“Sober people rape women just as much as drunks, if not more.”
Wrong. Completely wrong. Utterly and massively wrong. Could not be more wrong.
Most drunks do not rape or get raped. That’s true.
But when we are talking about acquaintance rape on campus, the data is overwhelming and crystal clear. 80+% of these assaults involve alcohol use by one or both of the persons involved. If you are a female and consume more than four drinks, your chances of being assaulted go up by like 17 times.
Being drunk increases the chances of a woman being a victim. Also increases the chances of a guy being an attacker. By a lot.
Colleges (among other groups) have done a lot of anonymous surveys on whether people have been the victim of sexual assault, often asking about it under several different definitions. Most college surveys ask about the preceding twelve months, but some of these ask over a longer timeframe. Anyone have easy access to the sex distribution of perpetrators according to those surveys?
(There is the issue I’ve heard raised that many men who have been the victims of sexual assault may not be able to consider themselves as victims, whether the assaults are perpetrated by males or females, given the cultural imperative toward men being sexually in control. I don’t know if I buy that, though.)
Right. I scanned the full report (CTRL+F) and couldn’t find anything on the sex of perpetrators. There’s got to be a criminologist out there who’s looked at this in depth, though.
“Sober people rape women just as much as drunks, if not more.”
Just read the newspaper if you want to see the causal connection between alcohol abuse and rape. The second Vandy football player was re-convicted over the weekend. The Vandy and Stanford cases are unusual only in that both involved lots of reliable evidence about what occurred. Incidents like those are rarely prove-able. But incidents like that happen regularly and almost always when the participants a hammered.
Both victims were drunk to unconsciousness. The Vandy victim says she blacked out after being handed a “blue drink” by her boyfriend in a bar. While that drink could have been roofied, most likely the blackout was caused by just too much alcohol too fast. Doubtful that either victim becomes a victim if their BAC was lower.
All three convicted attackers were seriously wasted. Up to 22 drinks for one of the Vandy attackers! Who knows what their true inner selves are. My guess is that are somewhat bad dudes, but they probably are pretty conventional in their bad dude-ness rather than being highly unusual monsters. Their behavior was clearly criminal. But what they did was, frankly, so stupid and reckless and nonsensical that it is very doubtful that they commit these offenses at a lower BAC.
The Vandy ring-leader, for example, carried his unconscious GF to a car which he then drove very erratically while drunk. He then parks said car right next to a police car! Then barely staggers up to his own apartment while being recorded the whole time on security cams. Rendered impotent by his own intoxication, he encourages others to molest his own unconscious GF (passing out condoms, taking pictures, generating tons of incriminating evidence) all while watching porn on his laptop. Then has consensual sex with the GF the next day.
The worst predator in the world would never act like such a moron.
“Sober people ________ just as much as drunks, if not more.”
I made this a fill-in-the-blank quote, because sober people don’t do ANYTHING as much as drunks. Add in the mob mentality found on college campus, and you have a perfect storm for criminal acts.
If you are sending a daughter off to college next month, this would be a good article to make her read.
This is what college sex assault most often looks like. Drunk girl, drunk guy, no proof. So cops and schools can do absolutely nothing except tell the kid “live and learn.”
Key takeaway. Girls do better when they don’t “self-roofie” themselves with many shots of vodka and tequila.
Sad story. But you know, every time it’s said “it’s not a good idea for girls (or guys for that matter) to get so stinking drunk they can’t make decisions” it’s victim-blaming, and every time it’s said “hookup culture isn’t great, better to have sex in the context of a relationship” it’s slut-shaming and sex-negativity. There’s a lot of space in between pearl-clutching and debauchery.
I read this story in the paper yesterday and I cannot fathom how anyone can consider this interlude to be a case of rape or sexual assault. Whoever convinced Ms Lind that just because she has no memory of the encounter (which seems to have been very consensual), she had to have been raped did her a grave disservice.
I was especially struck by the amount of alcohol she freely admitted to having consumed before she left home and how she seemed to think she was planning to drink responsibly because she wrote out a “shot clock” with a friend before leaving for the block party. When I read the part describing her consumption to my college-aged DS he said that he wouldn’t have been able to leave the house if he’d had that much, and he’s 6’ tall.
Getting extremely drunk, driving a car, getting into an accident and saying you can’t remember getting into the car, let alone the accident wouldn’t absolve anyone of responsibility for their actions. Somehow, certain college aged women have become convinced that they bear no responsibility for their own actions while drunk. It would be different if she had appeared incapacitated by the drinking but that clearly was not the case. I think it’s horrible that she’s so determined to destroy this young mans life.
Don’t even get me started on the fact that the two of them were well under the legal drinking age at the time of the event. Apparently no one even cares about that.
