:female ratios at college, it is a player’s dream. Coed dorms must make hookups easy on campus. Guys, wake up. Get some game. Good times are back.
December 20, 2009, 9:15 amjoel says:
Yeah, I love those counter points. Just keep repeating:
Bush, Cheney, Haliburton…
.. and all those other bad thoughts will go away.
December 20, 2009, 9:16 amFlyover Sam says:
Duke’s extreme irresponsibility and absence of accountability has a cost: it has soiled their brand to the point that some highly desirable candidates won’t consider it. It takes time for the quality of an academic institute to go down due to the avoidance by the best candidates, but I’d expect Duke is already experiencing that impact. In a few decades, we may talk of Duke as a community college that was once a proud institution.
My oldest, a national circuit debater of exceptional accomplishment, perfect GPA, top of class standing, polyglot, cross county athlete, etc., is already on the recruiting map for several of the top college debate programs. We’ve talked about places he wouldn’t ever consider and from our conversations in the past about Duke’s institutional racism and faculty bias, he’d never give then a chance. Actually, I have to confess that I even look at a Duke degree when looking through resumes as potential damaged goods. Seriously, if you do great at Duke, I know you pleased the hate-crimes faculty somehow, and if you did poorly, it just appears that you’re just not a good student. A Duke degree does not add to your reputation in professional circles; it impairs it.
December 20, 2009, 9:18 amPolitical Observer says:
I agree with Marilyn Mann that these individuals should not be disciplined by the University for their exercising of their free speech. However I don’t understand why the defamed students have not take each of the 88 to court for defamation of character. It seems to me that taking out a full page ad in a widely read newspaper plus the attendent publicity across the wire services and internet that accused these individuals of wrongdoing was intended by these 88 to defame the character of these innocent individuals. I think it is only right that these 88 are now held accountable for their malacious act. I realize that there may not be a lot of money in these lawsuits but it would seem to me that some public minded attorneys who believe in the rule of law would be willing to take this issue on if for no other reason than to give pause to other fools about the cost of blindly following the recklessness pursuit of their ‘politically correct’ dogma.
December 20, 2009, 9:25 amDesiderius says:
Mithras,
“Poor oppressed white men, always being denied the presumption of innocence.”
Open your eyes, Mithras. This is about the highest-status white men cutting down on their most direct competition. Tory democracy, redux.
And if you think Duke University, of all places, is likely to actually be on the vanguard of defending the oppressed, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn that I could liberate for you.
December 20, 2009, 9:26 amDesiderius says:
The doctrine of White Privilege is a reactionary attempt on the part of the trustifarian ancien regime that promulgates it to ameliorate the uncomfortable effects of the meritocratic admissions revolution of the previous few generations .
It works immediately by sapping the will and confidence of the brain-drainees from the hinterlands, but more inexorably by continually chopping at the liberal roots (such as the presumption of innocence) that drove the revolution in the first place.
December 20, 2009, 9:33 amPersonFromPorlock says:
Moral turpitude?
December 20, 2009, 9:33 amChernish says:
As a grad of the Duke engineering school ’63, I have seen the beginning of the tilt (the sit-ins and theater boycotts) and the continuing move leftward in the University and the town. Duke wanted to be the Harvard of the South, and Durham became the Cambridge of the region. The lacrosse incident was a not-unexpected outcome of this marriage, and the move leftward continues. Sure, Duke will hire more basketball players who are black, and will make sure that their admissions and “scholarship” policies result in the appropriate “ethnic and cultural mix” regardless of merit. Oh, the faculty will continue to hire more who mirror the incumbents.
And, no, I did not encourage my daughter to apply there–she graduated from the University of Chicago with honors.
WNC
December 20, 2009, 9:34 amTom J says:
I guess this will continue until the professors and high-level administrators start getting their own false rape accusations….
December 20, 2009, 9:35 amTo Hayek With You says:
Yes, because when we are at war we all know that we treat those we take on the battlefield exactly the same as those of our own citizens that we arrest for spraying graffiti on an underpass. The rules are exactly the same. They should be granted access to civilian courts instead of military commissions and the evidence chain and procedures should all be the same. Nothing could ever possibly go wrong with that now could it? I mean, it’s not like there has been a standard in the past where combatants taken out of uniform were shot on the battlefield or anything. Right?
Congratulations lgm, that was quite possibly the worst argument in the history of the internet. Not only was it off point and irrelevant but the underlying assumptions were all wrong (here’s a hint, the detainees were getting trials before the Supreme Court re-started things several times and they are being held until the end of hostilities as is normally done in any conflict… or at least that is how things stood before Chauncey Gardner was elected and declared that no matter the result of the show trial being staged in civilian courts he will not release KSM).
December 20, 2009, 9:35 amThatGuy says:
I’m sorry, let me see if I follow your reasoning. We should hang all these preppy lacrosse players, because somewhere else someone might have their guilt presumed? And if you read down a little, plenty of people have taken issue with Guantanamo Bay, at great length. It just wasn’t the topic here.
Cite me one conservative lawyer who advocates misconduct on the part of the prosecutor in any circumstances. Everything in this case was rigged against those kids, and they were hanged by their professors for being born to rich parents.
Oh, while we’re at at: your “epidemic” of rape on college campuses. Again, really? Can you back that up? Against any other population of 18-22 year olds anywhere in the world?
Again, this thread is about not condemning people without a fair trial, not about sexual assault. But hey, I’ll play your silly game. If you’re referring to the Christian Peter incident (the only slightly similar case I can find in a search of Nebraska football history), which I assume you are, he was never in jail for rape. He was never even charged with rape. The school settled the Title IX claim. And no one is saying we shouldn’t put rapists in jail. Only that they should be TRIED and CONVICTED before we do it.
Please don’t reply, my head hurts thinking down to your level for too long.
December 20, 2009, 9:36 amAnatid says:
Wait, can you reconstruct that sentence so it isn’t in the passive voice? I think it will be much more interesting that way.
December 20, 2009, 9:38 amTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Stuart Taylor on Fresh Rot at Duke -- Topsy.com says:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Kimberly Swygert, Eugene Volokh. Eugene Volokh said: Stuart Taylor on Fresh Rot at Duke: The estimable legal journalist Stuart Taylor, doing the job (along with blo.. http://bit.ly/6fZmtV [...]
December 20, 2009, 9:41 amSarcastro says:
Yeah, being white in academia suucks these days, but they just keep applying and succeeding in droves!
I also agree with Political Observer that public-minded lawyers should give up their ethical obligations in favor of harassing the profs who signed the petition!
The key is not to let the market decide, as that loser Flyover Sam is. We gotta continue to yell about it on the internet!
December 20, 2009, 9:43 amThatGuy says:
Really? I haven’t seen a huge plague of people eager to rally around an accused rapist. These kids were just lucky they were as rich as they were, they could afford to prove their own innocence. Had they been lower-middle-class white kids down the street at UNC Greensboro accused of raping a black stripper I’ll bet you they’d be sitting in prison right now, and you and the rest of the country would be thoroughly convinced of their guilt.
December 20, 2009, 9:45 amMalvolio says:
There are 2,877 members of the faculty, so 3% signed the petition. On the other hand, there are 13,457 students and only three were accused of rape but the police seemed to take it pretty seriously.
December 20, 2009, 9:46 amMoneyrunner says:
In case anyone wonders, here’s Mithras describing itself:
and what you can find on its blog:
Yeah, fight the power from the City of Brotherly Love.
Meanwhile Obama Imitates Saturday Night Live Skit
December 20, 2009, 9:48 amPlumber says:
re: LGM
You made essentially three — oh, let’s be nice and — call them silly claims in your post. If you’re going to make such asinine claims, and least provide some evidence to back them up.
1) You wrote that there are “innocent” detainees being held at Guantanamo. Perhaps in this instance you are correct, but since hundreds of detainees have been released, can’t we assume that the ones being held are actually pretty dangerous people? Whatever the truth, this is a non sequitor argument, because this has nothing to do with the situation at Duke.
2) You wrote that there is an “epidemic of rape” on college campuses. Really? Shouldn’t you back this up with some data. And, I don’t mean one of those ridiculous studies that claims that if woman has been whistled at, or if some guy has looked at her chest, then she has been the victim of a sexual assault.
3) You wrote that the football coach at the University of Nebraska got a football player who was in jail on a charge of rape out of jail for an important game. Okay, I live in Lincoln, Nebraska (and athletes at UNL do do a lot of stupid things) but the event you described never happened. This is a very serious charge, but where’s the evidence? How about some names and dates? Who was the coach and player involved. Good grief, if you feel free to make this whole incident up, why should anyone believe anything that you write?
Seriously, your whole post is simply moronic. You make non sequitor arguments that have nothing to do with the events at Duke, and you give zero evidence to back up any of your idiotic claims.
Truthfully, I can’t believe I wasted ten minutes out of my life to refute your ignorant post, I guess I need to get a life even worse then you do.
December 20, 2009, 10:04 amTechie says:
lgm subscribes to the “fake but accurate” newsletter.
December 20, 2009, 10:15 amAnatid says:
It really seems like there’s a huge problem.
December 20, 2009, 10:24 amjim m says:
IGM, your comments are based on poor analogies.
1) Conservatives have backed military tribunals which are quite different from the civilian court that the current administration is foolishly going forward with. To the extent that any conservatives have seriously advocated summary executions (I have not heard of any) they would be seriously off base.
2) The argument here is that the constitution does not apply outside the boundaries of the United States and that it certainly does not apply to foreigners engaged in criminal acts or acts of war outside the United States. Neither the constitution nor our devotion to its principals obligate us to giving these people the rights offered to United States citizens. Nor does it mean that foreign nationals engaged in acts of war on US soil should be given the protection of constitutional rights.
3) Your last argument is a ridiculous straw man. Had people heard of this case they would have made appropriate criticism. You are arguing that a miscarriage of justice in one case justifies an offsetting miscarriage of justice in another. I sincerely hope that you are never a victim of such a ‘justice’ system,
December 20, 2009, 10:27 amFen says:
However I don’t understand why the defamed students have not take each of the 88 to court for defamation of character
Maybe they’re gun shy re “justice” and the legal system.
What I don’t understand is why the 88 professors haven’t been beat down and put in a hospital bed for the rest of their lives. If there are actual consequences, maybe Academia won’t be so quick to judge. Or presmume guilt.
December 20, 2009, 10:28 ampireader says:
Professor Anderson –
An exceptionally-stupid public statement signed by 3% of Duke’s faculty three years ago constitutes evidence of “rot” at Duke.
I look forward to your analysis of the “rot” at Volokh Consiracy, based on an analysis of the dumbest 3% of the posts and comments here over the past three years.
And seconding Marilyn Mann’s comment above, when did we start dismissing and demoting faculty for making stupid public statements about the issues of the day? That makes me all the more keen to see your analysis of the “rot” here at VC, since I’m sure you’ll be calling for stern action on the most-egregious cases.
Or maybe your concern is Duke’s new sexual-misconduct policy. After a quick read on the Duke website, it doesn’t seem that different from other universities’ policies–or other workplace policies, for that matter. And Stuart Taylor’s sputtering doesn’t help much; he devoted more words to that old faculty statement than to the “fresh rot”. Maybe you can help … perhaps by comparing and contrasting it with your own university’s policy?
December 20, 2009, 10:29 amFen says:
An exceptionally-stupid public statement signed by 3% of Duke’s faculty three years ago constitutes evidence of “rot” at Duke.
Cute strawman. You should ask your college for a refund.
The rot is indicated by the reactions of the other 97%, staring down at their shoelaces, business as usual, nothing to see here.
December 20, 2009, 10:31 amThatGuy says:
Just to pull from one of those sources:
• 65 % of these attacks go unreported. The most commonly reported reason for this, offered by more than half the students, was that they did not think the incident was serious enough to report. (did not think it was a crime).
So….was it rape? Or drunk sex? Because I’m pretty sure rape is a crime. But this:
“74% of perpetrators and 55% of rape victims had been drinking alcohol prior to the assault.”
Makes me think that the study considered any sex where the woman was intoxicated to be a rape, because she was not able to legally give consent. Which makes me wonder how many times I’ve been “raped” and never knew it.
• 48.8% of college women who were victims of attacks that met one study’s definition of rape did not consider what happened to them rape.
Which begs the question: What WAS the definition?
I only raise the point, because one of your sources, the DOJ, does:
“Some scholars contend that the definition of rape and the survey questions used to measure rape may be too broadly worded or poorly phrased. As a result, they count as rape a wide range of actions, some of which may not be criminal. Responses to survey questions will depend on how a term is defined, and how a woman interprets the definition.”
Further, I see no comparison to other populations of similar age (although I did skim, not read in full). Even conceding that I don’t know the absolute numbers and yours may be correct, is there any evidence that they are higher on college campuses and not lower than the general population?
December 20, 2009, 10:34 amKen Arromdee says:
Anyone can be a commentor; the analogy to stupid comments would be if 3% of the students said stupid things, not 3% of the professors.
Furthermore, the 3% was not evenly distributed–many departments had more than 3%–and they were public accusations made against innocent private parties, by people who had positions of influence and used those positions of influence to give weight to those accusations. They were also enabled by the other 97%, who didn’t think it was worth objecting. Stupid blog posts are not that.
December 20, 2009, 10:40 amMike K says:
You don’t have to take a “Studies” class to get the white guilt trip. My daughter took freshman composition a year ago at a large state university. Her final essay, which constituted 60% of her grade, was on an example of a white male who raped or abused a women or minority. I helped her choose a topic and we chose William Kennedy Smith. I wondered if the teacher, an English grad student, would get the irony. She didn’t.
My daughter’s US History class had only one textbook, the rest were handouts. That book was on “Whiteness Studies.” Academia is rotten with this PC crap. I helped her study for the final and it was an eye opener to see the distortions of history in the handouts. For example (It was US History since 1877), the “Silent Majority” of Nixon was made up of people who opposed the Civil Rights Act. Total distortion.
December 20, 2009, 10:40 amjim m says:
Anatid,
The 1 in 4 claim stems from a study commissioned by Ms. magazine and performed by U of AZ professor Mary Koss, who did not ask women if they had been raped but if they had certain experiences which she then classified as rape. Of those that she surveyed 73 percent that she classified as having been raped did not consider themselves to have been so and 42 percent of her supposed victims had intercourse again with their alleged assailants.
While rape is a serious problem it needs to be addressed in a serious manner and using flimsy and arguably fraudulent statistical analysis is not the way to accomplish that.
December 20, 2009, 10:40 amJFP says:
“Poor oppressed white men, always being denied the presumption of innocence.”
What is wrong with the class consciousness of the left these days? If the comment had been about poor, oppressed rich white men, then yes, I might agree with it. But to lump all white men in the same privileged boat is a bit much. What about white males whose fathers are coal miners in West Virginia?
This whole incident shows what’s wrong with having one ideology dominant on our campuses (and it doesn’t matter if it’s the left or the right that’s dominant). Without the counterbalance of people who have very different opinions, one can say and do anything that feels good. Recently, I heard a liberal academic complain about his leftist chair, who simply does whatever she wants, no matter what the rules are. She justifies it because the results are “good.” I’m sure there’s a lot of this going on, ClimateGate being one of the ones we know about.
The result will be that no one outside of academia will have any reason to trust academia’s numerous “studies.”
December 20, 2009, 10:41 amRichard Aubrey says:
Heather MacDonald had a good piece on the imaginary epidemic of rape–on campus or elsewhere.
December 20, 2009, 10:43 amFact is, everybody knows it’s bogus, but some continue to pretend because there’s money and power in doing so.
Fen says:
What is wrong with the class consciousness of the left these days?
Uhm, because they are racist pigs?
I once had a colleg prof insist that “blacks can’t be racists… because they’re black”
December 20, 2009, 10:49 amAnatid says:
It’s a sensitive subject for a number of cultural reasons. How do you deal with shades-of-grey situations – for example, a woman might initiate with a man but change her mind, but he refuses to disengage. A woman might be drunk, and while she does not consent to sex, she also does not actively refuse. A woman might say no, but be unwilling to resort to violence to physically defend herself and thus be overpowered without any kind of battery occurring.
Depending on the circumstances of the situation, the personality and the cultural background of the woman, she might judge and react to all these situations in very different ways. That’s what makes data collection so difficult. But the general trend is pretty clear: sexual assault isn’t uncommon.
The questions you ask regarding the methods of the study techniques can likely be found in the paper themselves – I don’t know the methods of each study off the top of my head. Some methods will yield more valid data than others.
As for your content-related question, I do know that sexual assault is highest in women aged 16-22, which includes most of the college-going population. And within that population, it’s higher among college women than in the general population – see the second sentence of the Department of Justice report.
Agreed. The one-in-four number is unreasonably high – but that’s not the only study. All of them will share the same problem that it is very, very difficult to accurately collect and code this sort of data. ‘Consent’ is a highly subjective state.
Can you please link us to her piece?
… I’m guessing you don’t know any sexual assault survivors, do you?
December 20, 2009, 10:54 amAl says:
So you would agree that there were plenty of bases for Duke to “publicly rebuke” the members of the Gang of 88, right?
As to your question about dismissal or demotion, just off of the top of my head…
1. Failing at least one student because he was a member of the lacrosse team?
December 20, 2009, 10:55 am2. Falsely claiming that the petition in question was endorsed by various schools and departments at Duke?
3. Using departmental funds to have the petition published in the school newspaper?
4. Calling the lacrosse players “farm animals” and “scummy white males” in an apparent drunken tirade?
5. Publicly attributing racist comments purportedly made in anonymous course evaluations to lacrosse players based on the fact that lacrosse players made up about 15% of the class?
kentuckyliz says:
Universities are crazy, about this stuff, and it puts women in a Catch 22 bind if they’re paying attention to the messages they’re getting.
Drunk, anonymous hook-ups are feministically empowering!! I am woman, hear me come!
All sex is rape! (per Andrea Dworkin) I am woman, hear me whine!
It stinks that they’re teaching that regretted sex is rape. No, it’s not.
Just ask that group of crazy kids having a gang bang in a men’s bathroom in the dorm…girl goes back to her room, bf smells the sex on her, she says rape.
Nope, regretted sex. Of course she only regretted it once her bf busted her for being a cheating hoor. She should have been charged with making a false police report, but she wasn’t, because women get away with murder in this country and aren’t held accountable for their behavior, while men are raked over the coals and prosecuted to the max and suspicion=guilt.
Just like that guy in DC convicted for public exposure when he was naked in his own home and a peeping MOM looked twice and called her cop husband to bust him. His own home. She was trespassing and peeping but not arrested. If he were a beautiful young woman, no problem with the free show. If Mom were a guy, she’d be arrested for peeping. Crazy country.
December 20, 2009, 11:06 amSarcastro says:
So classy! If only we lived in a world without laws, people would totally have better thoughts towards their common man!
December 20, 2009, 11:08 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
Re: women denying that what happened to them was rape.
I can think of two very different scenarios for this.
1 – The woman was drunk (but not passed out) and willingly consented to sex that, sober, she wouldn’t have. There is a school of thought that if she is impaired at all, it’s always rape.
2 – The woman did have sex forced on her, but that was traumatic enough, and if she has to apply the word “rape” to it she really can’t cope. I think you have to count that sort of thing as a rape even if she doesn’t.
December 20, 2009, 11:14 amAJK says:
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_campus_rape.html
And yes, I do know sexual assault survivors. None of them have any doubt that they were raped.
December 20, 2009, 11:17 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
Anatid, you give three examples here. I see the first two as being quite different from the third, in that these are situations that the woman willingly and imprudently got into. I had a few talks with my daughter about looking out for herself. I viewed it as a continuation of, for example, telling her when she was a little six-year-old, that she must always put her seat belt on in a car, even if the person driving the car doesn’t tell her to.
If you’ve decided beforehand that you won’t have sex, because you don’t want to, or don’t think you should, or don’t have the birth control lined up, or whatever: don’t smooch and neck endlessly, and don’t get drunk, because that causes people to lose their inhibitions. Is it that outrageous, that a girl should be told these things? Do people just not talk to their girls? Crazy.
December 20, 2009, 11:21 amTechie says:
“One in four” would make the campus of Duke worse than downtown Detroit. Parents would send their daughters to school armed, or not send them period.
December 20, 2009, 11:28 amRM says:
The Duke Lacross players are just another in a long line of victims of PC. Well, at least no one has gotten killed yet because people were afriad to speak the truth. Oh wait a sec…..
December 20, 2009, 11:29 amglenn says:
I’m going to take a little bit of a contrarian view here.
December 20, 2009, 11:31 amFirst, all us white males have known we were on the stuff list since we started seeing those “dumb man” commercials 40 years ago. I for one don’t care. Don’t buy the products either but that’s another story.
Second, If the WM bashing means women and minorities get the slots at schools like Duke that means that when they get out they are going to do all the heavy lifting us “overly agressive white males” used to do. And about time they started paying their way in the world. If their degrees and politics can’t generate the wealth to which they’ve become accustomed that’ll spike all those welfare programs they love that much sooner.
Laura(southernxyl) says:
Duke qualifies people for manual labor? Wow, who knew?
December 20, 2009, 11:35 ampireader says:
Fen–The rot is indicated by the reactions of the other 97%, staring down at their shoelaces, business as usual, nothing to see here.
When one of my colleagues says something stupid in public, I should forthwith denounce him publicly. As I’m sure you’re quick to do at your firm. And if you or I don’t, then our respective firms are “rotten”. You have high standards, sir.
Ken Arrombee–Anyone can be a commentor; the analogy to stupid comments would be if 3% of the students said stupid things, not 3% of the professors.
Furthermore, the 3% was not evenly distributed–many departments had more than 3%–and they were public accusations made against innocent private parties, by people who had positions of influence and used those positions of influence to give weight to those accusations.
I accept your point about blog posters being different from commenters. Although, applying Fen’s standard above, we should denounce the Conspirators for not better policing the comment threads and posting rebuttals.
However, my point stands–the worst 3% of the posts on this blog (or on any other blog) make ugly reading. Does that indicate “rot” at the VC? Would the 3% of bad posts being more-heavily concentrated among some Conspirators than others make the situation worse, or better?
There are probably as many people who read this blog as read another outraged manifesto in the student newspaper. And there have been many accusations of bad faith and chicanery made on this blog–in both posts and comments. So I’m not sure what gets more weight.
JFP–This whole incident shows what’s wrong with having one ideology dominant on our campuses (and it doesn’t matter if it’s the left or the right that’s dominant). Without the counterbalance of people who have very different opinions, one can say and do anything that feels good.
Many of our major institutions have a leadership that’s heavily weighted one way or the other ideologically. University faculties, the military officer corps, the senior management of public companies, the Catholic bishops, etc. Should we purge and re-balance them all?
December 20, 2009, 11:36 amAnatid says:
AJK, thank you for the link. Question was just for Richard Aubrey.
Mac Donald lost me at “it is inconceivable that a raped woman would voluntarily have sex again with the fiend who attacked her.” She seems to view sexual exploitation as some kind of black-and-white situation. I wouldn’t be surprised if she also doesn’t understand why battered women so frequently return to their abusers. Yikes, the human psyche is complicated!
She’s attacking the most biased studies – which we all have a problem with – and citing the most extreme examples. That makes an article more emotionally compelling but undermines its credibility. She does built a killer strawman, I have to say.
Laura, of course a young person should be prudent about his or her lifestyle choices. But even in that post, you make assumptions. In the first example, perhaps the woman was interested in kissing but not groping, and the man simply assumed she wanted to go further, then refused to stop ramping up when she said so. Should she not have kissed a man on a date at all? In the second example, how do you know where or how the woman got drunk? Do you view a scantily-clad drunken sorority girl the same way you view a woman who has two martinis in her locked apartment alone? Should she just never drink at all?
Shades of grey.
December 20, 2009, 11:42 amChester White says:
lgm wrote:
“Conservative lawyers often advocate relaxing legal protections in extraordinary circumstances. As Justice Scalia famously put it: “The constitution is not a suicide pact.” The extraordinary circumstance on college campuses is an epidemic of rape. ”
Wrong. The phrase “suicide pact” in this regard was first used by Justice Robert H. Jackson in his dissenting opinion in Terminiello v. Chicago, a 1949 free speech case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Try again, dude.
December 20, 2009, 11:56 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
Anatid, I suppose that your term “shades of gray” confused me.
That’s not gray.
That’s not gray either, and furthermore, her martinis are irrelevant to the fact that a man evidently broke into her apartment and raped her.
December 20, 2009, 11:58 amA. Zarkov says:
In the Duke lacrosse rape hoax we had a black low-life stripper, prostitute, and drug addict who once tried to run over a policeman allege rape. This allegation got national press coverage, and many in the university staff piled on. Obviously the allegation got tremendous coverage because the accuser was black and accused were white. How likely is white-on-black rape? Not very. The National Crime Victim Survey for 2005 shows zero for white on black sexual assault. This means the number of cases appearing in the sample is less than 10. On the other hand, 33.6% of sexual assaults on whites were committed by blacks, and blacks are only 12% of the population. See Table 42 here. Initially the New York Times had a good reporter on this story, but he got removed and the Times then piled on too.
Now compare and contrast the media attention given to the Knoxville carjacking, kidnapping, rape and torture murders of a white couple by a black gang. This sensational story got little to no national media coverage. Only local press gave it any attention.
December 20, 2009, 12:06 pmJFP says:
pireader: “Many of our major institutions have a leadership that’s heavily weighted one way or the other ideologically. University faculties, the military officer corps, the senior management of public companies, the Catholic bishops, etc. Should we purge and re-balance them all?”
I’d be curious to know which way you regard them as leaning. From my perspective, every one of these leans further left than they did when I was a child back in the 50s.
December 20, 2009, 12:19 pmDarren says:
I have a former student–male, good-looking, intelligent, white–who has been accepted to Duke, and I worry a little. The school doesn’t deserve someone of his caliber.
December 20, 2009, 12:26 pmRichard Aubrey says:
Anatid.
December 20, 2009, 12:46 pmThanks AJK for the article. Anatid’s criticisms are pretty lame.
If you are concerned about how concerned Duke is about rape, see the case of Katie Rouse, a white Duke student who was raped by a black man–not a student–at a black fraternity house. Not fake rapes like the lacrosse hoax. Real rape.
It was even about the time Nifong was turning into a verb.
Crickets.
It’s not about the rape. It’s about the race/class narrative. Rouse didn’t fit. So she was a nothing, her sisters in feminism who are forever going on about the horrors of rape turned their collective heads
And the Duke admin had sweet damn’ all to say.
So, as I frequently say, bus tid.
Don’t be pestering us about rape. It’s about the narrative. The right narrative.
pireader says:
JFP–I’d be curious to know which way you regard them as leaning.
I’d be guessing; but that’s what the Internet’s for, isn’t it?
I’d say that university faculties lean left, both economically and culturally. Military officers lean right on both dimensions. Corporate senior managers lean right economically, mixed culturally. Catholic bishops, right culturally, mixed or left on economics.
All of these are relative to today’s US voting population.
December 20, 2009, 12:52 pmBDR says:
a.b. says:
and whose professors — 88 of them
I could not find it in a quick google, but how many faculty are there at Duke?
***
Undergraduate faculty = 966
I believe the 88 were all in undergraduate departments. At least I don’t see any listed as members of the graduate professional schools like Law or Medicine. That would mean 9% of the undergrad faculty were behaving badly.
***
joel says:
Then they worry there are too few males going to college.
About Duke basketball, not to worry. Aren’t most of the players black?
***
9/13 are white. 3/5 starters are white.
BDR, embarrassed Duke grad
December 20, 2009, 12:53 pmjim from cleveland says:
The problems in this country will continue to worsen until the public demands big changes at leftist madrassas like Duke. The public needs to be informed how much of their tax money is supporting leftist activism and propaganda masquerading as scholarship. They also need to know the names of the corporations and other organizations that shovel money to left-wing pseudosciences like gender and cultural studies. Obviously that work will need to be done by the new media, and one hopes that postings like this one will be disseminated widely.
Listening to the useful idiots of our “elite” universities is to be reminded of Orwell’s comment about certain ideas being so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them. My garbage man likely has a more sensible — and nuanced — view of the world than any product of the Duke English department.
December 20, 2009, 12:54 pmTwirip says:
If there are in fact “innocent people in the Guantanamo Bay detention center”, a claim for which you ofer zero support, then perhaps you should take your self-righteous indignation and direct it at some more appropriate targets. For instance, your President and Congress.
The comments section here at VC took a turn for the worse when you were finally banned from commenting at Malkins.
December 20, 2009, 12:55 pmDavid Nieporent says:
I’m not sure whether Scalia has ever said it — it is a famous quote, so a lot of people have repeated it, some to agree and some to disagree — but he certainly didn’t “famously” say it; Justice Jackson did.
December 20, 2009, 12:57 pmHoratius says:
Just don’t hire graduates from Duke.
December 20, 2009, 12:58 pmA. Zarkov says:
What epidemic of rape? Do you have any facts to support such as allegation?
December 20, 2009, 1:03 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
I’ve thought, if I’d had a son rather than a daughter, that I would have advised him about looking out for himself as well.
I would, for example, caution him about being in company with a woman he doesn’t know, who already has shown herself willing to mimic sexual availability to total strangers for money, in such a way that she could accuse him and complicate his life. And to stay far away from confused girls who appear to think it’s their constitutional right to get drunk, and it’s his responsibility to have more respect for them than they have for themselves. As with warning girls about going into dangerous situations, you can’t ever predict and defend against every bad thing that could happen to you; but you can refrain from putting yourself more at risk than necessary.
…I told my daughter, who loves literature, that she really could not major in English b/c she wouldn’t be able to take the political stance she’d have to take, to get anywhere. In her first semester at college, freshman comp convinced her that I was right.
December 20, 2009, 1:07 pmA. Criminal says:
It really seems like there’s a huge problem.
I looked at two of the links and one was the typically dishonest feminist tripe: “The ‘victims’ don’t think they’re victims, but we know better.”
The usdoj.gov link that reports “sexual assault victimization rate of 21.6 per 1,000 students” conflates sexual assault with all crimes (click their link), and then reports “3,459 Forcible Sex Offenses” for college students in the US in 2006 … out of 15.9 million students = 1 per 4,596 students (or about 1 per 2758 females).
December 20, 2009, 1:09 pmSo their FEF (Feminist Exaggeration Factor) is 59.6 times, ignoring the fact that about 20% to 40 or 50% of rape reports ARE false.
Twirip says:
I guess it all depends on your definition of uncommon, and whether or not you are one of those peculiar people who like to imagine that the official sexual assault statistics represent just the tiny tip of the iceberg.
Am I alone in thinking that the comment section here was better in the days of commenter registration?
December 20, 2009, 1:23 pmTwirip says:
Anatid
And you have the audacity to say that Heather MacDonald uses straw-man arguments? Ye gods!
December 20, 2009, 1:27 pmJavert says:
There were out of court settlements (in the millions) that precluded suing the miscreant professors. Even with those settlements, there are two suits pending against Duke — with the former lacrosse coach as one plaintiff, and a group of students as the other.
The percentages are irrelevant. At Duke, as with many universities, a clique of PC/multicultural professors runs the university. At the time of the hoax, and to this day, a number of them are chairs of departments, deans, directors and assistant directors of influential institutes. (Institutes are big deals at universities.) Far from being “beat down,” many of them have been promoted and given wider powers.
December 20, 2009, 1:35 pmConservaDad says:
LGM Said:
To offer a few of the obvious counter arguments:
1. Presuming guilt is not unique to college professors at Duke. There are innocent people in the Guantanamo Bay detention center, who have lost more than a semester at college. Why don’t you take issue with conservative talk show hosts who would prefer to dispense with trials of the Guantanamo detainees and proceed directly to the executions?
2. Conservative lawyers often advocate relaxing legal protections in extraordinary circumstances. As Justice Scalia famously put it: “The constitution is not a suicide pact.” The extraordinary circumstance on college campuses is an epidemic of rape.
3. Here’s a challenge of your even handedness: condemn the incident a few years ago in which the coach of the University of Nebraska football team got a vital player out of jail for an important game. The player was in jail for rape.
Your point #1. Our constitution says “innocent until proven guilty”, a standard which the 88 profs at Duke and the President chose to ignore and which many of the profs continue to proudly ignore today. Though they have control over the academic futures of the students, they cannot trump the constitution. You mentioned Talk radio hosts. They do not have control over the future of those detained at Gitmo, your analogy is inept and a total red herring.
Your point #2. Again, what conservative lawyers advocate has little or no bearing on the Duke situation as conservative lawyers do not have control over the academic future of the students at Duke. Also, Justice Scalia’s comment about the constitution not being a suicide pact refers not just to ignoring certain rights due to extraordinary circumstances but to an incident where nearly 3,000 people were killed by terrorists – perhaps you’ll remember the date, it was 9/11/01. Its WAY not comparable to the Duke incident which, BTW, was not an epidemic of rape but was ultimately found to be baseless allegations that were overblown by a politically motivated prosecutor. Has he been disbarred yet? Another inept comparison and a red herring.
Your point #3. Is merely a shabby attempt to cast someone with whom you disagree as being unreasonable. You have no way of knowing the opinions of the readers of this or any other blog with respect to your allegations about a football player at another university. Your presumption is that anyone who fails to denounce your alleged incident is somehow a bad person and you offer no proof that the incident even happened. What you DO offer is a revealing view that your own stereotype of conservatives is that they all condone rape by athletes. Who is it that has a problem here? When one person pre-judges someone else I believe they call it predjudice, do they not? We’d like to ask YOUR opinion on the issue at hand, athletes at colleges being singled out from the general student body as a sub-class to whom the consitution does not apply – they are presumed guilty rather than innocent. Instead of throwing red herrings around and smelling fishy, why not fess up that your comments here reveal you to be prejudiced?
December 20, 2009, 1:48 pmDangerMouse says:
Want an example of a woman who cried “rape”, and sent a man to jail, and nothing sexual didn’t happen? The man was released from prison only recently, and the woman faces 7 years for perjury:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/08/nyregion/08freed.html
The man was in jail for something that didn’t happen. He was convicted.
As for Duke, several thoughts:
1, I wish someone would accuse those 88 profs of rape. Put them through their own medicine.
2. You’d have to be an idiot to go to Duke, although the rot is far beyond one mere college.
3. Don’t hire anyone with a “studies” major.
December 20, 2009, 1:48 pmMarco says:
And if the rest of the academic community is guilty, then isn’t this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, John … isn’t this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do what you want to us, but we’re not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America! Gentlemen!
December 20, 2009, 2:13 pmMarco says:
The lax team will be a contender. Pre-Season number 2.
December 20, 2009, 2:16 pmpireader says:
Twirip–I guess it all depends on your definition of uncommon, and whether or not you are one of those peculiar people who like to imagine that the official sexual assault statistics represent just the tiny tip of the iceberg.
Over the years I’ve gotten to know a number of women well enough that they eventually confided in me that they’d been raped at some point in the past. As described, none were grey-area cases. The rapists varied from strangers to bosses to neighbors.
Each time, I’ve asked: Did you go to the police? Almost without exception, they’ve said “No”. None of them were hysterics or bullshitters or particularly timid.
So yes, I’m one of those peculiar people who like to imagine that the official sexual assault statistics represent just the tiny tip of the iceberg.
December 20, 2009, 2:19 pmJack D says:
Igm says “The extraordinary circumstance on college campuses is an epidemic of rape. ”
Not only is there no epidemic but the frequency of white men raping black women is essentially zero. Look up the crime statistics – white on black rape is virtually non-existent (unlike the opposite). Aside from the presumption of innocence to which the lacrosse players were constitutionally entitled (and which the Duke faculty ignored in their witch hunt against the evil White men) the statistics alone should have led anyone with common sense to doubt the claims of a drug addicted stripper. But modern political correctness is an exercise in “Emperor has no clothes-ism” and cognitive dissonance – the more obvious to all the facts are, the more loudly and vigorously you have to ignore them and maintain the opposite.
Even when the whole farce is over and the web of lies exposed, there is no stigma in academia with having supported them, whether it was the stripper in question or Stalinism – after all it was all for a good cause, your heart was in the right place, it was in support of the downtrodden and not out of any selfish motive, etc. The actual truth is not as important as the “greater truth”.
For those who say that in the name of “academic freedom” there should be no consequence for the support of the “Gang of 88″ – do you think there would have been no career repercussions if the same faculty members had signed a petition in favor of say the summary execution of abortion providers?
December 20, 2009, 2:43 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Am having a hard time imagining that I would not call the police if raped. I’m not saying that it doesn’t happen, just that I don’t get it, sincerely.
December 20, 2009, 2:59 pmHoward Veit says:
The only way to get to Duke is to affect their basketball program which is the main revenue producer there. Sue them, pull one basketball scholarship as penalty, and they’ll confess to anything. BTW, there are SOME white guys on the team and they actually get to play.
December 20, 2009, 3:02 pmMr L says:
ConservaDad – I’d add that LGM was holding radio entertainers and elite university professors to the same standards. It’s very…revealing…that he thinks this is a comparison he should be making in the first place.
December 20, 2009, 3:03 pmDesiderius says:
pireader,
“So yes, I’m one of those peculiar people who like to imagine that the official sexual assault statistics represent just the tiny tip of the iceberg.”
So it follows then that the presumption of innocence is the culprit?
This will only end when the Left sees that illiberalism is regressive. The Left will always be with us (thank God). We’ve had smarter Lefts. We need another.
Sarcastro,
“Yeah, being white in academia suucks these days, but they just keep applying and succeeding in droves!”
Black people all look alikeWhite people all have the same status?Each generation seeks to impede those in the next most capable of challenging their power. Due to the demographic strength of the Boomers, they have thus far been successful in doing so, leaving us with dull-witted sycophants such as the petition signers to teach the following generation/make our movies/do investigative journalism/preach our sermons. You’re enabling this process. It is in no sense left-wing.
Ultimately, it costs us all.
December 20, 2009, 3:06 pmjosil says:
That’s really not sufficient as some departments refer to themselves as sciences (e.g., social sciences).
December 20, 2009, 3:32 pmVader says:
Roman Polanski.
Wait, that was the Left, wasn’t it? Never mind.
December 20, 2009, 3:55 pmlgm says:
Clearly there are dueling college rape statistics, but google “college rape” and you will see those who deny it’s a problem pretty thoroughly debunked. Given the number of global warming deniers (and probably evolution deniers) here, normal one would not regard opinions offered here as the last word.
I did not know that “The constitution is not a suicide pact.” did not originate with Scalia. Too bad. That clear statement was one of the only things I credited that big mouthed but small minded man with.
A large number of Guantanamo detainees have been declared innocent and released. Given the numbers still there, statistically speaking, there is a greater than 1% chance (99% more likely) that there still are innocents detained there. Most were not apprehended “on the battlefield”, but were turned over to US forces in exchange for generous rewards.
December 20, 2009, 4:02 pmpdxlawyer says:
I googled “college rape” and read the first item which came up. It described a young woman getting drunk (voluntarily) and having consensual sex which she later regretted. Score one for the deniers.
December 20, 2009, 4:49 pmThatGuy says:
Ah, forgot that one. Still, no one thinks it didn’t happen. It just wasn’t “RAPE rape.”
December 20, 2009, 4:52 pmpireader says:
Desiderius–So it follows then that the presumption of innocence is the culprit?
I don’t see how you got from Twirlip’s comment about under-reported crime, and my response, to anything whatever about the presumption of innocence.
Elaborate, please?
December 20, 2009, 5:16 pmAJK says:
Didn’t work for me. Maybe you could point me to some actual sources?
December 20, 2009, 6:01 pmAnatid says:
Shame.
Maybe the first thing you did after getting raped was going home to take a shower and cry uncontrollably. After a day or so passes, you stabilize enough to call your best friend for help, but by now there’s no evidence and it’s only your word against his, and far too many people share Leviticus’ sentiment that since you waited, you actually just changed your mind and are now falsely crying rape.
Maybe after being physically invaded, the first thing you want to do isn’t to be subjected to an invasive medical test and a barrage of intrusive questions from the police about the nightmare you just endured. Propanolol (experimental drug that prevents fresh memories from consolidating as traumatic) probably isn’t on the menu.
Maybe your own behavior wasn’t flawless. Maybe you blame yourself for having agreed to meet alone at your classmate’s house to study. Maybe you blame yourself for having turned your back on your water bottle at the party when someone slipped rohypnol into it. Maybe you blame yourself for, after this sixth or eighth or twentieth time you refuse, not having the courage to hit the not-actually-friend who’s turned on you.
Maybe you’re not willing to testify in front of your attacker in court. Maybe you’re not willing to make waves by reporting your father, or your aunt, or your cousin, which would tear the family apart and they’d probably blame you. Maybe you’re afraid that if you speak up, the guy’s friends will come after you and hurt you for damaging his reputation.
Maybe you’re just unwilling to have your entire community know you’ve been raped, or even to acknowledge the fact and put yourself into the despised category of “rape victim” as well. Maybe you’re not willing to face the inevitable doubters who will take this painful and shameful moment of your life and analyze it, trying to figure out which parts are your fault.
Maybe you just don’t want to talk about it and want to put it behind you. Maybe the memories are so intense, so crippling, that you can’t even speak about them when you try.
You’re a strong woman, Laura. A lot of people aren’t.
December 20, 2009, 7:38 pmRyan Waxx says:
Anatid:
Or maybe you, LGM, and “I know hundreds of raped people who didn’t report” pireader are full of crap, to that unique degree only an anonymous internet troll can be totally loaded full of crap.
And don’t get me started on “look at all dem whities graduating, there can’t possibly be a problem!” Strawmano. I won’t hurt his pretty little head by using his own “logic” and claiming that campus rape can’t possibly be a problem, because hey look at all those women graduating! Do you feel dumb? Of course not.
I really don’t see how you people can go after John Yoo with such gusto and then one thread later defend the gang of 88. One would think that the reality whiplash would leave a mark.
December 20, 2009, 8:09 pmpireader says:
Ryan Waxx–Or maybe you, LGM, and “I know hundreds of raped people who didn’t report” pireader are full of crap, to that unique degree only an anonymous internet troll can be totally loaded full of crap.
Twirip raised a salient point. I gave a careful explanation for my views. Lauren asked a serious question. lgm gave a thoughtful answer. Now you’ve barged in with a mindless, obscenity-laden rant. Be quiet, Ryan, or go sit in the car. The grown-ups are talking.
December 20, 2009, 8:20 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Anatid, I don’t think I’m strong so much as boring and probably prudish. A man who would badger me for sex after the very first “no” or who had thuggish friends would be so far from getting the time of day from me that he might as well be on the moon. Can’t imagine going anywhere that I would think someone might slip me a roofie, so if that happened I would know in my heart that I was not at fault. I may or may not be strong, but I simply am not the woman you are describing. I suppose others are, and once again, that brings me back around to wishing that people would talk to their daughters about taking care of themselves and having some self-respect.
December 20, 2009, 8:24 pmRyan Waxx says:
pireader, your “careful explanation” consisted of unverifiable anecdotes. I’m sorry that you appear to feel everyone needs to just accept them as gospel truth.
What do you think would happen if you brought your anecdotes into a court of law and said “trust me!” ?
December 20, 2009, 8:27 pmElliot says:
How does a college sexual assault office know if assaults are decreasing? If a decrease in reports is because of non-reported assalts, and an increase in reports is because of more assaults, then how do we detect a decrease in assaults?
My rule of thumb is to not hire them.
December 20, 2009, 8:36 pmAnatid says:
Absolutely. The biggest problems are when children grow up in a household where their parents don’t show much respect for themselves or each other, leaving the kids without role models for respectful behavior.
I’ve seen a few studies looking at different parenting types that make a child more likely to be victimized. They were also more likely, if victimized, to develop PTSD or to pass the maladaptive behaviors onto their own children. Scary stuff. But give research another 10-20 years to gather more data and synthesize it, and there may be a coherent biopsychosocial (I think I need to go take a shower after using that word) model to describe who gets victimized, how, and why.
December 20, 2009, 8:38 pmpireader says:
Ryan –
Twirip suggested that only “peculiar” people believe rape is under-reported, because they “like to believe” it, presumably for ideological reasons.
Well, I believe rape is under-reported; but not because I’m peculiar or like the idea or have an ideological axe to grind. So I explained that.
Maybe Twirip will re-think his view that only weirdness or ideological blindness could lead somebody to a different conclusion from his.
December 20, 2009, 8:47 pmRyan Waxx says:
Aside from the fact that you are distorting what he said, he does have certain facts supporting him. Such as those who DO have clear, stated ideological biases give absolutely insane numbers for what they claim are the actual rapes. So, yes… you’d have to be rather peculiar to take any advocacy group at their word in general, and these groups in particular.
Your serial “I was raped” lunch conversations notwithstanding, of course.
December 20, 2009, 8:58 pmtheobromophile says:
Too frequently, that would get you labeled as a “victim-blamer,” Laura.
With any other crime, we can all acknowledge that there are behaviours that make you more or less likely to be a victim of that crime; what people are unwilling to acknowledge is that getting yourself too drunk to take care of yourself is a lot like giving your bank account number to that nice person who emailed you from Nigeria.
On a side note, no one really talks to their sons, either. Men are tremendously fearful of false rape accusations, but forget that there’s a pretty easy way to avoid 99% of those: don’t sleep with women who are not your long-time, loved and trusted girlfriends. Do not sleep with crazy women. For the other 1% of accusations: don’t invite a stripper over to your house. Or, to go with the overarching theme: if you cannot be sure that she’s sane and trustworthy, be really sure that nudity is not involved.
(Of course, some women can still accuse you, but if there was never actual sex involved, then it’s pretty hard for her to prove that there was non-consensual sex.)
December 20, 2009, 9:17 pmAnatid says:
The problem is that it’s part of a greater question. There are certain patterns of behavior that make a person dramatically more likely to be victimized, and for the most part, those patterns are determined by the fetal environment and the first few years of childhood, with a spice of social context thrown in as they get older and develop ideals of gender.
Changing individual behavior is the single hardest thing to do with any kind of intervention to lower victimization rates. It’s also the single most successful way to bring about positive change, if you can make it happen. The whole behavioral predisposition versus free will debate is for another thread, though.
December 20, 2009, 9:47 pmRyan Waxx says:
I’m sorry, theobromophile, but we’re talking mostly about American law here. It’s wonderful that you appear to be acquainted with a law system that requires an accuser to “prove that there was non-consensual sex”, but there is actually no such provision in American law.
Why do you think it was so vital that one of the accused lacrosse players obtain a picture of himself elsewhere at the time he was accused of raping someone? Why did that even have to happen? It isn’t because he lives in a system of law where there’s a presumption of innocence, that is for certain.
December 20, 2009, 11:05 pmMithras says:
There seems to be a lot of conservative white guys on here concerned about being accused of rape. Huh.
Yeah, you’re a victim-blamer. Good job.
December 20, 2009, 11:23 pmRyan Waxx says:
How do you know that he was talking about the victim? His admonition makes MORE sense if you read it as warning a male not to get drunk. Remember, if both parties are drunk and sex happens, it’s rape. And no, the female isn’t the one going to prison.
December 20, 2009, 11:38 pmRyan Waxx says:
Hey, I have an idea. Instead of wondering how many rapes are reported or aren’t, lets address the actual article that this thread is ostensibly about.
For example, I’d like to hear Mithras, Anatid, pireader or lbj… heck even sarcastro’s welcome to answer this one… explain to me why it’s vital that Duke’s sexual misconduct panels “deny the accused any right to have an attorney at the hearing panel or to confront his accuser.”, or how you are going to have a balanced hearing when the accuser but not the accused is allowed “to make opening and closing statements; and to receive copies of investigative documents”.
Men might not be so “tremendously fearful of false rape accusations” if the investigations of such accusations weren’t so clearly and consistently stacked to achieve the desired result.
December 20, 2009, 11:59 pmtheobromophile says:
Ryan: who is the “he” to whom you were referring in your penultimate comment? Couldn’t be me, because I’m female and my little avatar should make that abundantly clear.
My admonition was to both men AND women: don’t get so drunk that you can’t handle yourself (basic common sense); don’t get drunk around people whom you do not know and trust (basic common sense); and don’t have sex with strangers, especially not when alcohol is involved (basic common sense).
The problem that the Duke boys had was that they decided that it was a good idea to have a strange woman take her clothes off for them. Their ultimate salvation – pre-trial to all those who cannot distinguish between a college campus and a courtroom – was that they did not have sex with the aforementioned strange woman. There’s a lesson or two in there.
December 21, 2009, 12:45 amRyan Waxx says:
My bad, sorry.
You want to make that a crime equal in prison term to rape, go right ahead and try. But as long as it’s NOT a crime, it might be best if we didn’t chuck people in prison for that, wouldn’t you agree?
December 21, 2009, 1:16 amJohn Skookum says:
Any major with “Science” in its name isn’t real science, and anything with “Studies” in its name isn’t worth studying.
December 21, 2009, 1:34 amSarcastro says:
[Ryan Waxx, it's not important for schools to not provide full due-process procedures. But they sure don't have to Constitutionally, and schools will nickel and dime where they can without political consequences.
Don't think anyone s saying Duke is awesome here, though I must admit to having skimmed parts]
December 21, 2009, 1:45 amSarcastro says:
Desiderius‘s theory of generational warfare is so clearly true no evidence is needed, only the bare declaration!
But then he notes how the current generation totally sucks. And who is to blame? The man, who keeps oppressing the “most capable people,” i.e. privileged whites!
Whatta twist!
December 21, 2009, 1:49 amtheobromophile says:
Ryan, where did I say that stupidity should be outlawed?
My point is pretty simple: the Duke lacrosse players – for whom I do have a lot of sympathy – got into that situation because they were profoundly stupid. A false accusation of rape is no more justified in that situation than is rape when a woman gets too drunk to handle herself, but, in both situations, the undeserved harm is not exactly unforeseeable.
December 21, 2009, 2:08 amRyan Waxx says:
You mistake my point, theo. That sentence you quote was merely a setup for the next one, not to be taken seriously standing alone.
As for your point, I feel the exact same way. Just because stupidity can lead to horrifically bad consequences, doesn’t mean the stupid “deserve” those consequences. A drunk woman being raped while passed out is foreseeable yet inexcusable, and the exact same sentiment attaches to people who throw themselves into “he-said, she-said” situations.
There’s just one difference. There aren’t people who would justify raping a drunk woman. There ARE people who justify what happened at Duke. Some excuse the accuser, some excuse the faculty. Even more excuse a legal setup where if those boys had NOT had expensive lawyers, they’d be doing hard time, right now. The OP presents proof that Duke is if anything tilting its procedures FURTHER against future accused.
Oh, and Sarcastro, you might have a point… if ALL legal council was barred from the proceeding. Do you care to lay odds weather the accuser’s lawyer is barred from the procedure? Even so, someone accused of a serious crime should not have his lawyer escorted from the building – even if it’s “only” his job on the line at that point. For self-incrimination reasons if nothing else.
December 21, 2009, 2:41 ampireader says:
Ryan Waxx–explain to me why it’s vital that Duke’s sexual misconduct panels “deny the accused any right to have an attorney at the hearing panel or to confront his accuser.”, or how you are going to have a balanced hearing when the accuser but not the accused is allowed “to make opening and closing statements; and to receive copies of investigative documents”.
Good questions. I wondered myself, so I read the Duke Sexual Misconduct Policy (available online).
The short answer seems to be that Stuart Taylor got it wrong.
The relevant part of the policy supplements the university’s disciplinary process by specifying some additional rights for the complainant, paralleling those available to the the accused in any disciplinary matter.
Take your example–counsel. The disciplinary process provides “disciplinary advisors” for any accused from the outset of an investigation. The sexual misconduct policy provides similar advisors for the complainant; and specifies that both advisors work under the same restrictions.
An advisor (for accused or complainant) must be a “member of the university community” , which is the only basis I can see for Taylor’s claim that the rules “deny the accused any right to have an attorney at the hearing panel”.
December 21, 2009, 6:23 amRichard Aubrey says:
I suppose the non-88 faculty members could have run up a petition or other statement commending prudence, presumption of innocence, and recommending against a rush to judgment.
December 21, 2009, 7:26 amThey didn’t.
Probably figured that pointing out to the 88ists that there was a possibility that their peers in the university community would consider them stupid and vile wasn’t going to happen, nor was there a possibility of a career-damaging result for being stupid and vile.
Richard Aubrey says:
pireader.
December 21, 2009, 7:28 amYou forget this is a blog for lawyers and law profs who are pretty sure of their special skills and knowledge.
Saying that somebody from the university community is just as good shouldn’t fly.
But in this case, it probably will.
Chuck says:
Actually, no. Only three out of the top nine players are black. But this is actually somewhat of an anomaly.
December 21, 2009, 7:30 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
Actually, Ryan, (1) there are people who would do both, (not the same people, obviously) and (2) none of those people are commenting here.
December 21, 2009, 7:31 amRyan Waxx says:
Um, pireader? You might want to revise that statement.
Unless “disciplinary advisor” became synonymous with “lawyer” in the last edition of Webster’s, Talyor got it right, and you got it wrong.
Maybe you feel a university-issued “disciplinary advisor” is just as good as a lawyer. Maybe you even think that’s better. Forgive me if I express doubt that a “disciplinary advisor” is going to get access to ATM photo records or find missing DNA results.
Forgive me, in fact, if I openly scoff that denying someone their choice of counsel and force-substituting a university employee is anything except a move to address the Gang of 88′s complaint that the white boys only got off because they had fancy lawyers.
December 21, 2009, 7:41 amRichard Aubrey says:
Ryan,
December 21, 2009, 9:35 amYou will recall that in matters military, when a court martial is involved–the right kind of court martial–certain folks hint darkly that the defending attorney has his military career to think about and can’t be too, too zealous.
I am fully confident that the same caveat would apply wrt Duke’s disciplinary advisor. Yup. Fully confident.
BTW, does the kid get to choose his own disciplinary advisor?
AJK says:
Taylor makes five claims:
1. The accuser cannot have an attorney present.
2. The accused doesn’t have a right to confront his accuser.
3. The accuser — but not the accused — has the right to be treated with sensitivity.
4. The accuser — but not the accused — can make opening and closing statements.
5. The accuser — but not the accused — can receive copies of the investigative documents.
Can you point to anything in the rules that refutes any of these 5 points?
So in other words, the claim is completely correct (unless your lawyer happens to go to Duke).
December 21, 2009, 9:44 amRichard Aubrey says:
Funny.
December 21, 2009, 10:22 amOver the last forty-five years, say, I’ve gotten to know a number of women pretty well.
Only one ever mentioned an assault. A guy got her drunk and tried to mess with her.
I asked who it was. This was about twenty years later. Thing is, we were an isolated group of about two dozen in an extended field project and we’d worked together for a couple of months. I was planning in arranging for the guy to spend the rest of his miserable life looking over his shoulder.
She said she didn’t remember who it was. If she’d said she didn’t want to say, that would be one thing.
In this case, it was complete bullshit, and I found she was a fabulist in other areas as well.
I wonder what you have to do to get large numbers of women to fess up to unreported rapes.
mojo says:
Sounds to me like there are 88 professors who need to be accused and put through a months-long horror. Then maybe they’ll change their tune.
December 21, 2009, 12:19 pmJoe says:
A guy got her drunk and tried to mess with her.
I asked who it was. This was about twenty years later.
Twenty years later she couldn’t remember someone who no mention is made is a boyfriend or long term acquaintance “tried” to “mess” with her. That is hard to believe.
I know some women well over the years too, but darn if past sexual assaults is not something they tend to discuss with me. This might be because I tend to think such matters are private and don’t bring the matter up, but that just might be me.
These threads are interesting.
December 21, 2009, 12:23 pmRichard Aubrey says:
Joe.
December 21, 2009, 12:51 pmSorry I wasn’t clearer. There were about twenty-five of us working closely together in an isolated situation for six weeks, plus the prep time of about six months amounting to 5-8 hours per week. The “accused” was one of us.
I call bullshit.
Marcy says:
To clear up a common misconception that’s used as an anecdote in this thread: Duke has way more white basketball players than black players. In fact, they have the most white starters of any top 25 team. Coach K has routinely been called a racist because of this. Carry on.
December 21, 2009, 1:44 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
That whole “got her drunk” thing bothers me. It removes agency from the woman. She’s a naive innocent who’s been so sheltered she doesn’t even know what alcohol is? He held her nose and poured it down her throat? He poured a cup of rum in her diet coke and she didn’t taste it? I mean, how do you “get” another adult drunk?
December 21, 2009, 2:10 pmRichard Aubrey says:
Laura.
December 21, 2009, 2:28 pmThe woman in question was probably seventeen, in the program at the behest of her professor father whose self-importance was such that even his kids had to be involved.
You get somebody drunk by, I suppose, using vodka and fresca, port wine and soda, and so forth. I don’t think we had wine coolers available then.
Whichever the situation was, the idea that you can get a woman drunk with her acquiescence–by the time you figure out you’re really drunk, you’re too drunk to stop–followed by sex is presumed to be rape. Ask any feminist.
And, yeah, using that construction means the kid didn’t have agency. At a certain point, going backwards in age, young people don’t have agency in the face of an older person urging something on them.
As I say, I call bullshit on the story irrespective of speculative details on how what didn’t happen might have happened.
The original point was that, even though I’ve come to know a good many women pretty well, I really have no stringbook of women I’ve come to know pretty well telling me about unreported rapes. The example I gave was the best/worst that’s happened to me.
IOW, the guy who said he hears it all the time has about as much credibility as this girl/now woman.
Zilch
Laura(southernxyl) says:
Oh. Gotcha.
I will say that “I don’t remember” is a construction some people use for “I don’t want to tell you”. Yes, it has a very different meaning, but the result is the same.
December 21, 2009, 3:21 pmRichard Aubrey says:
Laura. I’m completely sympathetic to “I don’t want to tell you,” even though it might be meaningless after a certain period.
December 21, 2009, 3:38 pm“I forget” might be relevant if it were some guy she’d met at a party.
Not in this case.
Conservadad says:
Just curious – does anyone know the male/female breakdown on the group of 88?
December 21, 2009, 3:50 pmAnatid says:
You have to have friends other than rich, white, educated, systematically-intelligent but avoidant, conservative-libertarian, predominantly-male lawyers.
Not only does VC appeal to a demographic that experiences one of the lowest rates of sexual assault in the first place, but most of you folks aren’t exactly the empathetic types that your friends might want to share a painful secret with.
And then the selection bias and the self-report bias go out and tango …
Not as hard as you might think. Except for the more experienced drinkers, most people can’t taste the difference between Bacardi Silver and 151, despite the latter being twice as strong. Most people also have a very poor ability to judge the alcohol content of a mixed drink. Additionally, alcohol doesn’t affect your perception of your own intoxication as a linear gradient (nor does it affect your functioning) causing many beginning drinkers to overestimate their level of intoxication early in the evening and to underestimate their level of intoxication later in the evening.
Which all returns to the notion that if you’re going to drink at all, you should find out exactly what you’re drinking, and that you should pace yourself (and alternate with glasses of water) to be more aware of your condition and not overdo it.
December 21, 2009, 6:41 pmChris Travers says:
I have thought about going back to try to get a Masters degree in Scandinavian Studies. Does that count?
December 21, 2009, 8:13 pmChris Travers says:
I am confused as to why people feel that this is an “anti-white” bias in academia.
I think it is much more of an anti-due-process bias in academia.
December 21, 2009, 8:24 pmExtraAnonymous says:
The water thing was the one piece of advice my dad gave me before I went off to college. Well, the one piece he gave me explicitly in words, rather than implicitly by his own example.
As to the whole discussion of men being able to quantify the number of women they know who say someone sexually assaulted or raped them, whether or not those women reported it, and whether or not those men should believe those women… I’ll just toss out that I know five women who’ve explicitly told me they were sexually assaulted or raped. One I know for a fact reported it to the police; the man in question is serving a life+30 sentence in state prison for multiple counts of “first degree criminal sexual assault”. Three didn’t say whether or not they reported it to the police, and really didn’t tell me much beyond “I don’t want to talk about it”. The fifth said that since she was a teenager she reported it to her mother first, and her mother called her a liar so she didn’t report it to the police. She only told me after the way she’d been acting prompted me to ask her if she’d ever been raped. I’ve known two other women who I vaguely suspected may have possibly been sexually assaulted, but I never asked and they never brought it up. So, I know five women who say they’ve been sexually assaulted or raped, out of the several hundred women I know. I don’t have a shred of doubt that two of the five were telling the truth, and I’ve got no reason to believe that the other three were lying. As far as I know, only one of the five reported it to the police.
Completely anecdotal, but otherwise this comment would be completely non-topical
December 21, 2009, 8:35 pmChris Travers says:
Why would it matter if they were white?
If they were middle class black kids, the result would be the same too, and it would be one more statistic on how much more likely blacks are to be criminals. Such statistics would probably be invoked on this forum to back the guilty verdict too.
This is one reason WHY it is extremely important to be cautious with such accusations and why due process is so important.
Also one more thing to consider. Many of the folks I have heard throw out inflated statistics of campus rape also through out expansive definitions of rape as well. These definitions are fundamentally sexist because they assume that women who regret a sexual encounter even the next morning are somehow victims while men who regret a sexual encounter the next morning are not. This is the same sexism that these activists purport to be freeing us from, but which if taken seriously would ban women from the study of law and render them mere wards of their husbands or fathers. We should be struggling for equality and this means that we must not patronize one class.
December 21, 2009, 8:37 pmChris Travers says:
Read your own sources. The first link (the only one which disclosed clear and scientific methodology) lists a rape + attempted rape rate of about 2-3%. It goes on to list also a “victmization” rate of about 1 in 4 (see page 17). However if you look carefully at how “victimization” is defined, it is so extensive as to be meaningless in terms. It includes for example, pestering one’s girlfriend about sex or offering some sort of reward. Page 22 offers some additional problems.
An interesting bit of further work would be to see what percentage of married women might admit to being pestered about sex sometimes by their husbands.
One of the serious issues that arise when this document is looked at closely is how we as a society should draw a line between real sexual victimization of an objective and destructive sort (such as rape or attempted rape, which in that study affected 2.8% of women at college) and the sorts of sexual issues that people need to learn how to deal with, such as figuring out how to address different desires inside a sexual relationships.
However it is disingenuous to suggest that because around 25% of women reported to being sexually pestered, that this represents a huge problem of date rape.
December 21, 2009, 8:54 pmChris Travers says:
FIFY
December 21, 2009, 8:56 pmChris Travers says:
As far as rape prosecutions go, it had better not be highly subjective.
December 21, 2009, 8:59 pmChris Travers says:
This is what made the DoJ link that Anatid provided so interesting. They looked at a random sample of students and asked a wide range of questions. The conclusion was that rape occurred to approx 2.8% of the female students. That is about one in forty. (Yep, one in four is off by an order of magnitude.)
I would be willing to bet that far fewer than one in forty women has ever filed a police report. So yes, police statistics are probably just the tip of the iceberg. However, that doesn’t make the one in four statistics any less fake.
The only way to get to one in four is to define rape so expansively as to make it legally meaningless.
December 21, 2009, 9:16 pmChris Travers says:
What do we need to do to convince the court that such prosecutions and presumptions violate the equal protection clause?
December 21, 2009, 9:25 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
If you look at the Duke misconduct policy, it’s stated that alcohol does not moderate responsibility on the part of the accused, but does on the part of the accuser.
In fact, a strict reading of the policy and the examples given therein would seem to indicate that it’s against policy to have sex if you’ve had any alcohol at all. If a woman wants to have an evening of drinks and sex, she’s out of luck if her target has read this policy.
December 21, 2009, 9:32 pmAnatid says:
What makes this system even more sexist is that it means that, because of the gender assumption, it dramatically reduces the willingness to report or the resources available to a man who’s been sexually assaulted by a woman.
Much more interestingly, I read my sources’ sources, which went back to some primary research like the DoJ study. Sometimes an article can be near-worthless but its works cited page can be very useful. Sorry, I should have specified.
Until recently, sex-without-consent within a marriage was not considered to be rape. Glad that times have changed.
The “pestering” bit becomes a bit more serious when it becomes an issue of hours upon hours of harassment and sleep deprivation over many days. Sleep deprive someone enough, and they’ll agree to just about anything to get a chance to rest.
This is the problem. Society’s definition of consent and of rape has varied over time. My personal problem is that the scientific understanding of decisionmaking and coercion, like any area of research, is advancing faster than our laws involving these concepts. The studies that started with Milgram are gathering a growing backing in neuroscience, epigenetics, and developmental psychology.
I honestly have no idea how to devise a legal system that can reflect the various factors that enhance, bias, or impair a human’s ability to make decisions, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be dissatisfied with our current crude system.
We have that law here in California. We also have laws explicitly stating that marriage does not necessarily equate consent, nor does asking the other party to use a condom.
As I said, it’s crude.
December 21, 2009, 10:18 pmChris Travers says:
Is there anything which prevents men from accusing women of sexual misconduct after drunken sex?
I know it wouldn’t be taken as seriously but maybe we should start a “all women are rapists” masculism movement….
December 21, 2009, 10:19 pmChris Travers says:
I think this is where science and the law have to look at things differently though. In our system of laws, generally, a crime is defined as an evil-intending mind accompanied by an evil-doing hand in violation of reasonably clear boundaries set forth in laws.
What this means is that, for purposes of the law, legal consent needs to be a very bright line. One should not be able to be convicted for “inadvertently raping a woman.” Hence for purposes of the law, consent cannot be highly subjective but needs to be quite objective. I.e. consent is from the perspective not of the accuser but of the accused.
Sure. No problem with such laws, given the way consent is usually defined.
December 21, 2009, 10:28 pmChris Travers says:
Bah, edit didn’t get made in time.
I have no problem with “no drunken sex” laws provided that equal protection exists under the laws. If two people have drunken sex, they should be equally guilty in the eyes of the law. This could work out against many of the advocates of such laws, because it might mean that if a woman accused someone of drink-rape and it turned out both were drunk, she could and should be charged as well.
Is this the case in California? Are such “alcohol-rape” laws prosecuted with any gender parity?
December 21, 2009, 10:35 pmAnatid says:
This is where personal experience comes in for me. A friend of mine was molested for years by his father, who thought all he was doing was expressing his love for his son. When my grandfather mistreated my grandmother, he just thought he was doing what was best for her, because women clearly don’t have the same capabilities as men and need to be controlled. A man I used to know once killed two other men because he thought it would be the only way to protect his friends from them. A woman I know was once drugged and raped by a friend, and he simply thought that it was natural that she would be willing to exchange sex for drugs so there was no need to ask. All of these are “evil” acts but their perpetrators did not have, from their own perspective, malicious intent.
In neuro/psych, there really is no such thing as evil. Only variation and sickness (and how you separate the two is often a matter of culture more than science). And the factors that produce this variation and sickness exist on a spectrum, not a binary. Today, we would classify Eadweard Muybridge as sick, due to having his orbitofrontal cortex (part of the brain that allows for social judgment and inhibits socially-destructive impulses) destroyed in an accident, but the law makes no distinction between a “healthy” man with an naturally-impoverished OFC and a healthy man with an enriched OFC.
IIRC, we’ve had some bizarre but thankfully-rare double convictions. There’s not complete parity, though, since the tendency is to heuristically conflate “92-98% of rapists are male” with “women aren’t rapists” regardless of logical context.
December 21, 2009, 10:51 pmDesiderius says:
Sarcastro,
“Desiderius’s theory of generational warfare is so clearly true no evidence is needed, only the bare declaration!”
One dynamic among many, no doubt, but one of such prominence that the Greeks chose it for the birth-narrative of their primary God (hence the link in the above post). If you discount the resonance of such narratives, try getting a driver’s license Friday. Heh – Friday.
This particular dynamic used to be of some interest to the Left. Do you imagine that now that the commanding heights (of the culture/academy/media/government) are in the hands of those waving the right (er, Left – faux-Left, I would argue) ideological banner, that it will suddenly cease?
“But then he notes how the current generation totally sucks. And who is to blame? The man, who keeps oppressing the “most capable people,” i.e. privileged whites!”
The jury is still out on the suckitude of my generation. Under the ameritocratic credentialocracy instituted by the Codger Boom to protect their prerogatives and their favorite sons, our best and brightest have been relegated so far to doing our* best work at the family/platoon/enterprise/community/blog level. Perhaps for the best, long term.
Most capable of challenging the powerful does not equal most capable in general. Often, there is substantial tension between the two, which is why a healthy Right is as essential as a healthy Left for maintaining a dynamic civilization. The privileged whites (and, yes, they are still predominantly white, and male, despite their professed creed of diversity-uber-alles) are the oppressors, not the oppressees, who include in their number many minorities who are unfairly stigmatized as being inauthentic for challenging the reigning orthodoxy.
Luckily for the oppressors, they have no shortage of attack dogs like yourself at their beck and call.
Racists!
Sexists!
Reactionary Capitalist Roaders!
Go boy! Sic’ em!
* – I’ve found the station in life most appropriate for my strengths/limitations. Not so with many of my peers, thanks to blockhead Codger Boomers and their sycophants such as those who signed this petition.
December 21, 2009, 11:34 pmChris Travers says:
Then is such a law in your view compatible with the idea of “equal protection under the laws?”
December 21, 2009, 11:58 pmAnatid says:
The law itself ought to offer equal protection. In this area, cultural perceptions still have an effect on the way the law is presently applied, which does not fully offer equal protection.
December 22, 2009, 12:04 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
Well, I have a real problem with that. Look at Kobe Bryant’s apology.
He truly believes that the encounter was consensual, even as he acknowledges that she did not and does not view it that way. Now, how does that work? And how can it be fair, Chris, that consent is in the eyes of the accused? You just x’d out the concept of rape, there.
December 22, 2009, 10:19 amJoe says:
Sorry I wasn’t clearer. There were about twenty-five of us working closely together in an isolated situation for six weeks, plus the prep time of about six months amounting to 5–8 hours per week. The “accused” was one of us. I call bullshit.
The last bit, uh, is sort of important to your argument. I still can’t make a firm conclusion since I don’t know if she simply didn’t want to discuss the matter in full with you and used a dodge (quite possible). And, even there, if the guy then was someone she didn’t really know, it is quite possible (since he only “tried”) that 20 years later, she didn’t remember the guy.
As to someone else raising the “getting drunk” part … students who are just starting to drink, which appears possible here, among others can very well not be able to handle liquor very well. Likewise, it doesn’t even rob her of all agency since the “takes two to tango” line suggests both are involved.
She could have consented to drinking to excess but if he wanted to get her drunk to “mess with her,” particularly if he could handle liquor better (or was not similarly drunk), agency or not, he very well could have to been to blame more overall.
Again, this thread is interesting on assumptions.
December 22, 2009, 10:27 amJoe says:
I couldn’t edit my last comment … but since it happened twenty years ago and she might have realized you would have done something, it is quite possible that she didn’t want to tell you about it. If she did, it could have caused problems with the group or other things she did might have come out or whatever.
The “she’s a fabulist” comment also is something I would need a lot more information, and not just from her accusers, to access. The whole thing actually is a tad ironic given the topic of the thread.
December 22, 2009, 10:32 amChris Travers says:
Just a note on how prevalent rape and serious sexual victimization (as opposed to normal sexual conflict) is.
I have personally known three women who I had strong reason to suspect were raped. Of these two had actually brought it up, the other was a former girlfriend who would get (very) drunk and make accusations of rape that she would not remember in the morning. I suspected that something had happened in the past but there was not enough info to say in that case. I see no reason to assume that that the figure in the DoJ source of 1.1% being actually raped and another 1.7% being subject to an rape attempt is far off the mark.
(I don’t know what it is but people seem to have a natural tendency to confide things in me.)
However, the definitions of rape which provide for vastly inflated statistics tend to define “rape” so broadly as to be meaningless. For example, normal sexual conflict (asking “can we have sex tonight” every evening) can be classified as “pestering” and thus included in the analysis as something which is sexual victimization.
With alcohol things get more problematic. This paper discusses some of the issues that come up with allocating responsibility.
(As a side note, I DO think medical evidence should be required in rape cases because we live in a society which demands proof of guilt, and he-said-she-said should never ever rise to that level. I also think that some leeway needs to be granted in withdrawn consent cases in terms of timeliness, and 5-6 seconds of delay in responding to withdrawn consent should not be sufficient to convict.)
December 22, 2009, 11:30 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
There may not be medical evidence that proves guilt. If a man holds a knife to a woman’s throat and says “submit or else” she’s probably not going to fight, and there may not be medical evidence of forced sex. Then the presence of the knife and the threat will inevitability be he said/she said unless somehow there’s some other kind of corroborating evidence.
December 22, 2009, 12:33 pmChris Travers says:
Laura:
In the case of a knife threat, how likely is it that evidence wouldn’t exist to tell you that either:
1) sex occurred without much arousal on the part of the woman and must have been painful (i.e. vaginal tearing existed) or else
2) evidence exited which provided a plausable explanation as to WHY vaginal tearing might not be present.
I don’t know about anyone else here, but if I was on a jury on a case where a woman was alleging rape and a medical exam showed neither of the above, I would be pretty suspicious, esp. if the two knew eachother and the guy’s defence was “yeah I had a knife, but that part was consensual too– we’re both into kind of kinky stuff.” If no medical exam was done, I would be pretty suspicious of the whole allegation and would tend to require a heck of a lot more evidence to convict.
The only cases that might occur might involve withdrawn consent where consensual sex was initiated and then later consent was withdrawn even though both were aroused. Ultimately such cases would also pose many other problems esp. since they would likely amount to a he-said-she-said sort of case and if limited to that really SHOULD fall far short of Constitutional requirements to sustain a conviction. I think it would be very rare that such a case could even be prosecuted for reasons fundamental to our guarantees of liberty.
December 22, 2009, 2:28 pmChris Travers says:
According to one source I cited above, most states require the perpetrator to be clandestinely providing the alcohol to the individual as a necessary element of rape by intoxication. It isn’t that hard to fool folks into thinking that an alcoholic beverage isn’t alcoholic. As an experiment try mixing Jack Daniels and Cranberry juice…. Esters form and the alcohol cannot readily be tasted.
Only a few states hold that women who voluntarily become intoxicated are incapable of sexual consent. California is one of them. However the enforcement pattern suggests a serious equal protection problem.
December 22, 2009, 2:36 pmAnatid says:
Rare but horrifying exception: some women are capable of becoming aroused from the physical stimulation alone, whether or not they have consented.
Herein lies the problem. Most who who’ve been freshly-raped aren’t going to immediately want to submit to an intrusive medical examination – I’d guess that going home to take a shower and cry probably tops the list. Waiting even a few hours is enough to destroy the physical evidence, and at that case, unless you’re going to get a search warrant and start taking DNA samples from the room where it occurred, there may not be any physical evidence at all. Sometimes the only ‘evidence’ at all will be the accuser’s testimony. Which isn’t enough to convict on …
Also very interested in your views on this sort of situation, Chris.
Just for clarification’s sake. :)
December 22, 2009, 8:42 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Chris, I would agree with you, except that
1) women are not stamped out of cookie cutters, their bodies are different from each other to begin with and then there’s the possibility of multiple childbirths, etc, and
2) I have read, repeatedly, that absent actual damage, medical examination cannot determine whether a woman was raped or not.
It would be nice to think that these things could be determined in a forthright way, and sometimes they can, but it just isn’t true that every act of rape leaves a woman physically damaged in a way that would show in a medical exam.
December 22, 2009, 10:29 pmChris Travers says:
If I was a juror, there are basically three possible answers I would expect from a medical report:
1) Clear evidence of rape
2) No evidence of rape but reasons given why evidence was unlikely to show up in such cases
3) No evidence of rape and no reasons given as to why this specific case was unlikely to show signs.
The first case leaves little doubt that “something” happened and thus the focus becomes “who” not “if.”
In the second case, one has to ask both “if” and “who.” This may not be straight forward but the totality of the case matters.
In the third case I think a juror would be rightly suspicious.
But agreed that this poses difficulties. Consider the Baby case where the medical examination did show vaginal tearing, but both parties said that the sexual intercourse began consentually and the only question was at what point consent was withdrawn and whether the alleged perpetrator responded quickly enough to the withdrawal of consent (the disagreement was about a period of time amounting to 5-6 seconds). Were I a juror in a case like that I would be VERY hard pressed to convict despite the medical showing.
December 23, 2009, 1:30 amChris Travers says:
For good reason it’s not enough to convict. Allegaton isn’t proof :-)
For the Kobe Bryant case, I don’t have access to the complete evidentiary record. Certainly Faber’s behavior does undermine her credibility, but of the physical evidence retained there are a number of specific questions that come to mind.
1) What is the significance of the blood stains on the shirt? Is this evidence of vaginal tearing? Is it Was there an attempt to clean them up? Is there something else going on?
2) What other physical evidence existed?
Unfortunately without detailed forensics reports to sift through and read critically, it is impossible to say much. Ultimately based on the information available, I don’t have enough to reach a conclusion. Ultimately, I am further not willing to provide full trust in the police interviews of either party in this case.
However, if we take Kobe’s police interview at face value and assume no distortion, I would find plenty to raise suspicion that the contact might have been consensual, but perhaps a prelude to blackmail. Similarly if I accept Farber’s statements, one would assume that it was not.
The fact is that without access to a well-developed evidentiary record, I can’t be sure what happened that night and I think it would be unwise to speculate. The versions of events offered by both parties cannot be reconciled and only a trial would have been able to sort fact from mere allegation.
However, what I think you are asking are my thoughts about misperception of consent as a whole. I guess my thinking is that most sexual consent is non-verbal. It involves assenting to and escallating sexual contact. Assuming a pattern of assent and escallation, it is reasonable for a person to assume this implies sexual consent on the part of the partner. A further problem is that temporarily withdrawing consent is a technique that women (mostly) sometimes use to increase sexaul tension. This creates further possibilities for misunderstandings because sometimes the point is to try to get the man to make the next move. My thinking then is that when such a pattern exists (in the Kobe case, Kobe alleged such to exist), that withdrawing from the pattern really needs to be accompanied by clear, entirely unambiguous, and forceful communication. Where that is absent,it seems reasonable to assume legally that the pattern of escallation is being embraced rather than retreated from.
Furthermore, human communication is fundamentally imprecise, and we tend to assume it is more precise than it is. This is because language is a simplified model of how the universe works but it is not a model perfectly shared between speakers of the same language. Non-verbal communication is not necessarily precise enough to know exactly what is going on where something like consent is involved. Absent a written consent form (which might not be valid anyway), it is impossible to prove that consent existed in an objective way. Instead all we can do is try to ask if the individual behaved like a willing participant. Kobe said she did. Ms Faber said she didn’t. We have no way to sort fact from fiction.
I don’t know if this answers your question of if I am off on a tangent.
December 23, 2009, 2:20 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
Of course what actually happened that night could only be speculated about, and I would go so far as to say that neither party who was actually there really knows what happened at this point. So the actual fact of what happened is a closed book.
The thing that struck me about Kobe’s apology was that he said that he still thinks it was consensual (present tense) although he accepts that she did not and does not see it that way. I don’t know how to read that except that he admits that even at the time she was not seeing what was happening as consensual – i.e., she was not consenting – but he still maintains that it was consensual. I can’t read his statement any other way. It looks like what he was saying was that as long as he thought he was in the clear, then he was in the clear, regardless of what she thought then or now. Which goes to your earlier statement, Chris, about the accused person’s concept of the degree of consent being more important than the accuser’s.
If anyone cares at all, I expressed my thoughts at the time here and here.
December 23, 2009, 9:53 amChris Travers says:
Laura:
The fundamental question in terms of gaps in perceptions of concept is whether we expect committing crime to be something which is clear or vague. I think the line should be that the accused either knew or should have known that it was not consensual, not what the accuser thought. Otherwise we allow cases where consent could be rescinded after the fact, or where a crime could be proven to exist not on the basis of what actually happened but on the basis of the effects on the purported victim. I do not think that the 5th Amendment should allow such interpretations of laws, nor factual elements be subject to redefinition afterwards so as to allow a crime to be prosecuted where he accused had no way of knowing that he or she was committing a crime at the time.
Put simply, we should not malum in se crimes such as rape such that it is reasonably possible to inadvertently commit them. Rape by intoxication laws should similarly, IMO, be interpreted to only apply to intoxication so severe that the intoxicated individual could not be expected to physically resist or verbally communicate that a boundary is being crossed.
More importantly, I think that your points about preparedness in life are extremely underrated. I would add a couple of additional points though which you may or may not have considered:
While one hopes that being prepared would avoid trouble, this isn’t always possible. Being prepared also means being prepared to deal with trouble if it happens. it is important that both men and women know their rights, and also what options are available regarding how to proceed both if victized by a crime (generally, and including sexual assault) and if falsely accused of one.
I have been through some tough experiences in my life. I have been bullied daily as a kid, assaulted by a street gang, been the victim of fairly severe domestic violence– to the point of nearly daily assaults with a deadly weapon by a suicidal girlfriend when I was in college, and more. In every case, I escaped severe injury through a combination of strength of character, ability to assess violent situations, courage, self honesty, and physical discipline (such as knowing when to hit back and when not to, and being in complete control of such reactions).
As time has gone on, I watch my wife worry about whether my oldest son will be bullied in school and I realize that without the harsh experiences I have had in life, I might not have survived others. So I tell her not to worry about it and to let him learn how to deal with it. One thing I think parents should not do is isolate children from the mean sides of other children. We don’t want our children to grow up to be mean, but we do want them to know how to deal with mean people.
December 23, 2009, 6:33 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Maybe I’m splitting hairs here, but IMO if the accuser thinks something isn’t consensual, it’s not consensual. I’m not talking about the accuser consenting at the time and then changing her mind, and neither was Kobe in his apology. “You know you want it” isn’t mutual consent.
Physical resistance is problematic if the woman fears that resistance won’t prevent her rape, but will only add to the possibility of being beaten or choked in addition to it. Lying still in hopes of getting it over with, in the presence of a reasonable apprehension of force upon resistance, shouldn’t preclude an accusation of rape.
As to allowing your child to be bullied, if that happens – I think if you’re going to do that, then you absolutely must be very aware of everything that’s going on so that you can step in and counsel your child if necessary. It’s part of parenting, to teach your child how to deal with situations, because your child presumably is not being raised by wolves. I will give you an example here. My daughter got into trouble in elementary school a couple of times, for fighting. It always suprised everyone, because she was so tiny and blond and looked so fragile, which could be what emboldened the people who went after her. But I told her that the school had a no-fighting policy, which must mean that they committed to having an environment where the children didn’t have to fight, so she must give them a chance to sort things out before she hauled off and slugged someone. I grabbed her arm a few times and let her practice breaking my grip, had her say “No!” and “Stop!” without whining, yelling, or grinning, things of that nature. Somehow she made it through K-6 at parochial school without being expelled. Middle and high were much easier – there was one girl who tried her in both, and both times the school personnel stepped in and fixed it.
To sum up, you certainly can’t and shouldn’t shelter your child from every little bump in the road, but you have to be sure his life isn’t needlessly made hell by other kids. Some things the kids have to learn the hard way, and some things the parents can teach so the kids can skip all that.
December 23, 2009, 9:52 pmAnatid says:
Chris and Laura, thank you both for the outside links – very interesting reading.
As for bullying (now that we’ve gone completely off-topic), with some exceptions, the greatest influencing factor seems to be attachment type, which most children acquire from their primary caregiver (usually the mother). Anxious-attached children are the victims of bullying two orders of magnitude more than securely-attached children, largely due to a combination of behaviors in which the child both solicits abuse and fails to stand up for himself. Avoidant-attached children will bully other children two orders of magnitude more than securely-attached children, targeting first anxious-attached and then other avoidant-attached kids. Check out the research of Alan Sroufe if you want to learn more, especially how these patterns manifest when the kids become adults – it’s fascinating stuff.
And it should correlate with your own experiences as a child, that there was the one kid that everyone picked on, and there was the one kid who picked on everyone.
Chris, your wife should ask herself what her childhood experiences were. If she was the kid that everyone picked on, your son may be at risk. You sound as though you are securely-attached (an avoidant adult will be unlikely to discuss unpleasant childhood experiences, an anxious adult will be preoccupied and obsess over them, and a secure adult will discuss them calmly and with resolution). Spending more time with your son would provide a protective effect. If your wife only experienced mild bullying as a child, then your son will probably do fine. Still, the types of conversation that Laura described are absolutely helpful to any kid.
Dragging this back to the topic at hand, there appears to be a decent correlation between attachment type and the incident of acquaintance-rape. Anxious adults, especially young adults in their late teens, are more likely to trust a non-close friend, are less likely to assert themselves, are more vulnerable to pressure, and are less likely to protest or defend themselves in an extreme situation. They’re more likely to experience recurring harassment or assault, winding up in the same bad situations over and over.
December 24, 2009, 12:47 amChris Travers says:
How do you make that criminally culpable though? “I felt pressured into consenting because I thought he’d leave me if I said no, and sure I said yes, but I didn’t feel that was real consent” would seem to qualify as being non-consentual in your book. Legally, can one make that distinction though, absent requiring as-yet-developed mind-reading technology as a prelude to sex? I.e. is grudging consent overtly given but subjectively withheld due to fears of loss of the partner or other simila case sufficient to cause a rape charge? The law shouldn’t care about what you subjectively feel so much as what you communicate. Otherwise I would advocate throwing out rape statutes as unconstitutionally vague.
(Also some threats may not rise to the level of supporting a rape or attempted rape charge. “If you don’t have sex with me, I will kill you” clearly would. “If you don’t have sex with me, our relationship is over” clearly shouldn’t.)
I am not saying “you know you want it” counts as consent. I am saying “knew or should have known” should be the edge. IOW, suppose sex begins consentually, and one party says “we should probably stop.” What should matter is what was said, not what the intent was. I think that should NOT be sufficient to count as withdrawing consent.
One complicating factor is that women and men have very different communication styles and so “we should probably stop” is likely to mean something very different to a man than a woman. This is why I think CLEAR communication needs to be a requirement.[1]
I am also not saying one needs to expect evidence of physical resistance in a rape case. However, the fact is that any physical resistance AT ALL can be seen as withdrawing consent. Thus “cannot be expected to physically resist due to intoxication” interferes with communicating withdrawing consent and the like because it means nonverbal communication is unlikely to be possible either.
I agree about talking to my kid about being bullied. In fact we talk about it not infrequently. Some of what I have suggested has allowed him to turn things around.
I hope this helps make things clearer. I am not saying the perception in the mind of the accused is what matters. I am saying the available information from the viewpoint of the accused is what matters. If the accused has every reason to believe the sex is consensual then legally it should be regardless of the subjective view of the accuser. If the accuser clearly has indicated IN SOME WAY that it was not consensual, then it is not.[2]
[1] I am remembering an anecdote where a man and woman were sharing an apartment and the woman was frustrated by the lack of cleanliness in the kitchen. So she cleaned it and told the man “isn’t it nice to have a clean kitchen?” Obviously the message was not understood as it was originally intended, which was to say “I would really appreciate it if you would clean up after yourself.” Obviously hinting should not be enough to withdraw consent partway through a sex act.
[2] Also it is worth noting that consent is usually defined somewhat differently than what an individual might think when looking at an encounter. Usually consent as to the nature of the act is what is required. So presumably pretending to be a woman, seducing a lesbian, blindfolding her, gettng permission to perform intimate acts, and then engaging in heterosexual sex would clearly be nonconsentual because the essential aspects of the act were not consented to. However, pretending to be a rich businessman when one was lower middle class, seducing women with promises of expensive gifts, and having sex with them would not necessarily trigger rape-by-fraud statutes, nor would pretending to be single when one was married….. “I did not consent to have sex with a hobo” is not the same thing as “I did not consent to have sex.”
December 24, 2009, 12:52 amAnatid says:
Shouldn’t count as rape, but I still want to stress the terrific pressures that can be involved. The picture becomes more clouded when the couple has kids, when the man’s name is on the lease for the apartment, he is the primary breadwinner, and she has no employable skills sufficient to support a family. There’s a reason why the rate of divorce is higher among women with more education – more mobility to leave the husband and be self-supporting. There’s also a reason why women will return to an abusive husband time and time again, often facing deadly violence. Although I would not want to press rape charges in such a situation, I would suspect that not-entirely-consensual sex might occur in such an imbalanced relationship. But there’s a broad gap between “distasteful/immoral” and “criminally liable.”
December 24, 2009, 1:16 amChris Travers says:
Anatid:
My wife is certainly an anxious type, but I work from home and spend a fair bit of time with the kids too. It makes things interesting sometimes. However she says she was always the popular kid. She did have other traumatic experiences (at the hands of adults).
From what I have heard my son displays the same initial reaction to bullying that I did, that is to say standing up to the bullies as a general matter of principle. Most of what I end up talking with him about are things like HOW to do this constructively.
But there are two ways this bears on the current discussion. When I was little there was this one bully who was ALWAYS beating me up. I found out later that there was a period of time when teachers were paying him candy bars to leave me alone and that during that time, the beatings had been more limited. Years later, the bully’s father was arrested for sexually molesting a child. Whether or not hte bully was sexually molested I can be pretty confident in retrospect he was abused.
A second time was the college girlfriend who, after being in a relationship with me for two years and we moved in together, began to be extremely violent. It started out with her cutting herself and punching me and eventually escallated to her hitting me with blunt objects including the heavy half of a pool cue, threatening me with combat knives, and the like. She also drank very heavily and would make all sort of accusations when drunk that she wouldn’t remember the next day. I suspected she was heavily traumatized in some way as a kid, and given that so many of the accusations made when drunk were accusations of rape (against seemingly random people) I assumed some sort of sexual trauma was in her past as well which would be transferred to others in these drunken episodes, but many of her problems might have had to do with being raised by a single mother who was suffering from multiple sclerosis. It might have been crazy on my part but I stayed with her through the winter because she was also suicidal and I didn’t want her suicide to be triggered by a breakup. Out of all the folks who have assaulted me, she is the only one who made me fear for my life. (When the street gang assaulted me, there was no time to be afraid. However, six months of regular assaults even by someone smaller, weaker, and less trained than me is concerning. Training doesn’t protect one so well during sleep and the like, and spend enough time around knives and you will get cut….)
I do wonder what the possible role of sexual trauma was in both these assailants though was. However I will never know. Sad, really.
December 24, 2009, 1:27 amBarry Deutsch says:
They found that 1.7% of female students had been raped in a seven-month period. (An additional 1.1% had experience attempted rape). If you extrapolate that over a longer period — over a five-year average college career, for example — the prevalence of rape would almost certainly be much higher.
2.8% over seven months is not a low number at all; it’s a frighteningly high number.
Elsewhere, the same study found that 10% of female students had experienced a completed rape sometime in their life before the beginning of the prior school term. (See page 18.) That’s a more reasonable number to quote from this study, if you want to get an idea of how common rape is overall.
(That said, the study almost certainly undercounts rape prevalence in some ways. Most obviously, it doesn’t count male victims of rape. It also doesn’t include any questions about raping people who were so drunk they were unconscious — which isn’t an uncommon form of rape, especially in college.)
December 24, 2009, 5:40 amBarry Deutsch says:
The two numbers aren’t even remotely comparable. Koss’ 1 in 4 figure was a lifetime prevalence figure; the 2.8% figure you’re quoting was only for seven months.
The DoJ study found that about 21% of female students had experienced either rape or attempted rape in their lifetime prior to the current school term. That’s the number which comes closest to being a legitimate comparison to Koss’ 1 in 4 figure for rape and attempted rape. Overall, the DoJ study seems to confirm Koss’ findings, contrary to what you argue.
December 24, 2009, 6:03 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
Hm.
The girl who briefly bullied my daughter in middle and high school turned out to have an absolutely wretched home life. Her mother, too, had MS, and a seizure disorder, probably with some dementia; she threw terrible tantrums and kicked the daughter out of the house periodically, whereupon she would walk down the street and stay with her grandfather until it all blew over. After the school stopped her from hitting and kicking my daughter there was some psychological stuff that I walked her through dealing with. And then a miracle occurred … the first Lord of the Rings movie came out and they discovered that they both loved it. (My kid already loved the books.) They started drawing pictures for each other – the other girl is a very talented artist – and calling each other “Merry” and “Pippin” and even began going to movies together and such. Every now and then when the other girl would call, my husband and I would say to each other in disbelief that we never would have dreamed such a thing would happen. It was like one of those improbably smarmy movies, really.
I also in the last week heard a woman tell me an absolutely jaw-dropping story about sexual harrassment by a previous boss, and she mentioned that she had been abused as a child and that possibly contributed to making it very hard for her to deal with – she didn’t push back at all, she just left the job. I told my husband that I wondered if some people had “victim” invisibly tattood on their foreheads, as we had already previously determined that some people have “sucker” there. What you’re saying, Anatid, is that they do.
Chris, I am a big one for communicating exactly what you mean, no more and no less. But if you say that women tend to hint, and that hinting should not be enough, then you are standardizing how men are as the norm. I’m not sure that’s really appropriate. If, in fact, women speak indirectly instead of stating things outright, I’m not sure the burden is on them to change, rather than on men to make really sure that the person on the other end of the sex act wants to be there.
December 24, 2009, 9:10 amChris Travers says:
You have a point about normative issues. There may be a difference in how men perceive hinting at things and how women generally perceive hinting at things (both hint and both are direct at other times.
However, as far as legal responsibility goes, I think communication needs to be viewed from the perspective of the receiver of the communication. If a reasonable misunderstanding occurs the receiver should not be held responsible to that. Unfortunately, our culture is still quite sexist when it comes to roles in sexual relationships— women are still expected to be boundary-setters (a sexually aggressive man is seen as fine but the sexually aggressive woman is seen as a slut and generally it seems that women tend to be the ones who enforce this double-standard far more than men do).
So until we can get over a bit more sexism in our culture we can assume that where heterosexual sexual consent is at issue, most often (though by no means not always), the one asking for consent is the man and the one communicating whether consent is given or not is the woman.
I think we would be better off if that double-standard was reduced, however.
December 24, 2009, 11:53 amBarry Deutsch says:
I think it might be helpful to distinguish more explicitly between legal and social norms.
If A has sex with B, even though B consents only regretfully and halfheartedly… well, I don’t think that’s rape. But we should still be able to say that A has acted like a scumbag.
Feminists talk a lot about “enthusiastic consent” — the idea that it’s not just wrong to rape people, but that it’s also morally wrong to have sex with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with you, even if they fail to say “no” in a clear and explicit fashion, and even if they meet some bare technical definition of “consenting.” Such sex may or may not be rape, depending on the exact circumstances — but it’s a scummy way to act.
I think that’s the social norm we should be trying to build. A social norm built on “if s/he doesn’t say no, then there’s consent and there’s nothing to object to” will inevitably approve of lousy and abusive situations.
I’m not saying, of course, that all scummy sex should be criminalized. But just because something isn’t criminal shouldn’t prevent us from condemning it morally.
December 24, 2009, 5:42 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Barry, I think you are onto something here.
My daughter tells me of her friends having sex with their boyfriends without really wanting to – they think they are supposed to, she says, and they don’t believe her when she tells them they really don’t have to. You wouldn’t think this kind of thing happens in this day and time – she and her agemates just graduated from college this year – but it is sadly common, apparently. It distresses her to think that these girls don’t feel ownership of their bodies to the extent that they can tell their boyfriends “I don’t want to do that” in any convincing way. Like you, I don’t think it’s rape. It’s still not ideal.
Chris, I think women probably, in a lot of cases, frown upon what they perceive as slutlike behavior because it may be setting up an environment that puts all women at risk. There is something to that, because social norms always seem to sink to the lowest common denominator.
I think losing the double standard would be an improvement in a lot of ways. Remember the earlier thread about female teachers and male underage students – there are men who are evidently uncomfortable with the idea that a normal man might not be after all the sex he can get from any reasonable source. It would be good for the boys and men around them to be out from under that pressure.
December 24, 2009, 6:50 pmChris Travers says:
Barry:
I generally agree. I don’t think one needs to go as far as “enthusiastic consent” simply because people may choose to have sex for any number of reasons. We also have a lot of work to do to equalize concepts of responsibility for sexual morality and this is an important thing. As a society few people at any age seem to be able to be adult about sex in personal relationships.
Men need to think more about sexual restraint and women need to feel more empowered to be sexually aggressive. That takes a lot of effort to change though.
But let’s turn the tables on this a bit. There are times when my sex drive is quite a bit higher than my wife’s and sometimes she consents just to accomodate that. But there are times when the reverse is true and I accomodate her. In this case, “well, I don’t really want to tonight but ok” is not something I see as innately problematic because it doesn’t just go one way. So I think it is something short of a categorical rule.
Laura:
I think a lot of social games have to do with prestige and power. I think your post shows both sides of women being culturally marginalized out of the center of the lovemaking process or rather being turned into objects of that process rather than participants (i.e. sex is something that happens to women with or without consent instead of something that men and women consent in equally).
I think the best approach is for parents to talk to kids about sexual responsibility generally, but also not trying to cause children of either gender to be afraid of sexuality either. Being confident is a good thing. Being afraid of multiple bad outcomes on the other hand benefits nobody.
As an aside I have been in exactly two sexual relationships in my life. The first was with a college girlfriend who later turned out to be absolutely crazy. But we were together for six months before having sex. The second is with my wife. We knew eachother for about three months before having sex. In both cases, I waited for my partner to make the first move.
December 24, 2009, 10:09 pmpatricio molina says:
So there is no recourse against the 88 group (gang of 88?)
December 28, 2009, 4:21 amkombi tamiri says:
Thanks for article and share. very good. Thanks information..
January 5, 2010, 9:04 amMichael Ejercito says:
The problem is, not everyone can find a girlfriend. Are those men supposed to be virgins or worse?
What are the historical reasons for this double standard?
So the only successful marriages are marriages with high schiool dropouts?
February 15, 2010, 1:20 pm