57 thoughts on “3 Links on College Rapes”

  1. I haven’t had the chance to fully read the first article, but I am intrigued. As a feminist (and the mother of two boys), one of my concerns with this issue is the whole idea that a women cannot consent to sex if she has been drinking. While I get that sometimes men use booze and drugs as a tool to rape, I also find this problematic in situations where both parties have been drinking. If a man and a woman have been drinking and have sexual relations, it seems to me that we’re holding men to a higher standard to suggest that they need can recognize that a women is drunk and therefore cannot consent. In essence, what we are saying is that men are better able to control themselves when they are drunk – which to me seems sexist. I don’t know how to properly sort this out. On the one hand, we can’t allow men to say hey I was drunk too, when they purposefully get someone drunk for the sake of taking advantage. However, we shouldn’t say that men should be punished when they have drunken sex with someone who later regrets it. How do we develop policies that distinguish between the two? I don’t know.

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    1. Here’s an analogy I’ve used for the both drinking situation:

      Imagine two drivers. One is driving a Mini. The other is driving a large delivery truck. While both drivers should observe all applicable traffic regulations, it’s more important that the driver of the large delivery truck do so, as the potential for harm to others is far greater than in the case of the Mini.

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      1. One potential problem is that this suggests that women are somehow harmed by having sex in a way that men aren’t. Certainly an operative social norm, even in these enlightened days, but one that the activists who want these differential punishments at least nominally fiercely oppose.

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      2. I agree with Megan McArdle. It would be easy to implement different standards for the two sexes, and they might even survive judicial scrutiny, if the regulators and administrators said upfront that women are fragile flowers who need protection. But no one is willing to do that, so the system tends to caught in insoluble contradiction.

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      3. “One potential problem is that this suggests that women are somehow harmed by having sex in a way that men aren’t.”

        That’s the whole point of the analogy–the potential for physical and psychological damage is genuinely much greater for the woman involved.

        I think that there’s a weird current tendency (both by MRAs and certain strands of feminism) to treat heterosexual sexual activity as totally symmetrical for both the female and the male parties. But the truth is, it ain’t so.

        1. If there’s an STI, the odds are that her health and fertility are in much greater danger than his would be.

        2. If there’s a pregnancy, the physical and psychological repercussions are much greater for her.

        3. Because on average men are larger and stronger and more aggressive than women, there’s much more of a risk of a woman being accidentally intimidated into sexual activity, because she’s afraid that she will be harmed in some way if she says no. Hence, it is theoretically possible for a man to cause a woman a great deal of psychological trauma without realizing it. This is a good argument for the enthusiastic consent model.

        4. Thanks to the asymmetries of anatomy and physiology, it’s possible for a woman to experience completed intercourse with absolutely no cooperation or interest on her part. This scenario is, for obvious reasons, far less probable for a man. Hence, a man is (once again) in far more danger of accidentally having sex with an unwilling partner than a woman would be.

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    2. I’m sympathetic to this argument, but I think we have to take physiology into consideration. It really is physically possible for a man to be too drunk to have sex, right? I have no idea how often this happens, how drunk you have to be, etc. And it is not possible for a woman to be too drunk to have sex, from a physical perspective, right? (Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.) Also, on average, women are physically weaker.

      So it is not that women are delicate flowers who are more harmed by having coerced or forced sex. It is that the likelihood that a drunk woman will effectively press her advantage (or whatever you want to call it) with a drunk man is extremely low, whereas the reverse is a lot more likely, simply because of physical strength and biology.

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      1. That, plus that there have been a huge number of cases of men premeditatively using alcohol or illegal drugs to obtain sex from someone unwilling to consent and a very small number of women doing the same (probably because it would almost certainly be bad sex for her). It’s Bayesian, if you want to be trendy about the terminology.

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      2. Interestingly, I had a male roommate who was date raped. My friend is tiny (under 5’7″ and 112#) and has the alcohol tolerance of a gnat. He also has a reputation of loving the ladies. His date had a good few inches and easily 20 lbs on him. She got him drunk and actually carried him to his room. He told me what happened after that the next day as a night of “bad sex” that he admitted made him feel queasy to think about.* He met up with her again to try to get rid of the bad feelings, but when she kissed him he again felt sick to his stomach and called off the date. Interestingly, I really doubt the woman thinks she sexually assaulted my roommate, and even though I told him what happened to him would count as rape, he didn’t really seem to believe that that was the case. The girl told everyone that he had “used her for a one-night stand” which made me so incredibly angry, but fit into the narrative as him as a womanizer and her as a woman with almost no relationship experience. What makes it hard for me is, I honestly believe 100% that this woman thinks she had a fun sexy night with this guy that he enjoyed, and that he callously refused to see her again. I don’t think she’s evil or a serial rapist, I think she is just that bad at romance and reading people (she’s a kind of weird woman). What makes it uncomfortable is that I’m not sure I’d feel the same if the genders were reversed.

        *I won’t go into the details but it was pretty clearly less than completely consensual on his part.

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      3. I certainly don’t want to deny that this can happen, or to diminish the harms caused by it – I was just pointing out that it happens much more frequently to women.

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  2. I don’t think university administrators (or Department of Education officials) share Shannon’s views or aims. You can find plenty of quotes from official spokesmen suggesting that they intend for the system to discriminate against boys.

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  3. It would be extreme, but I’m willing to make it an honor code violation for someone to have drunken sex with someone who later regrets it. Presumably under such rules, a man could accuse his partner of not having obtained affirmative consent, as well. In the context of drunken sex, it’s plausible that a woman might not have obtained affirmative consent from a man, too, and thus, could be accused of a violation of the rules of sexual conduct on campus.

    So, how to avoid being accused of sexual misconduct (not rape, which is a felony, properly adjudicated in our criminal justice system, and for which I would not support this kind of change of rules)? presumably, informed consent contracts (completed before one gets drunk). Hey, there is an app for that: http://good2goapp.com/. (this is the name of the tolling/transportation pass in our neck of the woods, which makes the name really confusing to me). How to reconcile this with changing ones mind? rules have to be worked out, but they can be. The consequences for the violation though, would have to be actions under the school’s control, as with other honor code style violations, like cheating.

    How would all this work in practice? Will there be lots of “regrets” which, now, instead of having consequences only for the woman, have consequences for the men as well (presuming that it’s women who usually have regrets)? Will the consequences decrease the likelihood that men, in frats, or elsewhere, coerce (or force) women to have sex?

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  5. I am mostly concerned about the implications of creating a separate judicial system with access restricted by class. Empowering universities to investigate sexual assault cases is a first step in doing so (empowering the university isn’t only pushed as a parallel system, it is also pushed as an alternative system). A non-student young woman raped by a non-student young man does not have access to this system. A non-student young woman raped by a student young man also does not have access to this system. Why are the police good enough for a non-student, but not for a student?

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    1. Because the students only have access to a system that administers the rules of the school and the goal of the rules are to create a learning environment in a community that the students have chosen to join. It’s a new form of the parietal rules (ooh, an interest flashback, from the Harvard Crimson, 1963: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1963/10/1/parietal-rules-pdean-monro-and-watson/).

      Rape still needs to be a crime, punishable in the courts, and both students and non-students should have access to those systems and a lot still needs to be done about access to the courts (I found the rape kit article in the NY Times to be horrifying).

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  6. I’m also the parent of a boy, though too young to be thinking about this in realistic terms, but, am I willing to take the risk that 1) my boy will get a lot less sex 2) that he will have to take extreme measures to assess consent 3) that he might be the victim of a troubled woman who accuses him of something he hasn’t done?

    Yes, in general, though not if these risks result in his loosing his liberty (i.e. they can’t be laws).

    With my daughter, the unfair risks I worry about include the possibility that she will be raped or be the victim of a troubled ex-boyfriend. The state isn’t responsible for those risks, so there can’t be laws against them, but there can be rules that try to mitigate those risks, within a community like a college, and some of those rules might shift risks to others.

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    1. And has the boy signed up for your system? Once he is in college, you won’t be able to see his grades or his health records unless he agrees, and you think you can regulate his sex life?

      Remember, Madelyn Murray O’Hair’s son is a born again Christian. Phyllis Schafly’s son is gay. Mark Tushnet’s daughter is a conservative Catholic. Don’t presume to vote for your adult children,.

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    2. My boy still thinks girls have cooties, so as I said, “too young to be thinking about this in realistic terms”. But if these rules were in place at a college, he’d have to, wouldn’t he, to go.

      As a society, we used to segregate women and men in an effort to avoid both the rapes and the accusations of rape. That system is hugely limiting, and, always, to the less powerful group, the women (think about the lack of medical care in Afghanistan and the grandmothers who have to be scofflaws to drive in Saudi Arabia) and is clearly unacceptable. But I don’t think the current systems are working on college campuses, either.

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  7. I am concerned about the implications of creating a separate judicial system with access restricted by class. Empowering universities to investigate sexual assault is a first step in doing so. Especially since I have seen it promoted not only as a parallel to the existing system, but as an alternative to the existing system. A non-student young woman raped by a non-student young man doesn’t have access to the new, second system because she hasn’t paid the tuition. A non-student young woman raped by a student young man also lacks that access. The advocates of having the university seem to be saying that the police and courts are good enough for a non-student, but not good enough for a student.

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    1. There’s a whole continuum of bad behavior between “rape” and “nothing happened,” and while of course the judicial system is the best place to deal with rape, the college disciplinary system can be a reasonable place to deal with conduct in between those endpoints, some of which may not be criminal. Someone at Vox made the comparison to graffiti: not all graffiti or vandalism occurring on a college campus can be prosecuted criminally, but some cases of it result in an internal campus board legitimately disciplining a perpetrator.

      The college system can also be an adjunct to, not a replacement for, the sometimes slow-moving wheels of justice, even when a rape victim reports the crime to police.

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      1. If it is an adjunct, then we are back to imposing additional penalties for raping a student vice a non student. (This is different from graffiti or cheating as those are against the college not an individual. ) in addition, why shouldn’t the non student have a way to get justice over misconduct that doesn’t rise to the level required for jail?

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  8. Sorry for the double post above (I am anonymous)- my computer is having issues. I would agree BJ were it not for advocates arguing that university investigations should be an alternative (not a parallel) to the police.

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    1. Well, I agree that the university investigations should be not be an alternative to a criminal investigation when a crime has been alleged, and I also agree that universities have made such arguments, sometimes clearly in their own interests (to protect their reputations and that of accused athletes/other “important” students). I think universities administrators/health officials should have to report alleged rapes to the authorities, and should not have discretionary power over whether they do so (like the child abuse laws).

      But, violations of some of the rules I am imagining schools applying and enforcing would not be crimes; for those rules, the university system would be an alternative, but an an alternative to nothing (since the conduct would not be considered a crime — i.e. “enthusiastic consent” rules).

      BTW, the parietal rules article is fascinating (the subject being discussed is women in the Houses at Harvard. The arguments in favor of relaxing the rules is the possibility that women will be friends, and not just objects of sexual interest. The arguments against include raucous parties (which the authors believe can be separately regulated) and unwanted pregnancies (which the authors think parietal rules will not guard against, anyway): http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1963/10/1/parietal-rules-pdean-monro-and-watson/. It’s interesting to see how we are revisiting the same ideas, of how men and women can interact with one another and the rules that should govern the interactions.

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  9. I went to Notre Dame as undergrad and parietals were and still are in effect. In my experience, they made things worse, with respect to reporting sexual assault. Mostly this was because if you were in a male dorm after hours (and something bad was happening), you would worry that you too would be expelled for violating partietals. I think having the university administer some of these issues sounds good, but it problematic, given the way universities have been handling sexual assault. They may be too willing to classify issues that should truly be handled off-camps as on-campus matters.

    AmyP: that’s why I would never buy a Mini – those things look like death traps to me. Is it my fault if there’s an accident caused by say poor road conditions and someone is in a death trap? So I guess what I am saying is that I don’t buy that analogy. Not saying that girls deserve it or anything remotely close to that, but it just strikes me as sexist to say that men have to be (and can be) more in control of their decisions when they are drunk than women have to be and can be. If one drunk person can’t make an informed decision, how can another one?

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    1. In the analogy, you don’t get to choose whether you’re in a Mini or not. You are assigned (mostly by gender, but potentially age and other vulnerabilities might also play a role in what you get). And, in the analogy, you are not the mini or the SUV, you’re the driver of one or the other. So no one is comparing people to cars here.

      I would make the rights and responsibilities reciprocal. I’m seeing a surprising number of sexual misconduct cases involving female teachers and male students (surprising, only because I would have assumed that there were none, not because I think that there are many cases, especially compared to reversing the genders). So, I would not find unbelievable an allegation that a man might be coerced into behavior he would not have chosen if he were not under the influence.

      I don’t know that I think the system I’m toying with in my head would work better, presuming that the goal is to decrease the incidence of assault and non-consensual sex. In many ways, these rules really would be equivalent to setting up new versions of parietal rules, and as you say, those rules had a variety of consequences, many of them undesirable. In the discussion of the app, folks have pointed out that the app consent might then provide a defense in a case where rape actually occurred (say, frats could have all the girls to click the box on the phone as they enter the party).

      But I feel like we need to try something different than what we have now — a limbo in which colleges have obligations under federal regulations that are not compatible with the requirement to hand off investigations to the criminal authorities (the settlement in Seattle Public Schools specifically concerned that issue).

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      1. “I’m seeing a surprising number of sexual misconduct cases involving female teachers and male students (surprising, only because I would have assumed that there were none, not because I think that there are many cases, especially compared to reversing the genders).”

        That’s been one of the more mind-blowing developments of the last 10-15 years, especially considering how many of the female perps have been young married women and/or extremely attractive.

        When I taught high school in the Peace Corps, I was at times only 3-5 years older than my male students and I’d occasionally get inappropriate remarks from them. And a number of them were pretty darn cute. However, I wouldn’t in a million years have considered any sort of physical relationship with any of them. 1. They were kids and 2. I have my self-respect. 3. It’s incredibly unethical. 4. It’s incredibly unprofessional. 5. What a stupid way to blow up one’s future.

        That said, I think we really have to bracket those school statutory rape cases, because they involve a level of authority that simply does not exist in normal adult life. (Although it might well be the case in a situation involving a military superior or something along those lines.)

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  10. The first story is more a cautionary tale about ad hoc university systems which are horrible for all involved. Universities need to get out of investigating and prosecuting for sexual assault. They need to provide direct conduits to the civil authorities as well as advocate services for both accused and accuser.

    The difficulty is that there are a lot of well-meaning individuals – parents, professors, administrators – who want to intervene on behalf of the people involved OR the institution and who push events all out of shape. They discourage or encourage reporting. They obfuscate the case and the consequences with seat-of-their-pants judgment. We all need to take sexual assault more seriously and we don’t do this by elevating a secretive, separate system in colleges and universities.

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    1. I don’t think most universities want to get involved in this stuff, frankly. They must do, because of the Title IX litigation and now the new federal regulations. It is better for colleges/universities if the victims (men or women) involved go to the police and get the matter prosecuted that way.

      However, given that many sexual assaults go unreported (or prosecutors opt not to pursue a criminal indictment based on their ability to win a trial, not whether a crime has been committed), it means that victim may find themselves in classes/college settings with their perpetrators of their assault. This can cause the victim to stop going to class, stop participating in college life and undermining their eduction. Thus have appeared the rise in Title IX claims against universities against gender discrimination and the right for a full education.

      There are probably some schools that prefer a squeaky clean image and having their heads in the sand regarding college assault where the easiest outcome for reputation/admin is that the victim just get over it. This option for colleges is diminishing with the new regulations and the legal precedents from Title IX.

      But outside of that, there are no good options for colleges/universities here. They lack the infrastructure and power of a police force to conduct a fair investigation. Moreover, the justice system does not have the best track record on this, leading to low levels of reporting (from female as well as male victims). Now colleges and universities have an unfunded mandate to address and resolve these problems that are quite immediate for them and not remotely realistic, given the inability of society at large to resolve it in the last few generations where it has been relevant.

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      1. Tim Burke wrote a long and (for me) helpful piece along similar lines a while back. Here’s a good paragraph and a half, but the whole thing is worth reading.

        “A college or university can and should decide on standards that ensure that its students can get the education that they’re seeking. In the case of sexual assault, it can decide that any sexual behavior that could be judged to be predatory, aggressive or violating consent makes it impossible for other students to pursue their education in a safe, secure fashion. Particularly if the college or university in question believes, as most do, that at least some of the education they offer takes place outside the classroom, in the life of the community. In the pursuit of that safety, an institution could legitimately decide to decisively move students to other residences, change their course schedules, or suspend or expel the accused student. Or it could decide that it needs a thorough investigation of any such charges and a complicated, multilayered deliberative process. Or it could settle for a muddled, contradictory approach.

        “Under pressure from many activists, many colleges and universities are coming to the conclusion that they currently lack the expertise to assess such charges or to cope with their consequences, hence the changes unfolding at many institutions. …”

        http://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2014/08/18/conduct-unbecoming/

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  11. To piggy-back on Shannon’s comment: the administration here is very aware of this problem (ND prof writing) and this is no longer something students need to worry about. There’s a form of “parietal amnesty” if you will — reporting a sexual assault that occurred while parietals were being broken will not subject the victim to disciplinary actions. A lot of serious work has been done in the past few years to both increase reporting and bring out cultural changes that would lessen the rate of sexual assaults.
    That said, there are still issues here, though it’s hard to tease out convincingly whether they’re the result of parietals or exclusively same-sex dorms.

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  13. Y’all really like making rules. There’s a rule for everything, and a carefully calibrated consequence, and well, yes, what if they sign contracts…

    I have no idea what all this has to do with living humans. The original variety, I mean, who are born knowing nothing, are still relatively uninformed at 18, and know more about Miley Cyrus than they do about parietals in the 1960s. Will it help relations between the sexes to add criminal paperwork errors to the pile?

    I would think it was a satire inspired by Kafka, but I know it’s not.

    Why not go whole hog and betroth children at birth? Then there’ll be none of this dating-and-sex-with-strange-people-who-might-be-partiers.

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    1. Well, everybody seems to think they’ve been raped, so it does sound like the young people aren’t managing very well on their own.

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      2. Well, I have a somewhat privileged perspective here, because I live right near a college campus. Here’s what I’ve seen:

        In my experience, many college students (and this is probably most true of freshmen) are kind of bad at life or at least self-preservation challenged. This is particularly visible at the very beginning at the school term, when you see people skateboarding in the middle of the street, biking on the wrong side of the road or right down the center line between cars, texting while either skateboarding or biking in the road, and displaying gross ignorance of the 4-way stop system (hint: you’re not supposed to just follow the car in front of you). A reading of the police reports also suggests college students have a tendency to open doors to people they don’t know, leave doors open or unlocked, and to give rides to sketchy individuals. Oh, the hilarity that ensues!

        So, yeah, I think there are some life skills that bona fide adults are much better at, and I suspect that even upperclassmen are probably way better at them than freshmen. (And to be fair, the ridiculous skateboard and bike antics are usually only during the first month or so of class.)

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    2. I actually think many marriages might be better if the expected standard was that one would be betrothed to the appropriate person, marry them, and live out their lives. Mind you, that’s not a system that we can superimpose on the one we have, but many people do a lot worse than having their parents select their mate.

      And, yes, I can see the Kafkaesque nature of signed pre-sex contracts. But, contracts and paperwork is a way for schools to protect themselves. And, maybe, talking about them will have an effect on behavior.

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      1. As opposed to the years and years of mandatory sex ed which preceded freshman year?

        As far as I know, we hope that people who marry stay married. At present, though, one is allowed free choice in mates.

        I would opt to drop the drinking age to 18, or even follow the Europeans and allow beer and wine at 16. The theory that raising the drinking age would cut teen drinking seems to have lead to early adults who are worse at handling alcohol. The colleges can’t sponsor events with alcohol, due to social host laws and the legal drinking age being 21, so it all moves off campus. And the students often arrive at events drunk, due to “pregaming” with vodka. So even if there are witnesses to events, they’re often drunk, too.

        Laws and paperwork won’t fix the transition to adulthood. It’s like most zero tolerance policies, a bad idea.

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      2. Part of the point of paperwork is purely is CYA on the part of schools, as are the mandatory sex education and moving alcohol off campus, rule changes that shift liability while potentially not addressing significant problems, or exacerbating them. I see that they could be theoretical ideas with empirical failures.

        But, one effect of affirmative consent (and signed contracts) is that it shifts the consequences of the behaviors more generally compared to the current narrative. Instead of the consequences being localized to the woman who was raped (or had non-consensual sex, or regretted drunken sex), the consequences will fall on everyone involved. Will that change things for the better? An experiment worth trying, in my opinion.

        College presidents tried to argue for an 18yo drinking age a decade or so ago, and I don’t see the change as being politically feasible (though, of course, everyone says that about gun control, and I think that’s still a battle worth fighting).

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  14. In related news, Lena Dunham’s publisher is furiously backpedaling.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/12/08/lena-dunhams-publisher-says-her-alleged-rapist-barry-wasnt-actually-named-barry/

    Up until now, Dunham had refused to clarify that the Oberlin grad who had been widely identified (thanks to the magic of google) as the Republican rapist in her book was not the person she had been talking about as Barry was actually a pseudonym, not the person’s actual first name.

    It was really cruddy of Dunham to leave Barry twisting in the wind for months.

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    1. Are you really surprised that she acted that way? If Girls is really about her friends, then it is really, really mean.

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      1. I’ve never been able to bring myself to watch Girls. Watching 20-somethings having bad sex and whining never sounded like a good use of my precious TV-watching time.

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  15. FWIW, thoughts from my daughter–an actual contemporary sorority girl–on the U.Va. episode:

    the girl definitely incurred some type of sexual assault. i don’t think that level of trauma from the original article can be faked or those details imagined. im sure rolling stone exaggerated certain details to convey the brutality, but some kind of non consensual sexual assault occurred.

    however, i don’t think it was by a member of that fraternity. it probably was in that fraternity’s house though, since that is where her friends picked her up. a lot of times in the fall, frats let boys they are interested in rushing come to their events. this is forbidden by the national interfraternity council though, so they do not register these events w/ the university (hence the statement that they had no events that weekend). this likely means no “registered” events, it was a saturday at a frat, its silly to pretend people weren’t there drinking.

    the claim that no member of phi kappa psi worked at the pool is what made me believe it was not a member of the frat. what likely happened is that the guy was invited by older members of the frat to come drink at the house at to bring a date, so he brought “jackie.” he either told jackie he belonged to the frat or she automatically assumed it since he was bringing her to the event. in order to impress the brothers, he initiated the gang rape. i dont know how many members participated or to what extent, but that’s how it happened.

    likely, more responsible members in the frat found out and knew they would get in massive amounts of trouble just because this occurred at their house. they probably kept it under wraps to protect any brothers involved, but also banned the initiator from any future fraternity events, explaining why he is not linked to the frat in any way

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    1. Wow. That’s a plausible explanation of facts going from the other point of view from Amy’s, and the most detailed I’ve heard. It’s scary that your D can come up with all of this (from the point of view of the mother of a much younger child).

      Would she be willing to further contribute thoughts on how she and her friends personally protect themselves from the risk of assault while still having social lives? I recently heard a college student explain one such trick (she’d been exiled from her room, in the first week of school, because her roommate had a boy over). I naively asked why the roommate hadn’t gone to his room, and was told that wise girls always brought the boy to their own room, because it’s safer (and, on hearing that, I understood it, in your own room/dorm, your with people who know you, your roommate is a girl, you don’t have to go anywhere if you decide to end the liaison). My own daughter (who is a baby 🙂 told me the other day that she’s learned from older kids that you should never, ever, take a brownie from the kids at one of the local high schools (also unexpectedly enlightening). I’m collecting up rules that can be used by up and coming college girls, especially those rules that are so far out of my experience that I wouldn’t have guessed them.

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      1. Well, she was also inclined to agree with something Caitlin Flanagan (I think it was) wrote: that gang rape of a conscious girl was unheard of; college rapes that are not of the ambiguous variety either involve gang rape of an unconscious girl, or forcible rape by a single guy. So I don’t quite follow the part about not going to his room. That seems to me more like the sort of arbitrary rule girls make up–like if you go to his room, it’s like you’re planning to have sex, which is slutty, whereas if he comes to your room, then it’s his idea, and you just got carried away. Or something. I don’t really want to have too many conversations on this sort of topic with my daughter, however, and I don’t know that she wants to have them either.

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      2. The ‘not going to his room’ thing makes perfect practical sense to me. If you’re messing around with a guy with whom you are not in a relationship characterized by perfect trust, if you’re in your own dorm you’re surrounded by friends and acquaintances who are on your side in any possible altercation or disagreement; he does something you’re unhappy with, and you yell, you’ve got help. If you’re in his dorm, and you yell, the only people who can hear you are his friends.

        I didn’t apply this consciously as a rule, but I have vivid college memories of moments when I was in a room with a man I wasn’t planning to have sex with, and was very comforted by being only a thin wall or two away from dozens of people who had my back.

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  16. At this point, I don’t know what to believe about the UVA thing. I do wish the original writer had checked on the story by talking with Jackie’s friends, as the Washington Post has done: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/u-va-students-challenge-rolling-stone-account-of-attack/2014/12/10/ef345e42-7fcb-11e4-81fd-8c4814dfa9d7_story.html

    I rather think if she had done that, the story would never have been published. The detail about the friends texting with the supposed assaulter (with the image of a former high school classmate of Jackie’s) is downright strange.

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    2. Interviewing J’s friends who picked her up is such a no-brainer that I’d be surprised if Erdely didn’t do that, but who knows. However, the friends *saying* she didn’t contact them is not necessarily credible to me as they were portrayed very badly in the RS article and had some motivation to lie to make themselves look like less than dickheads. Especially that Randall guy.

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  17. But which story is more believable? Is it believable that three college freshmen wouldn’t urge a friend covered in blood to go to the hospital? No matter what might have caused that?

    They were texting with the guy. Jackie would have been the only source for his contact information. Yet if he were texting with Jackie’s friends, why not with Jackie? But if he (logically) would have been, then why isn’t there a named person who matches up with someone enrolled at the time at UVA? Because if she was texting with him, she would have his name. The article claims she provided the three friends with a different name for the attacker at the time (which they couldn’t find in the UVA database), but she has given a different name to other friends this week.

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    1. And apparently showed the texts to the WaPo author, which lends them credibility. So far, any details that can be checked in Jackie’s version, do not pan out. That is more than just trauma making her fuzzy on details. (When I first read the story, I thought Jackie was an amalgamation of victims and that RS would end up in trouble for not making that clear. I didn’t think it was this bad.)

      I think Erdely was incredibly sloppy. She wanted a big, splashy story and didn’t do any work that would jeopardize it. it is really too bad since a story that focused on Yale (for example) and the pattern of brushing off victims (or even better, use several unis) would have made the point about rape culture and how unis don’t take sexual assault seriously much more strongly. It wouldn’t have been splashy and it probably wouldn’t have sold to RS.

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      1. I think the idea of regulating the sexual lives of 20-somethings, to any standards stricter than the ones established by law for defining “rape,” is moronic and bound to produce endless injustice. Here is Yale, getting it wrong again:

        http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ruth-marcus-in-sexual-assault-charges-dangers-for-male-and-female-alike/2014/11/11/16045622-69c8-11e4-a31c-77759fc1eacc_story.html

        Anyone here who has a son, and thinks he wouldn’t have sex with an ex-girlfriend under those circumstances, is delusional.

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