I am waiting for more information before I form any opinion on the Montague case.
@dstark, your argument is a strawman. I have never seen a single person defend premeditated rape (guys who plan sober what they will do drunk). The issue, as @momofthreeboys notes above, is how to handle the cases where it is not clearly violent or premeditated rape. It is my opinion that lumping those hazy capacity to consent type cases in with more obviously evil conduct is wrong. That said, I agree 100% with post #54.
@texaspg, there is nothing wrong with people watching out to make sure their friends don’t either walk out with a stranger or walk out with a drunk girl for that matter. In fact, my son tells me the later happens constantly. My contention however is that the apparent atmosphere on campuses, or at least what we see reported in case after case, is that there are no reasonable standards applied at all. We have this case, or the case at Amherst, or the girl who slept with her room mate’s boyfriend, or the one who was texting with her friends and on and on. I have no idea how you “educate” young men in such an environment.
Now you may say that no matter how many utterly insane fact patterns we hear about, there are more women who are assaulted in college without an adequate remedy. Maybe that is true, maybe it isn’t. It is unknowable and unprovable despite the fact that it is an article of faith among some. What ever the actual facts are, I just wish some here would be intellectually honest enough to say that they feel tossing some to them insignificant number of guys out of school is a price they are willing to pay in order to make campuses “safer”.
@ohiodad51 - I don’t really have an opinion about every single type of case out there as being onesided issue. I only think about drinking and leaving parties with someone they just met there intentionally or otherwise.
I think drunk people are susceptible to suggestions that they regret later and there should be a way to prevent their actions, no different than not letting them drive. Universities are looking sideways when they are allowing underage people to drink on campus which means they should ensure people behave responsibly. If it means getting them to sign responsibility forms when they are leaving parties with newly formed acquaintances, so be it.
Are young people drinking less now that we have tougher drunk driving laws?
I don’t think so. Young people are still getting smashed.
Yet, they know not to drink and drive. How come?
Many of the cases you call hazy are premeditated. The guys know on Monday they are going to get drunk on Friday night and try to find some drunk girl to have sex with. They aren’t thinking too much about consent. Some of the guys don’t know what is rape Some of the women don’t know. In order to decrease sexual assaults, young people have to learn what sexual assault is.
Texaspg and others have mentioned ways to combat sexual assault. When there is an obvious sexual assault, the assaulter has to be punished. The punishment can’t be a slap on the risk like the Stanford case. Society has to send a message. We aren’t going to tolerate sexual assaults. There will be fewer hazy cases as society no longer tolerates sexual assaults.
There are many good videos about sexual assaults around that young people can relate to including Any Schumer’s.
We have to educate our young people about sex and sexual assaults.
We should teach sex education in schools. In Ohio, sex education is not mandatory. That is ridiculous.
There are studies that show young people are having less sex now than the last generation. I am not sure but I think drug use is down. Teenagers are making fewer babies. We are makng some progress.
The main issue with this approach is, some people are looking to do just that. Here, the problem circles back from drunkenness to hook-up culture. Many people, male and female, go to parties with the intent of finding a good-looking stranger to hook up with. I don’t share their interest in doing so, nor do I think it’s a particularly rewarding (or safe) experience, but I understand why some would. In the vast majority of cases, it’s consensual. Some of my friends, if I told them not to walk out with a stranger, would react no differently than most people would if you barged in on a date and told them to go home.
Until those social norms change, there’s only so much that can be done.
I agree with this. Where I differ is that I do not see how campus sexual assault policies further this goal, in fact I believe they do the opposite. Nor do I think that “drunk people being susceptible to suggestions that they regret later” should be equated with rape and sexual assault. That is really my point. We should deal with violent assault, sexual or otherwise, differently than we deal with questions of ineffective consent.
This is neither rape nor sexual assault. “Drunk” people can still consent to sex under the law in every state. But let’s pretend that you are right, and having sex with a drunk girl is rape. Never mind that this criminalizes a huge proportion of normal sexual relations. Fine, that is the new standard. What does drunk mean? And explain again how you are going to “educate” guys about that standard, in the context of “blackout states”, or a woman “freezing up” such that her consent isn’t really consent, or claims being filed months and years after the event.
See above. And you make my point. When you define sexual assault and rape in such a broad way, the idea becomes meaningless.
No one disagrees with this.
Your beef then is with the law in California and the people who elected the Judge in that case. But I do appreciate the acknowledgement that you are less interested in justice in a particular case and rather more interested in punishing people to “send a message”. I find that a dangerous position to hold, because you will not always hold the whip hand. But it is honest.
Agree. My personal opinion, if it isn’t obvious, is that the general tenor of the sexual assault policies on campus actually inhibits this type of norm shifting.
@Ohiodad51, you have written so much bs in your post I am not going to bother.
You can argue with yourself. 
I frequently argue with the voices in my head. Doesn’t everybody?
Everyone is right that we don’t know who wrote this. That said, if this is actually written by a detective, he made the error of thinking that the difference between his own college experience, and the single college jurisdiction where he practiced, was a result of a national trend changing substance abuse patterns over time. A detective would not be an expert on nationwide patterns; these two colleges could have bucked the trend. A detective would, however, know a lot about how intoxication impairs sexual assault investigations. So if we could verify where this came from, I’d take the observations seriously in spite of the error about national trends.
@Hanna Do you or anyone else have any experience with https://www.livethegreendot.com/ ? It is geared towards reducing the broader aspect of violence, which includes sexual assault. I ran across it while reading an article elsewhere. I see some schools in the list of participating schools/programs.
Interesting program, but the issue is not violence, the issue is drunk kids making poor choices. Violence is a crime. Drunk sex is not a crime. In states that have consent laws it is pretty clear that if you are drunk you can’t give consent. If both parties are drunk, it follows that neither can give consent. Colleges need a message that will resonate with both sexes regarding drunk sex. Violence messages won’t do it, because kids don’t perceive themselves as violent (unless they are and that is criminal). Plus it’s not illegal to have sex while drinking. So where does that leave us? With parents thinking their is a rape epidemic on campuses, which there is not. And a whole lotta traumatized kids of both sexes. It’s no fun to have your roommates define your regrettable sex as “illegal” and it’s no fun to be called a rapist, when you did not.
@ohiodad51 - I want to focus on a limited problem which is specific to college campuses. I couldn’t care less about what happens once they leave campus or go to outside parties.
- There are too many underage drinkers.
- However, they are not underage for sex.
- Colleges are implicitly condoning underage drinking.
- Any underage drunk who walks out of a party should be monitored or whoever walks out with that person now becomes responsible.
The current policies of identifying incidents after the fact and trying to punish the offender seem to be useless. The colleges are simply not geared up to be the internal legal system to punish people. The process of expulsion for what might be sexual criminal misconduct which would put a person in jail if they were not in college, simply does not work.
OTOH, they can do a good job of prevention. There is nothing wrong in saying that students should be signing consent forms with each other so they don’t need to be policed by the school.
The sexual assault issue is (as momthree’s comment above indicates) always focused on (and bogged down by) legalistic arguments about consent and then also about post-assault adjudication procedures. As if the problem is primarily one of folks simply not being well enough versed in the applicable legal theories and tests.
The whole title ix/Dear Colleague effort is the prime example. A legal process focused policy prepared by litigators who believe that improved litigation practices are the solution to our problems. “If we can just punish enough rapists, then the rapists won’t rape so much.” And of course such policy is not held up to any efficacy measurement. Since that’s not how lawyers like to roll – we just assume the incident will go down once we can get the convictions up high enough. Of course sexual assault, no matter how much litigation you do, is rarely going to be proven or punished given the nature of the crime.
So stuff like Green Dot is totally the way to go. Focus on prevention and risk minimization, and then measure whether what you are doing is effective or not. Rather than spend your primary effort/focus on litigating the bad incidents (whether technically consensual/legal or not) that have occurred (which is doomed to fail most of the time), see if you can keep the bad incidents from happening in the first place.
@texaspg I agree with pretty much every thing you wrote except the last clause in point 4. In a way, I think that is what the sexual assault policies on campus are trying to do, shift responsibility for actions taken or decisions made by a “drunk” person on to another individual. But other than that, I think you are right.
@northwesty, well said.
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These cases where the participants are so drunk that they are unable to give clear signals about whether consent was given, or properly interpret signals from the other participant, or clearly remember the consent questions and answers not only make it difficult for a third party (police or otherwise) to handle any dispute about consent, but also provide a smokescreen for the true sexual predators where the predator chooses a very drunk victim (or causes the victim to be very drunk, or intoxicated with date rape drugs), knowing that such a victim will not be able to remember things clearly (or at all) and therefore be unable to give enough solid information to whoever is investigating the incident (if the victim or anyone reports an incident at all).
“provide a smokescreen for the true sexual predators where the predator chooses a very drunk victim”
It sure does, and it’s always going to be tough to prove after the fact.
" https://www.livethegreendot.com/"
I’ve heard of it, but that’s all.
We need WAY more research about effective prevention. We know very little about what interventions work. I’ve started hearing the phrase: “Consent is a high five and a hell yes.” I don’t agree with that as the line between sex and rape, but I think it’s great as a statement of best practices for young people in sexual situations.
I’m not saying we have a rape culture (I don’t think we do), but I do know that there are many small steps that occur in a person’s life before he or she heads off to college and is then placed in a situation where sexual assault or a hook up may occur. I have a rising 9th grader, so she hasn’t even experienced high school yet, let alone college. But already, she has been in the midst of several events that reflect our society’s values.
She has already had a classmate threaten to rape her. When I reported the incident to her school, the counselor said “Oh, he didn’t mean it; he probably doesn’t even know what rape is.”
She had another classmate continually express his desire to kiss her, despite the fact that she told him several times she didn’t want to kiss him. One day after school, he grabbed her and kissed her anyway. Several of his friends gave him high-fives.
A group of boys came up with a t-graph of “girls you want to date” and “girls you want to f _ _ _ but not date.” several parents (of both girls and boys) complained to the school. I was actually told “Why are you complaining? Your daughter was on the ‘date’ list.” Why should it matter what list she’s on? None of the boys responsible were disciplined because “These boys are role models - honor students and star athletes.”
She’s had several friends groped walking down the halls. Girls have also been called to the office to have their uniform skirts measured (because, apparently, polyester skirts and polo shirts create uncontrollable urges in middle-school boys).
This is where it begins - when boys aren’t disciplined for their actions in middle school and high school, they will continue to carry their attitudes with them to college. Then, add alcohol and/or drugs to the mix, and you have kids who either don’t understand what “no” means or they know there will be no repercussions.
As a parent who attended college in the mid- to late '80s, I have also witnessed many male friends openly declare that they will get girls drunk to have sex with them, and that if they take a girl out for dinner and movie that they are “owed” something in return. I’m not sure if these attitudes are still prevalent today, but I imagine they are.
If what you say is true and you and other parents have proof, you need to be more forceful about including discussions around appropriate behavior for boys and girls in whatever mandatory sex education you have in your system. No one should be grabbing anyone in the school hallways or slamming people into lockers etc. It would not be out of line to ask that teachers or administrators be in the hallways when classes pass to keep an eye on things. I know they do in our public school…between every class everyone is in the hallways - administration and teachers and students.
What does your school do if males violate dress code? If they ignore it then they are not applying the rule equally and parents should speak up and point out the inconsistencies. If they do haul boys in for violating the dress code - like wearing a ballcap in the hallway or not tucking their shirt in or wearing an inappropriate t-shirt, whatever it is, then they are not singling out the girls. Following dress codes is a good “life lesson”…there are very few jobs and workplaces where “anything goes” or even breaking the rules just alittle bit is OK and can get an adult sent home to change or get a violation in their HR record.
The behavior described in post #77 confirms to me that yes, we do have a rape culture.