As a woman and a feminist, the idea that kissing someone at a party without their express consent equals rape (“serial rapist”) is beyond ludicrous, IMNSHO. If it even happened. Funny that Nungesser’s ex, apparently a vulnerable individual, didn’t think there was anything untoward about their relationship until she discussed it with Ms Sulkowitz.
I would point out that if Ms. Sulkowicz’ story were true, she would have had bruises that showed his attempt to choke her. If she had gone to the police at that point, they would have had strong evidence of an assault.
Now, I know that victim’s actions in the aftermath of an assault are not always completely “rational.” But honestly, if someone had attempted to strangle me, I think I would at least have mentioned it to someone. In fact, I know I would have, because I have experienced that in the workplace. And she did not even actually place her hands on my throat. She just made threatening motions in a corridor not observed by others.
@Consolation under Columbia’s current policy grabbing someone and kissing them without their consent does not constitute rape, it falls under the category of “sexual assault - non-consensual touching.”
Also if you are referring to the article posted above by @ahl, that was not his girlfriend. It was a random girl who was at party with her boyfriend and went upstairs to get some beer or something. He allegedly followed her into the room.
She was an older member of the coed group they all (that is, she, Emma, and Paul) belonged to. She was not a “random” girl at a random party. He allegedly followed her to an upstairs corridor, IIRC. It appears that Paul’s ex GF was not a member of this group.
Although I know that it will be used to impeach me here, I have to say that I think that calling an unwanted kiss “sexual assault” completely demeans the real trauma suffered by real assault victims. Emma is the one who characterized him as a serial rapist, so apparently she was classifying this as one of his “rapes.”
I am getting my info about the girl from the article posted by @ahl in her #220.
Columbia has 2 categories of sexual assault — “non-consensual sexual contact” which involves some sort of unwanted touching of a sexual nature and “non-consensual sexual intercourse” which involves some form of penetration. Many schools have similar definitions.
Interesting piece by Katie McDonough in Salon: http://www.salon.com/2015/02/03/the_perfect_victim_myth_how_attempts_to_discredit_individual_survivors_stand_in_the_way_of_real_change/
Some victims of abuse by their husbands do stay with their husbands and still profess to love them. This does not mean that they have not been abused.
Cathy Young has a particular view on feminism, which can be gleaned from the Wikipedia article about her and reviews of one of her books on Amazon. She is pro-equality, but opposed to a type of feminism that is easy to caricature. I do not think that she starts from an unbiased viewpoint when she first approaches an instance of reported rape.
Working on a college campus, I have encountered too many women who have been raped, some after drinking and some not. I have encountered one woman who was roofied. In several cases, I have known the women well enough in advance to have a good idea of their veracity. If it never again happens that I see a woman in the hallway, and say, “Hi! How are you?” and she bursts into tears over a rape, I will certainly be glad of it.
Sulkowicz would be welcome in my house, not that she would ever show up here. I think she has suffered a lot due to verbal attacks on her, following her reporting. Rather similar things happened to Chessy Prout when she tried to return to St. Paul’s the year after Owen Labrie’s arrest. What her family alleges in their civil suit is chilling. The fact that St. Paul’s apparently had another outbreak of a game of sexual conquest more recently than Labrie’s graduation year just makes the situation worse. New Hampshire has apparently launched a criminal investigation. Good.
Sexual conquest at St. Paul is a tradition, not a game, it’'s been going on for decades, so it’s not going away anytime soon. And New Hampshire authorities can try to curb it, but I wouldn’t be too optimistic. The only way it stops is if Harvard says, you’re no longer one of our feeder schools until you clean up your act. Then it might stop.
Same lawyer settles another one.
The situation at St. Paul’s was and is disgusting.
I’ll add to Consolation’s comment in #228 that the situation is incomprehensible to me.
Re #227: I know nothing about this case, and apparently the details are sealed, but I am always glad when justice is done.
As a separate issue, I have never complained when an accused person who is guilty (in reality), but innocent (under the law) is released on a technicality. I consider this to be the cost of a fair system of justice.
I have to assume, when it comes to the question, that we are all on the same “side,” the side of justice, whatever the just outcome is.
I think we would all say we are in favor of justice, but QM, the losing side of the outcome rarely feels justice was served
The case in #227 was that two college kids had sex (gasp!) and the friend’s reported it… She always said it was consensual. The school just wouldn’t back down. Even at the hearing the women said it was consensual, that she never said no, that she wanted to be with this guy.
He was a high school classmate of my nephew’s (from a Jesuit high school), on an athletic scholarship at CU-Pueblo. Lost it all. No one has ever said a bad thing about this kid.
http://denver.cbslocal.com/2016/04/19/csu-pueblo-grant-neal-suspension-con
So sad. Such over reach by a college. Doesn’t surprise me though…reminds me a touch of the Yale case. Do unis really think women are so stupid they can’t make decisions for themselves?
“the losing side of the outcome rarely feels justice was served”
Yes and no. People who lose in court (and their lawyers) usually feel that the decision-maker got it wrong. But they don’t always feel that they were cheated, that they didn’t get a chance to be heard, or that the decision-maker was in the tank for the other side.
One of the bad signs about Title IX hearings is that even people who WIN often feel cheated, not listened to, etc.
Sometimes when the losing side feels that justice was not served, it wasn’t. Sometimes it was.
Perhaps I should have written that I am in favor of truth prevailing.
Whose truth? A young woman feels she was coerced into sex. A young man doesn’t feel he was coercive, and says he would have stopped relations if the woman said no. What do you do then?
Ohiodad51, my notion of truth is large enough to encompass your scenario. The young man felt that he had consent, the woman said he did not have consent. That could be what is true, and not just what is being claimed on one side or the other.
Part of the difficulty arises when one tries to convert a continuous range of circumstances into a dichotomous outcome.
In the case you pose, the likely outcome is that there is no preponderance of evidence (barring other information). But it might be useful information for the young man to know that his partner did not feel that she had consented.
An adversarial process is sometimes a hindrance to finding the truth. As I understand it, lawyers are committed to an adversarial process. Scientists are not.
Actually, I wanted to add something about the “Romeo and Juliet” laws. I favor these. But I don’t think they were intended to morph into “Romeo and Juliet and Bianca and Beatrice and Cordelia and Portia and Rosalind and Viola (and Goneril and Regan, even).” The current form of the law would shelter the “competitors” in the latest round at St. Paul’s, if they lived in a “Romeo and Juliet” state.
So, @QuantMech, after reading the article about the Grant Neal case–I can assume you read it, right?–are you willing to say that this appears to be a case of a prosecution gone awry?
Actually, no, Consolation. According to the article, the woman stated, "Grant was lying on top of me and I told him that I did not want to have sexual intercourse with him that is unprotected because I am not on any birth control. Although I told Grant no, Grant ended up penetrating me … and I told him to stop. He stopped and pulled out from me immediately. Grant then said to me that if he used a condom, would I be okay with that. I told Grant yes to the condom. Grant placed on the condom and we began to have protected sex at this point which I was okay with it.”
As far as I could see in the article, Grant only described the pre-condom interaction as “sexual contact” and did not mention penetration.
So, it depends on whether the first two-and-a-half lines give a true representation of the interaction or not. In my view, penetrating a woman without her consent is in fact rape. If penetration did not happen, it isn’t rape.
There are two other troubling elements of the story. One is the point where the woman says, “I may be acting like the typical girl who just got raped, but I hope you know I don’t think I did.” The other is the one where the story says,
“CBS4 traveled to CSU-Pueblo and contacted the woman at the center of the controversial decision. She said she felt ‘wronged’ by what happened between her and Neal the night of Oct. 25, but declined to elaborate.”
It goes on to say: “She reiterated what she said numerous times during the investigation — that CSU-Pueblo overreacted and handed out discipline to Neal that was too severe …” Suspension until the woman graduated might have been over the top or not.
In the CSU Pueblo case, I think the reality hinges on whether the woman communicated to Grant her unwillingness to have intercourse without protection, as she said that she had, and whether unprotected penetration occurred or not, as she said that it did.