Department of Justice study: ~4% of college women raped each year, ~10% sexually assaulted

Parents Forum
181

@“Cardinal Fang” , @ucbalumnus , and @BookLvr RE: several posts…

I can’t cite a study that shows women dressing like prostitutes makes them more vulnerable. This is common knowledge. Why do you think prostitutes dress like prostitutes? Because it works.

And, again, this is not blaming the victim. A legal conviction must be proved beyond reasonable doubt. And when a jury is confronted with a situation where a male defendant claims she consented, they want to know things like prior sexual history, sobriety, dress, etc. to gauge the situation. No jury is going to send a guy to prison when the girl has had 12 sexual partners, was too drunk to remember if she consented, and was dressed like a prostitute. Even though he may be slime and deserve to be imprisoned, he won’t be.

Evolution will always steamroll good intentions and idealism on a macro scale. Male predators exist because females have mated with men that exhibit these behaviors in a non-obvious way. No one is going to fundamentally change men.

For my small circle of influence, I strongly endorse abstinence and alcohol-free lifestyles for various reasons. A byproduct of this is that the males will never rape another person. I don’t need to have silly conversations about consent. Yet, I get relentlessly mocked and told how stupid I am for advocating these positions (interestingly, mostly by women?), and apparently within this thread, have been accused of doing “nothing” to address the male rapists.

Because of this and many other good arguments made in this thread, I don’t believe this is a public health threat that requires overarching political and institutional action. Using drinking as an example, women drink with the thought that the benefit outweighs the risk. While I advocate for an alcohol-free lifestyle, I am not a prohibition extremist. We can all make informed decisions that suit us as individuals without making policy that can adversely affect so many, and possibly not even help the people it was intended to help.

Yes, I know people that have lifelong issues due to having been raped. There are no experts here, only a collection of individual experiences.

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Can you please stop with this “dress like prostitutes” rubbish? Your knowledge of what sex workers wear while they are on the clock may well be far in excess of mine but I’m not aware of a uniform that is worn by women who exchange sex for money. Since male prostitutes exist, is there a way men can “dress like prostitutes”? Inquiring minds want to know.

You say you are not blaming the victim, but you are obviously saying that women who dress in some vague, undefined (so far) way should expect no sympathy if they are raped and their assailant denies it. That is blaming the victim, pure and simple. Are you even aware that it’s illegal to rape sex workers and that they are as entitled to justice as any virginal girl who attends church and dresses like the Amish?

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Endorsing and professing a life of sexual abstinence doesn’t seem to have prevented Catholic priests from raping. I don’t know why you’d think it would work any better for other men.

Avoiding alcohol, on the other hand, probably reduces rape rates. We know that alcohol is implicated not only in rape perpetration but in all violent crimes, because alcohol makes some people more violent.

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Don’t be so sure about how well men understand what prostitutes wear while working. Clearly, prostitutes dress however they dress to signal availability, but some men are clueless. One time, when I was in my 20s and very naive, I was walking along the street to get to the grocery store. I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, no makeup, and my hair was its usual random self.

A car stopped next to me; I figured the guy wanted directions or something. To my surprise he said, “I’ll give you twenty dollars.” I had no idea what was going on. Why was this strange man offering me money? My first impulse was to say, “OK, hand it over,” but I figured nothing good was going to come of this encounter so I just turned and walked away. It was only years later that I realized he was trying to solicit me for prostitution.

It turns out the particular stretch of road was known (not by me) for having hitchhiking prostitutes on it. I later remembered that a boyfriend had had a related problem on the same road: he picked up what he thought was a hitchhiker, only to discover that she was a prostitute trying to get work.

In any case, prostitutes dress to express availability for paid sex. Nobody, not prostitutes, not anyone else, dresses to get raped.

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How I wish this board had a “Disagree” button!

@OhiBro Talk to any cop who works in a sex crimes unit. Want to know the #1 thing a woman can do to reduce the odds she’ll be raped? Cut her hair short. Wearing a ponytail boosts your odds of being raped significantly. Why? Because one of the most effective ways to overcome a woman is to grab her by the hair and use that hold to control her movements. Another problem? Big hoop or long dangling earrings. Again, wearing them makes you more vulnerable.

Indeed, since I am older than most on the board, I can tell you that there was advice to women demonstrating against the War in Vietnam to avoid pony tails and dangling earrings. If you had long hair and didn’t want to cut it, you were told to wear it up with a gazillion bobby pins in it so it would be harder for it to come down. It was the unfortunate reality that police used to grab pony tails and earrings to subdue -and sometimes intentionally hurt–female protestors.

If you think dressing conservatively will protect a woman, you might want to read a very enlightening series in the main Salt Lake City newspaper about sexual assault at Brigham Young University. The series won lots of journalism prizes. More importantly, it forced BYU to admit that sexual assault exists there. The first comprehensive survey of student experiences had a 43% response rate, which is unusually high. 6.5% of female students reported having unwanted sexual contact in the previous 12 months. 1.2% of males did. Of the unwanted sexual contacts reported by females, 19% involved penetration and 20% involved attempted penetration. https://magazine.byu.edu/article/byu-releases-findings-from-sexual-assault-survey/ and https://news.byu.edu/sites/default/files/Campus%20Climate%20Report_F2017.pdf Given BYU’s dress code–and that of LDS members generally–how likely do you think it is that the victims “dressed like prostitutes?”

BYU female students were less likely to report. Why? Because the first questions were always about what they did wrong which had caused the attack. After BYU admitted it had a problem and agreed to change its procedures, the # of reports doubled.

BTW, the report indicates that the victims reported that in 6% of cases the male assailant had been drinking and in 2% of cases the victim had. (LDS members are prohibited from drinking alcohol.)

Female victims reported that in 52% of the cases, the assailant was a male BYU students.

So, lets not make believe that if only young women didn’t drink and dress like prostitutes, there’d be no sexual assault.

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A more accurate way to describe those statistics is only a small percentage of women admit to making false accusations. Since people who make false accusations may not answer honestly on surveys, we can’t know what the true percentage of false accusations is.

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Suppose a lot of accusations brought forward are false. That doesn’t explain the large number of women survey respondents who say they were assaulted but didn’t bring accusations forward. So, they’re all lying sluts too? Why?

The survey that prompted this thread is in line with other campus surveys I’ve seen. For example, in a 2014 all-UC survey, 7% of women undergraduate respondents said they’d been sexually assaulted. As with the DoJ results, LGBTQ students were at much higher risk.

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Ok for statistics answer me this. If the question is with reference to an “unwanted sexual contact” and a guy makes a move - say he goes in for a kiss or something. He’s denied. Says “no problem lets go eat.” Is that an unwanted sexual contact for these surveys?

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For the kissing part of unwanted sexual contact, the survey asked about “Forced touching of a sexual nature (forced kissing, touching of private parts, grabbing, fondling, rubbing up against you in a sexual way, even if it is over your clothes).” I don’t know how the women surveyed would interpret that question, but if a guy attempts to kiss me, I reject his advance and that is that, I would not call that “forced kissing,” would you? To me “forced kissing” implies, well, force.

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If it were possible to dress our way out of risk of rape, women in abayas should be rape proof. That isn’t so. Sadly.

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Brigham Young University, in the link in #184, used the very survey developed by DoJ, the one I linked to in post #1. So, the numbers are comparable; it’s the same survey! Except BYU evidently added some Mormon-specific questions about their faith.

Of the 6.5% of female survey respondents who said they were sexually assaulted, we can’t tell from the report how many said they were raped, because they didn’t break down the numbers the way I’d like. It was a minimum of 1.1%, but probably more like 1.5% to 2.5%. In other words, around 1 in 50 women students at BYU said they were raped in the previous year.

So this is what happens when women students follow rules of alcohol avoidance and modesty in dressing. They still get raped, at a rate of 1 in 50 per year. If you’re sitting in a BYU classroom of 100, half women, chances are, one of the women was raped this year.

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privatebanker: you can probably search for the thread(s) we had on the Stanford case at the time it happened. Women posters counted at least five good men who intervened. They got lots of praise. There is no war on men going on here with the women who have been posting on this issue for years now.

CF… thanks again

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I really don’t want to derail your thread, CF. However, I wonder about the usefulness of a new thread with links to some older ones, including dstark’s Missoula book thread, might be helpful to posters who weren’t around then??

There were lots of good men posting their concerns about rape culture.

Adding:

dstark is a former male poster very concerned about rape, especially on college campuses. Private banker: please search his threads. You will perhaps find them interesting and educational. Many of us did at the time.

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Those would be useful links, @alh.

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@OhiBro Others are rightfully taking issue with your dress like a prostitute victim-blaming, but no one yet has addressed your “slept with 12 people” statement.

So what if a woman has slept with twelve people? So what if she’s slept with twenty or a hundred? If she says no to someone then it’s no. No judge should decide whether or not to believe a woman on the basis of the number of her past sex partners. Another instance of sexism - a man can “sow his oats” and guys will wink and nod, but if a woman chooses to have however many partners she wants, then she won’t be believed if she’s raped. The good old double standard.

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@privatebanker, I’m very very sorry for mixing you up with a different poster. It was an egregious error. I should have been more careful. I apologize and will endeavor to be more careful in the future.

It was a different poster, not you, who mentioned dress and alcohol. This was my error, for which I am sorry.

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I miss dstark.

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I miss dstark too.

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@“Cardinal Fang” Thank you. I believe women and our daughters at school can wear whatever is in fashion for them and they decide not men. And drinking has its own risks for both genders. But no excuses for anyone getting assaulted in any way.

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In my fantasy he’s grandparenting, and shows up again in 17 years when we both have grandchildren starting college, AND college rape culture is no longer a concern.