The New York Times has an explosive story about a girl who was raped by some football players. Hobart and William Smith College bungled the investigation.
Why are colleges doing their independent investigations? Why isn’t this simply a police matter?
Apt. 11d 
That was my reaction. The college staff should limit themselves to giving the woman in question psychological and emotional support, including telling her that they will assist her in reporting the matter to the police. Why on earth would a group of university administrators be qualified to conduct a rape investigation or a rape trial? For instance, does anyone think that anyone associated with Duke University helped the situation or the university with their involvement in the celebrated rape case there? Universities should stick to investigating things they understand, like plagiarism.
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I’m not too excited about local authorities handling rape cases, especially relating to colleges where there are serious town/gown divides. However, it only makes logical sense that the police investigate, not the college.
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I suspect that, historically, the goal of colleges’ internal systems was to keep as much student misconduct out of the police as possible. From a student’s perspective, it may be better to be written up by a dorm advisor for underage drinking than to have a police officer issue a ticket. How, when, and why sexual assault came to included under this umbrella is beyond me. Certainly it has always been the case that if there were to be a homicide, the police would be brought in.
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It’s hard to hide a body, so the police must be called. Other crimes, like drinking etc, can be ignored. Unfortunately, sexual assault and rape could be hidden by universities.
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In principle, I agree completely: rape is a crime, it should be reported and investigated like any other crime. In practice, the competence and interest of police forces are highly varied, the quality of medical care and advice also anything but uniform, and the American justice system, when presented with rape cases, often turns into something Kafka couldn’t have imagined on a bad day. I guess I still agree that the law should handle it, but like Wendy, I’m not optimistic about the results.
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All of this is true, but none of it is an argument for why universities should be taking those roles.
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Tenured Radical explores some of the issues here:
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2014/07/inside-the-red-zone-the-college-rape-season-begins-soon/
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In practice, I think the effect of colleges doing their own rape investigations is often to sweep conduct that should be criminally prosecuted under the rug. But in theory, I can see there being a real function related to evidentiary standards. “Beyond a reasonable doubt” is a very, very high burden of proof, which is appropriate if you’re going to impose criminal sanctions on someone. But there is a lot of room for allegations that probably wouldn’t support a criminal conviction, but are well enough established to justify administrative action of some kind by the college.
The case in the article actually sounds to me as if it should have been enough to put the football players in prison. But say something without the contemporaneous texting, or the witness — where it’s a victim with an impaired recollection of what happened because she was drunk, and no supporting evidence that unambiguously establishes what happened. Depending on the details, I can very easily envision a case where as a juror, I’d have to say that there was a reasonable doubt, but as a college administrator looking at exactly the same evidence I’d be clear enough on what happened to suspend or expel the rapist, or to rearrange housing assignments to protect the complainant, or whatever seemed appropriate.
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I think that part of the motivation might be (and have been) the protection of university reputation, and that motivation simply can’t be justified. I am developing the notion that the university should have a duty to report a felony to the police. Police have historically done a bad job in handling rape cases, but, my guess is that it hasn’t been any worse than the way that universities have handled it, at least since the days since they gave up their function of regulating the social and moral life of their students. Police, in addition, have rules and laws governing how they must handle rape cases these days, at least.
I do think that schools think they might be able to manage allegations of rape to support the individuals without the trauma of criminal convictions, but the facts seem on the whole to contradict that assumption. One can find many stories of women who believe their stories have been mishandled, and some of men who feel that way as well (who, say, found themselves acting under limiting restraining orders, or moving off campus, or into forced leaves, because of allegations that would not meet standards in court). The schools are trying to have a “rape lite” adjudication, and I suspect that’s simply not working. I believe large state universities are moving towards this understanding, and treat rape as the felony it is under law, by reporting it to the police. We should think about making this the requirement for all allegations of rape.
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I have a terrible feeling that the police’s and DA’s level of enthusiasm for the prosecution would have a lot to do with whether or not the football team has been successful the last couple years.
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As a parent of HS boys, I think my good strategy is to make them read the articles about ambiguous situations ending badly for both boys and girls. I also want to stress the idea that screwing the body of some unconscious drunk girl is evil, and also not fun in any real way. They will, or at least should, feel bad in the morning whether there are consequences or not. Views from the Levendees would be appreciated. Laura, what are you doing to indoctrinate yours to be young gentlemen?
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Do you have an article directory yet that you could share? That’s not a bad project as a sort of digital scrapbook: cautionary tales for teens.
By the way, I don’t know if there’s good backup for this, but I heard through the college grapevine that there’s been some research that a disproportionate number of sexual assaults involves college girls during their first six weeks on campus freshman year (i.e. right when they have few street smarts and are eager to experiment with their new freedom).
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Indoctrinating one’s sons to be gentlemen will do little good unless others are indoctrinating their daughters to be ladies. We have tried to do that, but I can’t say we have felt supported by society at large. Certainly the project of turning out ladies and gentlemen is not on the agenda of any high school or college I know of.
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How does one indoctrinate a girl to be a lady? Dave tells us his proposal for boys — to tell them cautionary tales of bad outcomes.
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I’m confused. I suppose if you teach your son there are two classes of women–ladies and trollops, and one only has to be a gentleman towards the former–then the comportment of the woman matters to behavior. Otherwise one would expect a gentleman to behave like a gentleman in all circumstances. The men I know who were raised right are pretty skilled at diffusing the drunken advances of a woman incapable of consenting and further making sure the women are taken care of. That can include staying with the woman, finding her friends, or making sure she gets home safely.
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I don’t really get your point here. Don’t rape girls; don’t have sex with a girl who is clearly incapable of making decisions; only have sex with women whose answer to “would you like to have sex with me?” is — and remains — an enthusiastic yes; stop if that changes…these are guidelines that apply to all girls.
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Yes, I was thinking those things, too.
But, I’m actually asking a non-rhetorical question, too. I have a middle schooler; I give her lots of rules, some of which are pretty far out of the mainstream of her middle school population. I’m comfortable doing so.I’m not expecting, though, that I will be able to get her to follow my rules in college, and further, at that point, I think she has a right to develop her own rules. But, I can give her advice. So what advice do we give the young woman heading off to college, in the same way that give the boys advice?
Giving the boys the advice that they shouldn’t have sex with someone who has not or cannot consent is good advice. So is telling men that they must obtain explicit consent. But, these assaults are occurring when everyone is under the influence of psychoactive substances that impair their judgment and ability to make decisions, to assess whether a question has been asked or answered and to judge the nuances of the answer. Ultimately I think telling boys that they need consent will not practically prevent the assaults.
In my mind I want something more extreme, like, say, an 18 year old college freshman can’t consent to group sex at a party without a written contract. Then, if the facts alleged in this article were true, the frat boy football players would have to pull out the written contract to protect themselves, or they’d be kicked out of school. Could that actually work? Would be willing to apply it to simply having sex with your partner (say, like in the old days, when adultery was a crime and one needed a marriage contract)?
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It seems to me that you’re conflating two things. I assume you mean “ladies” and “gentlemen” are people who do not want or plan to have sex before they are married, and who do not dress or otherwise behave as if they do. That’s a fine goal, common to a lot of religious traditions. But a boy or man does not have to brought up as a “gentleman” in this sense to be the kind of ethical, serious guy like the friend in this story who tried to find and help her.
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bj – I don’t know. My advice to boys and girls going to university would be don’t get out of your mind on drugs of any kind including alcohol and also, don’t attend those parties where that is the point. That will be a part of my advice giving to my kids. Find a Friday and Saturday night job and work that instead.
This is, pragmatically speaking, how things sorted out at my previous university — the consequences of getting messed-up drunk were too scary. I ended up finding a tribe that spent its time on early internet text-based roleplaying games. But I don’t know how practical that really is. It’s a tough one.
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JennG said:
“bj – I don’t know. My advice to boys and girls going to university would be don’t get out of your mind on drugs of any kind including alcohol and also, don’t attend those parties where that is the point. That will be a part of my advice giving to my kids. Find a Friday and Saturday night job and work that instead.”
Yep. Or, at the very least, practice the buddy system, be mentally prepared to drop a dime at any time, and make sure you have the wherewithal to get home safely no matter what you do. But, all in all, JennG’s advice is simpler and easier to implement–why hang around with people that you believe may sexually assault you or others?
Also, “It’s OK to be a fink,” is one of the values we try to model to our kids. If I see a stray dog wandering around looking forlorn, I call it in. If I see a long-distance bus wandering unpredictably between lanes, I call it in.
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Then your teaching is broken, because a gentleman’s behavior is consistent regardless of that of the people he faces. A gentleman doesn’t blame provocation of another person for his lack of discipline.
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That six week period is mentioned in the article.
A few years ago, I read a similar article about Harvard. I thought then what I thought now – how can it be legal for a school to know about such allegations and not report them to the police? I understand why colleges want the maximum level of control, but who cares? Why do we allow it? Any allegation of a felony needs to go to law enforcement immediately. I agree with AmyP and others that the police may not do much better – but they couldn’t do any worse.
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I talked to a college faculty member who’d recently done a college training. Apparently, faculty here are now responsible for immediately reporting (not sure to whom) any sexual assault and they need to immediately explain that to the student who is unburdening themselves. (I believe student counseling is still confidential.)
The worry is that in practice what this means is that students immediately clam up.
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We were recently told the same thing–and that some Federal law (not sure of the name) now requires it, so it must be the case everywhere. I think once they start unburdening it’s already too late, so I don’t see how clamming up will help–it must be reported, not to the police but to the administration, which must keep and share statistical data.
I’m pretty easy to talk to and get students coming to me with different sorts of problems, but as a mother of three daughters I would still worry more (and will, in two years, when my first flies the coop) about the potential for previously unrecognized mood disorders to erupt during those first few years. For every student who has had complaints about sexual assault (not many) I have had many, many more who came to my office clearly depressed, most for the first time, and without a clear sense of where to turn for help. I will be checking in quite frequently and asking pertinent questions about mood when my ones leave home.
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I’m wary of the notion that emphasizing extreme outcomes will be a deterrent. Haven’t we discussed that with drugs already? The fairly rare but really bad does not seem to dissuade the young (while it weighs heavily on the minds of parents)
I remember a study that said the most effective anti-alcohol programs were ones that emphasized the lack of consensus on the behavior (ie “everyone” is not doing it). Potentially there’s a parallel of that campaign for boys? Maybe that’s part of teaching them to be kind.
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I think it would help to teach a man that having sexual contact with a woman too incapacitated to consent is akin to hitting a woman. It’s cowardly, unmanly, and in no circumstances would a ‘real man’ ever do it. (Yes, I know there’s some problems there from a perspective of full gender equality, but I don’t think the good should be the enemy of the perfect). In other words, we need to make sexual assault as ostracized as physical violence towards women.
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B.I. said:
“It’s cowardly, unmanly, and in no circumstances would a ‘real man’ ever do it.”
I’ve been doing a little manosphere research recently (it was after some posts I’d done on a Catholic family discussion forum (!!!!????) wound up the subject of very unfriendly attention over at Dalrock) and interestingly, in those parts, there’s a lot of hostility to similar language (“man up,” etc). I don’t know how prevalent manosphere/men’s rights thinking is in the male college population, but in a lot of those quarters, there’s a desire to throw over the normal rules (which are believed to be unfair to men) and essentially go feral.
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Yeah Amy P, it seems like the MRA movement is about retaining the misogyny of patriarchy with none of the chivalry. Their ideal world is one where women are maids, sex slaves, AND bring home the bacon while the man sits around. It’s entitlement to the extreme.
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Yeah, it’s a funny thing that while those guys criticize women for wanting modern freedoms while holding onto traditional privileges and chivalry (all rights and no responsibilities), a lot of the MRA guys are just as much bent on having their cake and eating it, too, just in the opposite direction.
Oh, and while I’m on the subject, I’ve noted the following:
1. They hate career women and women who wait until their 30s to get married.
2. They complain about lazy SAHMs, spousal support, child support, and hate 50/50 splits of property with an SAHM in the case of divorce.
Make up your minds, guys.
I could go on and on. There must be a dissertation in the works already on these guys–it’s a very rich vein for research.
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Like Dave S., the men I know who are not rapists (aka every man I’ve ever talked about the topic with) do not find the idea of nonconsensual sex sexy. Treating a woman like a living sex doll is profoundly revolting to them, and they would far rather abstain or masturbate than have sex with someone who was unconscious or not interested in them sexually. I feel the same way, and I’m not sure how men grow up thinking sex is fun without feeling desired by their partners. My guess is it has to do with sexual puritanism and objectification of women. If you learn that women aren’t capable of enjoying sex, then you’re less likely to care that the woman doesn’t enjoy it. Likewise if you view women on some level as ‘objects’ rather than agentive humans and sex as a way of ‘scoring’ or ‘collecting’ an experience with an object rather than as a mutually pleasurable activity, then you probably don’t care what the woman thinks. What we probably need is more feminism and more sex positivity.
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“I feel the same way, and I’m not sure how men grow up thinking sex is fun without feeling desired by their partners.”
Maybe the view is that something is better than nothing? In my internet travels recently, I’ve been noting an uptick in men (generally in the 18-30 bracket) who feel that no woman is going to want them, that virtually all women are being monopolized by the top 20% of guys (how is that even mathematically possible? no idea), and that themselves they are the victims of “sexual poverty.” It’s virtually impossible to talk a guy down from that particular view, even if it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
http://www.doctornerdlove.com/2014/07/self-limiting-beliefs-are-holding-back/
That comment thread has a number of the critters.
I don’t know what the overlap with actual rapists is, but one can easily imagine a guy with those “sexual poverty” views deciding to go Occupy and to claim what he regards as his fair share.
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I have to admit that I found this article extremely disturbing and I found the Tenured Radical article even more upsetting. I’m trying to unpack it all and figure out how to write something coherent.
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I also found it deeply upsetting. Is this a new norm? Was it always there, but only for a group of women we never heard about (because they remained silent)?
I think I was in school during one of the heights of the “no means no” and “take back the night” walks, so maybe nothing is really different. But these stories emerging, of young men and women in drunken parties engaging in fairly extreme behavior (and documenting it) leaves me wondering what is happening.
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The documentation is certainly a new thing. And I think widespread social media-fueled exhibitionism is also a new thing.
I don’t know whether the criminal behavior itself is different or more common, but it is getting easier to prove (because a lot of perps can’t resist the urge to text each other and take and share souvenir photos).
I suspect that the massive amounts and endless varieties of pornography are shaping people’s desires, expectations and repertoires in a way that was not feasible pre-internet.
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I worked in a dorm during the late 80s/early 90s as well as having been a victim of sexual assault myself by members of a sports team (unreported, except two years later when I was talking to the dean of students casually) and I can attest that this was always there. The documenting is new.
I have been holding back on some of my strong feelings on this topic but…we had an actual girls’ orientation in freshman week, informal, where girls were told which two dorms never, ever to visit without at least one sober wingman and which areas of other dorms were set up for assault (rape rooms, although mostly due to the quirky architecture). While all that was useful information, the message I got when it happened to me (Oct 31, freshman year, right in the Red Zone) was that therefore I had been an idiot. This was all well-known throughout the (small, Canadian) school. Attitudes shifted slightly as I was leaving and the worst dorms were made co-ed under the theory that would break up the problem, I guess. I pretty seriously doubt it did.
I agree with the Tenured Radical piece that campuses will take this problem seriously when they are looking at financial penalties akin to punitive damages for negligence, or a serious enough PR issue to impact on enrollment (which I find unlikely for a variety of sociological and psychological reasons). We recently had a slew of incidents on Canadian campuses where the freshmen songs/cheers were _vile_ and it just now, 2013/14, occurred to people that maybe it’s not okay to have a cheer about raping girls, as well as a scandal about a group of boys that were discussing a student leader and how they were going to use rape to punish her for winning (if I remember the story correctly.) At least that surface-level stuff is starting to move (in 2014??? SRSLY??!!) but I am not sure that gets at the actual problem.
My husband was also involved in one of these “was it rape?” cases that resulted in a hung jury…boy meets girl at rave, they go to have sex in the alley, girl goes quiet and limp but never actually says no. Boy says at the trial he knew something was off but kept going, which is I suspect what hung the jury. That shows the culture in which things happen even in slightly fuzzier cases.
Like I said above I have boys and that is where I am starting: By making it their responsibility to get an enthusiastic yes, or at least trying to pass that on. It’s tough though.
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All this just convinces me that campus police and administrators should not be dealing with rape. It would be nice to believe that a college’s judicial system would deal with an accusal of rape quickly and, if there was a preponderance of evidence a rape had occurred, throw the student off campus for good, all in a way that would help the victim avoid having to be further entangled in our criminal justice system. But all these stories show that college judicial systems don’t work well, that too often favored students (eg, athletes) get favored treatment, and that even the end result I favor — permanent expulsion — would just leave a rapist free to assault someone else at some other college. Better to call the police and have them and prosecutors deal with this serious crime. Yes, I know that police and prosecutors fail as well, but they’re trained to handle crimes and they should do so. After all, if a murder occurred on campus no one would look to the college to handle it.
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Considering that athletes get favored treatment all throughout the university–we talked here about tutoring programs a while ago, and there’s currently a whole of raft of (non-sexual) scandals at UNC–I don’t know why anyone would be surprised that athletes get favored treatment in university disciplinary proceedings.
Then again, I didn’t notice Tenured Radical and her friends demanding that Bill Clinton receive the same treatment as Bob Packwood, so my contempt for the hypocrisy of the academy knows no political barriers.
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It’s kind of amazing how whenever someone mentions anything related to penises, you think about Bill Clinton.
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We discussed it at dinner last night. My daughter in college had read the article. She hears gossip from friends through their smart phones; that is, many of the stories come from many different colleges.
I believe the person most able to change the landscape on this issue is…the college VARSITY MEN’S COACH. Make it worth his while to keep his team members from sexually assaulting women, and things will change. For one thing, there should not be “meetings with accused and witnesses (i.e., other team members)” out of the public record, under the coach’s control.
The men are rational actors. Perception of risk plays a large role in their actions. It is troubling that some of the witnesses were other players. Most likely, they were the recipients of athletic scholarships, controlled by the coach.
I was also shocked that a “chief fundraiser” was in charge of the college’s investigation. Excuse me? Why? Was his/her role to get to the bottom of the issue, or to hush it up?
Of course, the cover up has done more damage to the college than treating it as sexual assault. Rather like Penn State.
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Hobart and William Smith is a D-III school, so there are no athletic scholarships. Most likely, the football players are just big UMC kids, whose status, if any, comes more from their popularity on campus than from their financial contribution to the university.
In some of these cases involving male athletes and sorority girls, there is a racial and class dynamic, usually unmentioned, playing a role, but I actually don’t think that’s the case here.
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The difficulties faced by universities are epitomized by these two articles about sexual assault cases at Brown:
http://www.browndailyherald.com/2014/04/23/u-mishandled-sexual-assault-case-victim-says/
You almost have to pity the universities, except I don’t.
I think a lot of the problem is dehumanization of women by society as a whole, which is why women participate in the rape culture. It’s hard to see yourself as a human when no one else around you does.
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Well, Wendy, thanks for the personal hostility up above. I can always count on you for that. I won’t be participating further in this discussion.
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I’m hostile because there was a discussion going on that was relatively free of politicization, and bam, there you go.
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There’s a list on Chronicle of HIgher Education of which schools have the highest rates of sexual assaults — and the methodologist in me was all about ‘those are the ones that have the most REPORTED sexual assaults. THose are the ones that are responsible about reporting them” but then my 18 year old son (yes, we’re a bunch of methods nerds) looked at the list, and he said to me “Don’t you find it interesting that most of these are what we would think of as ‘good schools’? Places with high name recognition?”” His explanation was that these were the places where guys felt the most entitled — to lots of things, to being paid more than they are probably worth, to starting a job off as a supervisor rather than an employees, and to having sex with beautiful women whether or not they consent because, after all, they go to school “in Boston’. I would link the survey but it has apparently migrated behind a paywall.
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Not wanting to look bad in comparison to other colleges probably enters into this.
I think I would give some credit to the “good schools”–they may have enough institutional confidence that they feel they can afford to tell the truth. Also, if you’re a well-known school, there’s no danger that the rape stats will become your top 10 google listings forever, but if you’re a small, obscure school, that could easily happen (at least for the foreseeable issue).
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Like Hobart & William Smith. The NY times article is now the top Google hit.
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I have a 14 year old daughter, and there was a boy at middle school this year who was joking about raping her. We had a really hard time getting anyone to take it seriously. They response we got was “well, he’s obviously just joking”. And yes, he was only joking. But I still felt like that was NOT an ok thing to joke about. ever. I think we may be missing some teachable moments early on….
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Was that just the administration or the administration, parents of the kid and the police?
That sounds like the sort of situation where having a police car arrive at the family home and having a police officer explain the law to the young perp and his parents might be helpful. (Everybody hates having to explain a police car to the neighbors.) A lot of times, just making threats is a crime all by itself.
http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattle911/2009/10/20/when-are-threatening-words-or-profanity-illegal/
If the police can’t be stirred, a lawyer’s letter might be called for.
I know people complain about overkill (1st graders waving Pop Tart guns, etc.), but there really are 14-year-old rapists and coming down like a load of bricks now might save everybody a lot of trouble later.
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For me, the point isn’t that one is necessarily worried that that the joke about rape is a threat, a real one, but that it isn’t OK to joke about rape. A fourteen year old might actually be a potential rape threat, but the first grader waving the water pistol might find himself with a real gun and be a real threat as well. But, they’re usually not. In our house, it’s not OK to point a pretend gun and say “bang bang you’re dead.” and it’s not OK to joke about rape either. And, on top of that, the censure/prohibition is greater the older you are. The goal for me is to teach the 14yo that joking about killing or raping is unacceptable, not to react as though I’ve actually been threatened with rape or death (if I really don’t believe I have been).
The *joke* has to be taken seriously, even if there isn’t, on assessment, any underlying threat.
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Unfortunate personal experience suggests that when somebody is repeatedly “joking” about raping you, it’s not unreasonable to suspect that they really, truly are thinking hard about it.
That’s why I say–throw the books at the kid and tell DD, “Nobody is ever joking”. Or, as the more popular pop psych phrase goes, listen to people when they tell you who they are.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/14/oprah-life-lesson-maya-angelou_n_2869235.html
(That will probably be the only time you will ever catch me quoting Oprah and Maya Angelou at the same time.)
It’s easier for everybody to do this now, rather than when the kid has been unleashed into the wild four years from now.
The 6-year-old saying Bang, Bang! probably doesn’t want to kill everybody–the 14-year-old probably does want to sexually assault DD.
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In hindsight, we probably should have pushed harder. We let the school handle it. We ended up switching schools for next year (due to a multitude of reasons, not just this.) The hardest part for me was the realization that so many people genuinely seemed to think that she was being oversensitive, and that was the bigger problem. I discovered a “boys will be boys” mentality that really bugged me.
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Bummer.
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Really troublesome. I do not believe that the issue would have been met with a “boys will be boys” mentality in our area. We’ve seen several boys leave over what I hear from the grapevine as aggressive enforcement of physical conflicts (and, in one case, an allegation of sexual harassment). We’ve never heard equivalent stories of girls leaving (which, in the parallel I’m drawing, would be your story).
I do think schools are in a very difficult spot when they need to regulate the interactions among their students. I know in our school, I’ve heard serious complaints about lack of enforcement and over enforcement and am also privy to the balancing of all the different needs of a small community of children who behave practically like siblings.
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After thinking about this over the weekend, I suggest one method of improving the aftermath of sexual assault at colleges would be to make all college employees mandated reporters for sexual assault on students, much as teachers are mandated reporters for child abuse.
Such a change would put a stop to the current game (allegedly, by some, etc.) of “therapists” paid by colleges persuading victims of physical assaults that turning to the police would be too traumatizing. These advisors face divided loyalties, don’t they? If you can persuade yourself that going through a trial would be really difficult for a patient, I think it would be much easier to try to make the whole problem “go away.”
See the Amherst story for another, very similar, situation, in terms of counseling students to avoid the legal system. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/education/amherst-account-of-rape-brings-tension-to-forefront.html?pagewanted=all
To provide psychological counseling for students in distress, refer students to outside therapists paid for by student medical insurance. But send to prison any adult employed by a college who does not report an assault.
I suspect that if more students were to face criminal consequences for sexual assault, the rate would decrease. This also would put an end to the sort of kangaroo-courts many colleges currently run on such issues. Any accused person has a right to due process. Any victim has a right to unbiased counsel as to whether she should press charges.
Many accounts cannot be prosecuted, due to a lack of evidence. In this digital age, though, there is much more evidence than in earlier times. It is much more difficult to maintain a divided front of silence, when lawyers can subpoena text messages.
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As the parent of teenagers, I also think we must get beyond the thought that we can protect our children by inculcating certain attitudes in them while they are in elementary school. The pity of all this is, “good” people can commit horrendous crimes, given the wrong circumstances. “Good” children can be the victim of crimes, in the wrong circumstances.
The majority of all college students drink: http://www.alcohol101plus.org/downloads/CollegeStudents.pdf. A drunk person cannot consent to sex. If both parties are drunk, neither can consent.
We have to get past the old-fashioned sentiment that “good” women don’t drink, and that those who do “deserve” whatever happens, or that it’s useless to prosecute, because juries won’t convict. Even prosecutions without convictions will wake up parents of middle class, budding sexual predators. It is also far easier for a parent to threaten a college administrator (I’ll tell my friends not to give to the annual fund!) to get rape allegations quashed, than it is to threaten a prosecutor (I think that’s a felony?)
From all I’ve read over the past years about fraternity parties, (not beginning with the Caitlyn Flanagan article), they are not healthy places for young women to visit. Unfortunately, it seems many freshman students look forward to experiencing “real” college parties. Wanting to go to parties with friends does not mean a student consents to gang rape.
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“A drunk person cannot consent to sex. If both parties are drunk, neither can consent.”
Morally, yes, and that’s something to work on.
Legally, I’m not sure that’s ever going to fly if it’s a tipsy or enthusiastically drunk girl. Will a jury want to send a cute college boy to prison for hard time for having sex with a loudly enthusiastic drunk girl? Not likely.
Might as well start issuing the kids breathalyzers. I wonder if there’s an app for that?
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