A New Study on campus rape and the one in five number

[dstark]

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a33751/occidental-justice-case/

Mirkovich concluded that Jane’s “successfully navigat[ing] herself, under her own power to [John’s] room … [indicates that she] had an awareness of where she was and that her motor skills were sufficiently intact.” However, Mirkovich also concluded that because multiple witnesses describe her as “slurring her speech, stumbling, and not making sense … [Jane’s] decision-making ability was significantly impaired… . [She] was not aware of the consequences of her action and she did not have the capacity to appreciate the nature and quality of the act. Accordingly, [Mirkovich] finds [Jane] was incapacitated.”

Did John know she was incapacitated? Mirkovich decided that even though John “was more intoxicated than he had ever been,” and that “this level of intoxication so impaired [John’s] ability to assess [Jane’s] incapacitation that he did not have actual knowledge of [her] incapacitation,” his state of mind had no bearing. Occidental policy dictated that “being intoxicated or impaired by drugs or alcohol is never an excuse for sexual harassment, sexual violence … and does not diminish one’s responsibility to obtain consent.” If a sober person would have known that Jane was too drunk to know what she was doing, Mirkovich reasoned, then John should’ve known that, too. (At press time, Occidental had refused to release a transcript of the hearing, so all of Mirkovich’s findings come from her final report to the college. Mirkovich declined to speak with Esquire.)

Mirkovich declared John responsible for both violations. Occidental, like many colleges, had a variety of options for punishments, ranging from community service and censure to expulsion. (In 2010, the Center for Public Integrity found that a mere 10 to 25 percent of students found responsible for some degree of sexual assault were expelled. Occidental, for its part, once assigned a book report to a student found responsible for sexual assault.) However, John was given the most severe punishment: “permanent separation from the college.”

[TV4caster]

@Cardinal Fang

I can’t speak to your experience, but Occidental Jane Doe says she didn’t remember the sex.

That is only semi-correct. She testified that she remembered giving John oral sex. She also remembered telling him that she had thrown up and needed gum. She testified that she remembered asking him again if he had a condom. I personally don’t find those the actions of someone who is incapacitated but I can understand how someone else would, because it is not too far from where I would draw the line.

[dstark]

From the Esquire link…

Law-enforcement agencies have a terrible reputation among victim advocates for their unwillingness and/or inability to build a case against alleged sexual assailants. Among the efforts to fix how police departments handle sexual-assault cases, few show as much promise as Carrie Hull’s. A detective with the Ashland, Oregon, police department, Hull launched a program in 2013 called You Have Options, and she’s seen sexual-assault reports to the police more than double (especially among the students at nearby Southern Oregon University) in just a year. You Have Options takes the best parts of what many colleges offer students—support, guidance, and the ability to set the scope and pacing of the investigation (hence the Options)—and combines them with the rigors of a full-blown police investigation. “It’s a training issue for law enforcement,” says Hull, who’s currently in touch with fifty-three police departments across the country on You Have Options training. “You have to give anybody who is interviewing a victim of trauma, particularly sexual trauma, in-depth training on how to do a trauma-informed interview… . Then you have to actually get out of your chair and take that really good information that you often get from these interviews and start corroborating it.” Background checks on suspects, forensic interviews, wiring an accuser so she might surreptitiously record a confession from an assailant: “We’re not doing anything that is not being done in any other caseload. We’re just using it within a sexual-assault caseload… . That’s the stuff the DA needs” to build a case.

[dstark]

@TV4caster, I am glad you got your act together. Thanks for sharing your story.

[TV4caster]

@Cardinal Fang

I’m confused, then. What’s your problem with the Occidental verdict? The Oxy woman was, by the account of many witnesses, slurring her words and stumbling. As she was walking from her room to the guy’s room, she puked twice-- an RA witnessed this, and IIRC, he held her hair out of the way. Most people would say without hesitation that she was heavily intoxicated. She said she wanted sex, but she was indisputably heavily intoxicated.

I guess it is a matter of defining “heavily intoxicated”. I view slurring words and stumbling as drunk (or intoxicated), not heavily intoxicated. I also am prone to disbelieve the one or two people who said she was slurring her words. Others said she was not slurring her words (IIRC- and I am pretty sure I do). Someone who is slurring their words is incapable of typing coherent texts without any misspellings. If you don’t believe me just go to a bar and find someone who is slurring their words and ask them to text you.

[dstark]

The Esquire story is incomplete. The witnesses were following her around. Trying to protect her.

[northwesty]

All these “line drawing” discussions you all are having are irrelevant. It really does not matter exactly where any of these lines about consent or incapacitation are drawn by courts or by various college policies. It is a complete waste of time to discuss them. Why?

Because there is never any evidence. Even mattress girl gets this. From this Sunday’s NY Times:

"Sulkowicz has concluded that “the system is broken because it is so much based on proof that a lot of rape survivors don’t have.” Ding ding ding ding!!!

I’d be more inclined to say all systems have a baseline requirement for proof. If you want to go with Emma and say the system is broken, fine.

But recognize that it is impossible to fix the system. You can never have a system that does not require proof, and victims never have proof. You’ll never have proof unless you require students to wear body cameras or have sex in front of witnesses. There simply is no solution to this.

If there’s no proof, it doesn’t matter what your adjudication procedure is or what your policy book says.

That’s why it makes so little sense to address this by tinkering with adjudication procedures.

[bearpanther]

I found this survey linked through the Esquire article. It is a survey of men and women’s attitudes towards issues surrounding sex (and sexual harassment/assault):

http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/sex/a33555/esquire-cosmopolitan-sex-survey/

The sections on rape and sexual assault are particularly interesting, especially when alcohol is introduced into the equation.

[Cardinal_Fang]

If you read the entire report you see that basically everyone around her thought she was really really drunk.

[TV4caster]

@Cardinal Fang do you have a link to the actual report and not just articles about it? I would like to read it but don’t see it in a quick search

[dstark]

@Bearpanther, some of these assault numbers are very high.
Also, what people think the percentage of men capable of rape is is very high.
The thinking of campus rape doesn’t look good either.

[Cardinal_Fang]

Tv4 I’ll link the report when I get home if no one beats me.

[TV4caster]

A few other things in that article really caught my eye. First of all: the author of the original 1 in 5 study had this to say.

However, the lead author of the NIJ study, Christopher Krebs of RTI International, a research organization in North Carolina, is the first to point out the limitations of his data. “We don’t think our data are nationally representative. We’ve never described them in that way or claimed that they are,” he says by phone from his office outside Raleigh.

That is pretty incredible.

Secondly: the President of the rape advocacy group RAINN had this to say about incapacitation versus intoxication:

Scott Berkowitz, the president of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), incapacitation is about “being physically unable to resist or unable to speak. Generally it’s understood to mean that drugs or alcohol have had such an effect on [a victim] that they’re not in a position to express consent.”.

There should really be no argument that Jane could speak and would have been able to resist considering that her roommate found her immediately afterwards essentially giving a lap dance to another guy and making jokes.

[bearpanther]

The ones that stood out to me were the ones concerning “are these behaviors rape?”

So it was good to see that almost everyone, men and women, thought forcing your spouse or partner to have sex is rape. Considering marital rape did not exist in some states a few years ago this is a positive sign education has worked.

The question “sex wherein either party expressed sexual interest only while intoxicated”—46% of women said this was rape, compared to 38% of men. Still less than half of both sexes.

But this one–“sex wherein either party is intoxicated but had expressed sexual interest when sober”–only 38% of women and 27% of men said this was rape.

This indicates to me that people think a “Yes” given before the first beer is still good after the 5th beer.

And this might be born out also by the result that over 1/4 of both sexes had not even heard of Yes means Yes (28% of women and 25% of men claimed not to know what that was).

[TV4caster]

That survey has some replies that surprised me.

1- ~80% of women think police would take their accusation seriously in they made a complaint. That sure isn’t what I expected.

2- ~50% of women do not think it is a reasonable expectation for a man to get a yes before sex.

[dstark]

TV4caster, some of your posts are bizarre. I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have mentioned your prior habits.

I told you a true story about what happened to me. A gay woman was all over her brother. I was there. You weren’t. Yet… You have an opinion that she was able to give consent. Ok.

You don’t know the Oxy story. I guess the guys trying to protect this women were wrong. Ok.

[TV4caster]

@bearpanther

This indicates to me that people think a “Yes” given before the first beer is still good after the 5th beer.

I know that I think that. A woman can clearly change her mind at any point, but absent her saying that she is not longer interested then I would think it is reasonable to expect that they are still consenting. I’m betting at least a few people here disagree.

[TV4caster]

@dstark

I told you a true story about what happened to me. A gay woman was all over her brother. I was there. You weren’t. Yet… You have an opinion that she was able to give consent. Ok

That is because you are making an assumption that she wanted to have sex with her brother and that therefore she must be too wasted to consent. I never in a million years would see something like that and think what you did. I would think that she was trying to make him uncomfortable, for whatever reason.

You don’t know the Oxy story. I guess the guys trying to protect this women were wrong

I know the story quite well. I have read many different articles about it. You are conflating people being concerned about someone with them being too drunk to give consent. The two are not necessarily linked.

[dstark]

You weren’t there.

[mathmom]

An in-depth article on the Occidental case including some facts from the transcripts of the investigation that I had not read before.

I thought the most amusing suggestion was to encourage more marijuana smoking instead of drinking. I think John has a good case for him being raped by Jane… Yes, there were witnesses, but she blew them off. At some point you make your own bed.