He has to be a law student to know he shouldn’t rape a woman who is too drunk to do anything? Wow, you have low standards. Are you seriously saying that if she is so drunk she just lying there doing nothing, and he is very hammered but nevertheless has intercourse with her, that’s not rape because he’s drunk? What the heck? How is that different from the Vanderbilt rapists or the Steubenville case?
Was Occidental Jane puking and stumbling in front of the accused or back in her dorm where her friends took her? The issue to me in that case is that she was back in room, and then chose to leave her room and voluntarily go to the boys room and engage in sex. To me, it was not clear in that case a reasonable person would be able to determine she was too inebriated to consent, since she was capable to leaving her room, walk to his dorm and find his room, along with texting him. This was a case in which mediation and education and possibly some sort of minimal sanction would have been,ore appropriate than expulsion.
She was puking and stumbling on the way to his room. The evaluator determined that a sober person would have realized that she was incapacitated. Let’s say you were sober in a hotel, and an extremely drunk person walked from their room to your room, vomiting in a trash can along the way. Don’t you think you’d be able to detect that they were absolutely plastered? The rule is, could a sober person determine that the person is incapacitated, and that’s the correct rule, since intoxication is never an excuse to commit an offense. You and I could have determine she was too drunk.
I’m not going to argue with you CF on the occidental case - it’s in the courts and will be settled at some point, but
If she was not consenting why did she not say “no, I’m not OK” to her friends when they stopped to talk to her, she had a perfect opportunity to have someone help her.? There are unanswered questions and nothing is as black and white as you seem to want it.
In my opinion, they both should be sent home for a semester to grow up and gain alittle mature perspective. Actually alot of these drunk sex cases could use alittle tough love for both parties.
Perhaps we could have. But we aren’t college kids. I agree he should have been more aware of her state of mind, but still seems like she also should have some responsibility since she went to him and consented. As some young women state in some of the articles there are some instances where something is not quite right about the encounter but it is also not rape in that there did not appear to be coercion or restraint. If he had brought her to his room directly from the party, I would be more convinced this was assault.
If I had been deciding the Oxy case, I would have suspended him for a semester or two, and if he accused her and was found to be incapacitated, I would have suspended her the same length of time. That both expressed consent at the time is undisputed; the issue is whether one or both was incapacitated.
I can think of many different ways which could be rape without coercion or restraint, and so can you, so you should not say the above, @mom2and, lest someone misunderstand you and think that you approved of the Vanderbilt case.
How to tell they consented, for dummies:
- you asked them and they said yes
- they texted you to make sure you had a condom
- they texted several friends to tell them they were going to have sex
There, that wasn’t difficult, was it?
Oh yeah, and apparently they threw up once but YOU didn’t see it, and therefore had no way of knowing, and they proceeded on their way to your room anyway, without your encouragement, help, or accompaniment.
Cardinal Fang, I said that I think a guy filing a counterclaim after the woman did would be viewed as retaliatory. Yes, it is speculation. No, I am not talking about being physically overpowered, I am talking about the “drunk and therefore cannot consent” scenario. I also think that a person would have to be really, really disingenuous to maintain that there are not huge social differences at play when we talk about a guy filing a claim of this nature. At the same time, anyone who doesn’t believe that a drunk guy has been seduced and “taken advantage of” by a woman in the course of human history is living in an alternate universe.
I would consider sex with a passed out person coercion since they had no ability to consent or not. But would never want to be considered to not consider the Vanderbilt case rape, so to clarify, i was only talking about a situation in which the women consented without coercion, did not withdraw consent, was not kept from leaving and the case was considered assault only because she, while not clearly incapacitated, was drunk and determined to be too drunk to consent. Let me know if that doesn’t cover it CF.
Agree that a suspension could have been warranted, depending on details.
In the Oxy case, if the college had kept their noses out of it entirely the girl would not have been convinced that she was “raped” after several indoctrination sessions and would have chalked it up to a bad decision made while drunk and possibly learned that it was unwise to get so drunk. And grown up a little. The guy might have learned that a mutually satisfying experience, both sexually and emotionally, was unlikely to result from this kind of drunk sex and maybe he would have grown up a little too.
In the olden days, these were the kinds of experiences that freshmen testing the boundaries of their new freedom sometimes had, and they learned from them. Now they have been redefined as rapes by activists eager to portray all women as hapless victims with no agency and no personal responsibility.
There are far too many REAL rapes. It would be a good thing if those were prevented, or prosecuted more effectively. Dragging this kind of thing into the mix only distracts from that.
Unless you happened to have a nose-- she threw up not once but several times while she was walking from her room to his room. And she was slurring her speech, and he knew she had already been quite drunk before she started swigging the vodka. It wouldn’t have been difficult for you or I to determine that this woman was incapacitated, if we’d been there and seen what he had seen.
I don’t dispute that she acted like she was consenting. I merely state that she was incapacitated, and a sober person would have known she was incapacitated. You would have known, if you were there and sober. You would have thought she was incapacitated.
I agree there are social differences. Women who were incapacitated and taken advantage of are much more likely to feel, afterwards, that they want accuse the guy of the sexual assault that he committed, whereas men who were incapacitated and taken advantage of are not very likely to want to accuse, even though they also were assaulted. So what? “I wouldn’t mind if you committed the offense, so you shouldn’t mind if I commit it” is a piss-poor justification that should be treated with the contempt it deserves.
One problem with the “she said she was okay, and so gave consent” claim—someone can reach a point of impairment such that they they can’t give consent. Giving consent to sex is an affirmative act, it’s not a default—the default is that consent is not given.
Now, whether the man was too drunk to give consent and whether the woman was too drunk to give consent are both questions for administrative (for the college) or judicial (for the courts) review. Also, I’d submit that it’s actually entirely possible that both of them committed sexual assault, if neither of them was able to give consent.
Dfbdfb, that’s my position as well. I have no problem with Occidental deciding that both John Doe and Jane Doe had nonconsensual sex, and giving them both a year suspension. There may be a blurry line between incapacitated and not incapacitated, but students are free to stay away from the blurry part and they would be well advised to do so.
There are no winners in the Oxy case. John Doe was kicked and out and Jane Doe dropped out and is suffering PTSD.
I think this is a good link about the Oxy case.
http://www.businessinsider.com/occidental-sexual-assault-2014-9
I wonder if Jane Doe would have been better off or worse off if (assuming John Doe had also also found to have been incapacitated, which seems plausible) they had both been suspended for a year.
Well I know where I’m placing my bets in the Occidental lawsuit 
unbelievable. They are both intoxicated and he gets expelled…whose responsibility was it to get consent anyway - she went to his room and took off her clothes, if that isn’t consent I don’t know what is. Perhaps she just wanted to cuddle…naked. Crazy world we’re living in.
And the hits keep on coming, lord mamas don’t send your boys to Occidental LOL:
On the basis of what, @momofthreeboys? That Occidental can’t have a rule that a very drunk student can’t consent to sex? There are a lot of cases out there where the colleges don’t seem to have granted the accused student due process. This isn’t one of them. I’m putting my money on Occidental, even though I think the punishment was too harsh.
I can say two things with confidence about the Occidental case:
- If I were an admissions officer at another school, I would feel comfortable admitting John Doe.
- If my niece were dating John Doe, this incident would not give me a moment's pause.
Professor Dirks denies making those remarks.
There were a lot of people concerned about Jane Doe before she went up to John’s room.
The expulsion was harsh.