<p>Just because there was semen doesn’t mean that it was or wasn’t consensual.</p>
<p>From the article, quote from the district attorney:
But he also understands the questions that might lead a woman to stay silent. “Is this going to be publicized? Is everybody going to know about this? Am I going to be ostracized? Is this going to affect me for the rest of my life? Am I going to lose friends? Are people going to believe me?”</p>
<p>If a woman does decide to come forward, he said, she should do so immediately. “If you wait hours, days or weeks, that gives people plenty of time to get their stories together, to engage other witnesses to support them, and it makes it much, much more challenging.”
end quote</p>
<p>It was a difficult article to read but worth reading the whole thing. As the mother of a freshman daughter whose move-in day is less than 6 weeks from now, I had to stop and restart reading–it took me a while to get through the whole thing and I still haven’t looked at the videos.</p>
<p>The biggest takeaway it seems to me is that she was admittedly drunk out of her mind and can’t remember much. I’m never going to understand why people just seem to accept this part and move right past it to the rape charges. If you can’t remember what happened prosecuting anything will obviously be much more difficult. </p>
<p>Recent changes to the Violence Against Women Act has made amendments to the Clery Act, which in turn requires amendments to the act governing federal Title IV aid. Currently, there is negotiated rulemaking regarding the administrative regulations as a result. You can read about the proposed regulations here: <a href=“http://www.ifap.ed.gov/fregisters/attachments/FR062014.pdf”>http://www.ifap.ed.gov/fregisters/attachments/FR062014.pdf</a>. Anyone who wonders why administrative costs are so high at colleges need only read these regulations to get a clue. It is important to note what these rules will expect colleges to do in terms of defining, reporting, and dealing with this sort of thing.</p>
<p>"The stories one hears of today would never, never have happened (well, IMO)when I was in college 74-78. The stories in the news of college rapes now are acts of barbarians and the drinking is totally out of control and seem out of the realm of reality for a thinking person. "</p>
<p>Rape out of control drinking certainly existed in the 1970’s and early 1980’s (when I was in college). The reason why you didn’t hear about it back them is colleges suppressed reports of on-campus rapes. You had to dig deep to get the stats of on-campus assaults, especially student-on-student assaults. </p>
<p>Colleges are now required to report campus crime occurrences due to the Corey Act passed in 1989. Previous to 1989, campus crime was under reported, if at all.</p>
<p>Dharma - you should let the school know of your reservations considering that your daughter almost went there. Not just about the crime that happened, but how they mishandled it. If more of us spoke up in this way the schools might get their acts together more quickly. Money talks, and most schools have more than 50% female students. </p>
<p>I remember touring schools with D3 and looking around wondering about the rape culture at each place. Of course it’s not a guarantee of safety, but I’m glad she chose a place with no football team and no Greek life. </p>
<p>How do you define “rape culture”? It’s oft quoted,but I’ve yet to determine what that means. It’s not the schools that are under investigation in my opinion…both Michigan and MSU are on that list…over 80,000 kids between the two campuses, about 40,000 on MSU and 40,000 on Michigan. I wouldn’t say that a “rape culture” exists on those campuses. So how do you determine what campuses have “rape culture” and what is a definition of “rape culture?” </p>
<p>Football team–head of fundraising chair of the committee which investigates allegations of sexual assault–disclosing the victim’s name in a letter–that’s a good start.</p>
<p>SlackerMomMD,as soon as I posted this, I reallized the truth as you told it (this happens to me a lot…) Its just that…my four years at college were for me and my friends, incident free–we NEVER got drunk even to the point of stumbling ,and I was one of those girls who had a lot of boys just as “friends”–a lot of them inthe music department who would play the piano for me for hours. How sad to draw comparisons. How I cherish my college memories of a school phenomenally too expensive for our family to afford for our children (my husband’s school is the same, BTW).</p>
<p>Yes, as I wrote earlier,I have been composing these letters inmy head all day and I will do my heartfelt best to communicate to a number of authorities at HWS.</p>
<p>Hmmm I would have thought the opposite. Most big sports are at big unis where there are tens of thousands of kids, generally a police presence and where Greek life is more diluted because of the sheer numbers of kids including grad students. I would have thought people were talking about rape culture at small primarily undergraduate schools with heavy Greek and party scenes and a more homogenous student body where administration was turning a blind eye toward the entire campus.I would not have equated “rape culture” with athlete preference because I would have thought those schools perhaps giving undeserved preference to an athlete that would not be afforded another student and not that those big unis were not dealing with campus issues in general. That doesn’t feel like a “culture” to me. The word culture to me would be a prevailing campus feeling that impacted all students.</p>
<p>I don’t think there’s any universal and fixed definition for rape culture. And I don’t think it needs to impact all students all the time. But a school that has hearing about an alleged sexual assault, and the accused is saying (at first) that there was no contact, and they have the hearing even though they know there is a rape kit and it isn’t processed yet - well, to me that is evidence of rape culture. Meaning that they are acknowledging that rape happens and it isn’t very serious if it happens between a drunk freshman girl and a senior football player. Lah de dah, she should have known better and why did she go with him if she didn’t want to?</p>
<p>In a similar case at Columbia, a woman was anally raped and one of the faculty investigators questioned repeatedly if that was possible since no lubricant was used. Can you imagine? How is it even possible that these incompetent people are questioning students and making decisions in a cloud of their own ineptitude?</p>
<p>I don’t know enough about the schools you mentioned – MSU and Michigan – to answer definitively, but I would bet almost anything that there is a rape culture at those schools. I think there is rape culture at just about every school, high schools included – it is pervasive everywhere. </p>
<p>I am so angry about this. Rape is a crime and it needs to be handled by the criminal justice system. Period. If I were the parent of a girl heading to college in the fall, I’d tell her to go straight to the cops and bypass the college system. </p>
<p>Kudos to the Times for reporting this story. I hope HWS is sweating bullets. And I hope the Times and other papers follow up with similar stories. </p>
<p>But here’s the thing. If, as Emilie Buchwald suggests, the normalization of sexualized violence has “saturated every corner of our culture so thoroughly that people can’t easily wrap their heads around what rape culture actually is,” then we need to take care not to let ourselves or the people around us become desensitized. We need to notice this stuff, get outraged, and share our outrage with others. Staying aware of rape culture is painful work, but we can’t interrupt the culture of violence unless we are willing to see it for what it is.</p>
<p>It complicates prosecution when the three guys have gotten together to get their stories straight, when an inept college adjudication body comes out with a verdict prematurely (yes, the recommended 60 days to wrap it up still would’ve given them another month to get the facts straight). Note the video by the DA, FGS. This victim-blaming is seriously annoying — how mentally together would you have been even in six months had you been gang raped? Anna got some seriously bad guidance by those who did not have her interest foremostly in mind.</p>
<p>Momofthreeboys: I’ve seen you post on Swarthmore’s board. I know that Swarthmore students have had quite a bit to say about “rape culture” there.</p>