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

Parents Forum
141

^I should have been more clear. Yes, a half-hearted no is indeed a no. But the conflict arises when the one party either misperceives it, or disregards it. So this is a conversation that must be had beforehand, and when both parties are sober. “When I say X, I am meaning we are going no further at this time. And because we respect each other, I am counting on that not being a problem.”

It seems to me that all the guys who are concerned about the potential for false accusations would want to have this conversation.

Back in the early '80s when awareness grew of AIDS, many people altered their sexual behavior and more conversations were had. As the prevalence of campus rape becomes more widely publicized, there should be fewer barriers to having these conversations IMO.

142

[quote So this is a conversation that must be had beforehand,
[/quote]

Well beforehand. Like, when the guy is ten years old and his parents tell him that they’re not raising a rapist. “No” is not some top secret safeword that the woman needs to explain to guys because they don’t know what it means.

What, the guy’s defense to be that he didn’t know what “No” meant because she hadn’t explained it to him beforehand? This is ridiculous.

143

Yes, it may seem ridiculous that “no” needs any additional explanation. But given the statistics on campus sexual assault, I am advising my soon-to-be freshman daughter to a) take a self-defense class; and b) actually practice saying “no” in a clear, forceful and unambiguous fashion. I don’t want her assuming that some guy at a campus party, or even a BF of 3 or 4 weeks, necessarily understands what “no” means.

144

I agree everyone should take a self defense class, you can usually even get PE credit.
It’s good advice to be proactive and not be in vulnerable situations, but it’s important not to give women the notion that if they are assaulted, that they could have prevented it somehow.

145

The unfortunate fact is that some people can only be deterred from from doing bad things by violence/loss/hurt or the threat of violence/loss/hurt. Self-defense is useful, but if “no” doesn’t work, screaming bloody murder might.

146

Isn’t the proper and safe thing for someone asking for sex to assume that “no” always means “no”, and anything other than a clear “yes” from a sober person who is not under duress also means “no”?

147

So the idea is that you need to explain to the guy beforehand, when he’s sober, that you don’t want him to rape you? Otherwise, well, he might misperceive or disregard your No rape you?

But, if a guy is a rapist, why is he going to listen to you telling him not to rape you?

148

@TransferGopher wrote:

No. Just no. Absolutely no.

Even just limiting ourselves to legalities, leaving ethics and morals completely out of it, if the drunkenness is at a level where consent can’t be fully given in the jurisdiction where the sex occurred, drunk sex is entirely and completely rape. This is the case even if the participant who didn’t receive full consent thought that consent was received.

You are wrong. Please recognize that. You are utterly and completely wrong, and you need to recognize that before you get yourself, or allow someone else to get, into serious trouble.

149

To me, the weak point in this survey is the way it addresses “incapacitated rape” which is a considerable portion of the total reported.

To dispense with the requisite disclaimer: If incapacitated means a passed out, unconscious or obviously very drunk or drugged, e.g., staggering, vomiting, slurring, then no argument: sex under these circumstances is sexual assault.

However, for a person who’s had a few drinks but is still walking, talking functional, the level of intoxication (or incapacitation/drunkeness/out-of-it-ness) is impossible to judge or define. This subjectiveness is a significant and thorny issue because the determination of whether sexual assault has occurred hinges on two often unprovable premises: 1) That the alleged victim was in fact incapacitated, intoxicated, drunk or whatever descriptor used and 2) That a sober person would have been able to make this determination.

Often – in fact in about half of the pending lawsuits brought by males unjustly accused of sexual assault by their universities – the alleged victim’s level of intoxication is arbitrary and self-defined. It is clearly self-defined for the purposes of this survey. “Too drunk or out of it to stop what was happening” is a fuzzy and open ended prompt which could lead to fuzzy and open ended responses. “Out of it”? How much vaguer could they get?

Mutual drunk sex is a morass of grey area. If a woman drinks and consents to sex which she MAY not have consented to had she not drunk alcohol, is the man “taking advantage” of her, as the survey asks? If the next day (or week or month) she regrets having consented, is it valid to allow her to claim incapacitation and therefore rape? To me, there are too many “ifs” involved to accept category c as defined by the survey as an indicator that rape occurred.

The survey didn’t ask the participants if they were “taken advantage of” when they were passed out or unconscious and didn’t define clearly “very drunk” or even worse, “out of it.” Because the survey’s definition of incapacitated sex is vague (“too drunk or out of it”), we can’t know whether activity in this category should be sexual assault or just two people having some drinks and having some sex. As noted, context matters.

I’m also bothered by the phrase “taking advantage of me” which superimposes 19th Century morals on 21st Century behavior. College woman should be able to take responsibility for choices they make after drinking alcohol, even if it means lower inhibition and sexual activity that was in retrospect not such a good idea. Again, I’m not talking about passed out unconscious.

Sex under the influence is not necessarily rape, but if there’s no way to consistently and reliably measure inability to consent then any college woman who drinks (which is a large percentage) gets a free pass to move bad judgment to the rape column.

150

On a thread last fall, I suggested the fact we could make condoms a cultural norm means we are capable of making enthusiastic consent a cultural norm. We just have to teach it. I don’t know if that will have an impact on rapists willing to rape their sleeping friends. I just don’t know.

I would like to think education could have prevented Beau Donaldson becoming a rapist. He was on a team. I’m thinking about Amy Schumer’s Friday Night Lights spoof that dstark posted a while back. That was Beau’s norm.

We can change the norm when we recognize the problem and get outraged enough.

151

About things people do while under the influence. Old story - I have a relative who as a young adult woke up once in jail with no memory of why - last thing she remembered was partying with buddies. Turns out a cop came by and broke up the party, and she objected by slapping the cop.
LUCKILY they let her out after letting her sweat a bit (it was a different era).
Was she responsible for her predicament? Absolutely. The cop could have booked her for assault.
We all agree that if she were driving and hit someone she would serve time, right?
So to get back to the thread point, I think women and men should be responsible for what they do while drunk. The only possible exception if they were made drunk unwittingly (spiked drinks frex).

152

There seem to be lots of theories floating around about how women feel about drunk sex. I can only base off my experience and that of female college friends at the time, but based on that sample all the types of voluntary (if ill advised and regrettable) drunk sex that people had did not lead to a feeling of having been raped. Feeling stupid does not mean that a person feels raped or would report that they were.

These survey responses are private and the theory that other posters have put forth about young women publicly labeling an encounter “rape” or “coerced” sex after the fact to save face doesn’t seem to hold water. Unless the respondent is in such deep, deep denial and shame about choices that she feels the need to deflect “blame” for choices on a private, anonymous survey I don’t understand what the benefit of exaggeration or misrepresentation would be in this setting.

153

@saintfan, except that this most recent study didn’t ask “were you raped while drunk” but “were you taken advantage of (while drunk)”. Someone could feel that they were taken advantage of without feeling like they were raped.

And as @momrath pointed out, there’s significantly more of the “taken advantage of” type of rape than the forcible/violence-threatened type.

When you have 2 drunk people having sex, there are all sorts of gray areas. Lots of judgement impairment, possibly misreading of signals, etc.

154

@saintfan, I agree with you. Drunk sex shouldn’t necessarily be considered rape; however that’s exactly what’s happened in case after case in which men are suing their colleges for unfair Title IX proceedings. The accuser didn’t deny that she consented, but her consent is invalid because she was “intoxicated” (not unconscious, just not sober). Ergo she was raped.

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@momrath, you said you agree with saintfan. So you agree with the above?

Did you read Missoula?

156

I agree that accusing a man of rape following consensual but ill advised sex isn’t something that would have been acceptable behavior when I was in college (back on the Pleistocene) but after reading through a number of male Title IX driven lawsuits, it seems to be SOP. The problem is that there’s an ocean of grey area between sober and unconscious, and methods to determine how drunk is too drunk to consent are unreliable.

No I haven’t read Missoula yet.

157

@momrath, and have you watched Amy Schumer’s video on rape?

http://hollywoodlife.com/2015/04/23/amy-schumer-friday-night-lights-spoof-rape-parody-video/

158

Yes, back in the day there was the concept of “seduction” which made a guy a cad but not a rapist.
I think part of turning these numbers around means rethinking the attitude towards hookups.
It seems obvious to me that the hookup culture is offering many predators vast opportunities for rape, as well as causing a lot of bad, regrettable non-rape encounters. These are all having detrimental emotional impacts on young women.

159

I think it’s also important to not give underage drinking a “pass”. If we can’t control under-age drinking which is illegal then we need to change the law. I think it’s important for all young people to understand the personal responsibility involved if they choose to break the law and drink and even if they have turned 21 and choose to drink. We’ve done a “good job” as a country driving this message home about drinking and driving, we’ve done a pretty good job of educating about safety from STDs and pregnancy prevention, but we’ve done an abysmal job of educating young people about personal responsibility around sexual freedoms. I tend not to post a whole lot about these surveys, because I too, think they are flawed which makes the data questionable…and I absolutely agree with Momrath’s points.

160

@TransferGopher I don’t need to be a college student to know how you think. All I need is a brain. And you’ve been assaulted? I would expect someone who has been assaulted to have a higher level of sensitivity. Just because you don’t think sexual assault isn’t a big deal doesn’t mean it isn’t. Those are not laughing matters.

It is never the victims fault.

Never.

Ever.

If someone’s car gets stolen when they are drunk, is it their fault?

If someone’s wallet is stolen when they are drunk, is it their fault?

But if someone is drunk and raped, then it is their fault?

The fault falls 100% on the perpetrator EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Your assaults were not your fault at all.

It’s impossible to have conversation when every time a new study is released, you bring up the same damn statistics trying to downplay rape and assault. You do realize that statistics can change over time, right? That’s why it makes sense to rely on the most recent data. And it is very plausible that the data most recently published disproved what was published last year. In addition, the data presented was far more specific than the BSJ data which was more general.