To me a better way to look at it is not that we have x% of sexual assaults or x% of false claims but simply we have sexual assaults and we have false claims. Then the focus is on what is the evidence that supports one or the other’s side if the university setting is where the accuser wants this handled - a fair and equitable process to resolve a dispute. As someone upstream said it is different in criminal courts, so accusers need to understand the subtle differences.
Well, my view is that we have sexual assaults, and we have false claims, and we have situations that aren’t either of these, exactly, but that involve bad behavior, miscommunication, hurt feelings, and more. I think colleges can do a pretty good job of dealing with those situations–the situations aren’t black and white, so I don’t see why the consequences have to be black and white, either.
Hunt,
I don’t know what happened.
It doesn’t make sense to me if Emma objected, Columbia would listen to her objection. She lost her case.
Hunt, you are talking about proving he said she said cases. Emma lost her case. She did not prove her case.
If Emma got a fair hearing, would she have proven her case?
Probably not. It is a pretty tough case.
However, doesn’t sound like the hearing and appeals process were fair. This still doesn’t prove her case.
Did Paul lie about the video. Paul brought up the video. The video itself imay not be important. If Paul lied though…that is an issue to me.
Why weren’t three accusations considered?
I keep saying schools are not courts of law. Schools can look at accusations from multiple cases and then kick somebody out, correct?
Schools can have their own codes and conducts, correct?
Some of the he said she said cases, one or both parties are lying. When you know somebody is lying, that can make a difference.
I am not talking about the Columbia case now…
If a guy says he did not have sex with a woman; therefore, he did not rape her, and dna evidence shows up and proves he did have sex with her, the guy lied.
I think that is material. Then the guy says something like, "Ok. I had sex with her. I didn’t rape her. "
Maybe in a court of law, the guy still has a chance.
In most cases, at a school, the guy should be gone.
There are differences between schools and courts.
I certainly agree that colleges can (and should) expel people who haven’t been convicted of any crime. I just think their procedure for doing so needs to be fundamentally fair because (in my opinion) it’s a pretty big deal to expel somebody from college, especially if you’re going to say that it was for something serious like a sexual crime. Imagine, for example, that one of the Vanderbilt four had turned state’s evidence against the others in exchange for not being prosecuted. I would still want Vanderbilt to expel that person–it wouldn’t be a difficult case at all.
CF, I like your post # 117.
Hunt, Hunt, Hunt, I agree with you. 
I want the procedures to be fair for both sides. Both sides.
I am glad Standford got rid of that swimmer. I guess technically the swimmer may have left on his own. Stanford said do not ever set foot on our campus.
In a case like the Stanford case…the procedure can take two minutes.
I see an interesting phenomenon in the Columbia case, which is the reaction of people to the very, very aggressive and persistent position of the accuser in the case. It seems to me that this makes some people more likely to believe that she is telling the truth, and some people more likely to believe the opposite. I think we all have a lot of notions about how people “normally” behave that may or not be representative of how people actually behave.
I guess what I am trying to say Hunt is that I don’t automatically side with the alleged victim because I am female. I have no “ax to grind” against men. I have both a son and a daughter, don’t have any personal experience with sexual assault and believe the truth is often hard to find in a lot of these cases.
When I read KKR’s post #90 and his posts that focus on “false accusations” rather than on the specifics of the case in question, I perceive a mind that is already made up.
“People’s memories are not as we imagine. Rather than remembering an event as if there were a video recording, we construct our memories. They’re inaccurate, and our confidence in our memory is not correlated with the accuracy of the memory. Here’s an interesting article about “emotional memories,” how we remember events with a strong emotional content, like hearing about the Challenger explosion:”
That is why, IMO, some of these cases are not false accusations as much as inaccurate memories. In some cases, something can feel off about an encounter and as it is replayed in our minds, there may be a shifting of our memory to the more dramatic. Witness the Brian Williams helicopter story now in the media (unless he is outright lying, he says his memory shifted).
I don’t know (and not to get off on a thread), but in the Serial podcast, I thought the whole issue of memory, how it works, and what makes a day stand out or not was interesting. One defense attorney suggested she was more inclined to believe a suspect that did not have a perfect recollection of the day a crime was supposedly committed because if he didn’t do it, it would be just another day. Not entirely relevant here, but speaks to the inaccuracy of memory at times.
It certainly sounds like the adviser to Emma did not act in a way that Emma or her parents thought was appropriate. But Emma chose not to have an attorney (based on advice), she was not restricted from having one.
Hunt agree. As I stated upthread, I wonder what everyone thinks about Emma (and others) continuing to call this guy a serial rapist, even when he has not been convicted of anything. Is that OK if he really is guilty? And what if he is not guilty?
I wonder why Vanderbilt hasn’t expelled the other men associated with the rape who have admitted to crimes-- accessory after the fact is a crime, and so is covering up a rape. I also wonder why Vandenburg’s horrible roommate, who was there when the rapes were happening and did nothing, is allowed to remain at Vanderbilt. AFAIK he didn’t commit a crime, but if Vanderbilt’s Student Code of Conduct has any requirement for the barest tiniest minimum of civility or decency, he did not meet that standard.
I wonder too. Did they cooperate in some way in exchange for leniency? Were they not visible on the video? Aren’t two more guys going to trial?
I have a son and two daughters so on a macro level, I lean towards the women.
The odds are the woman is not lying. It is more than a 50/50 chance the woman is telling the truth.
This doesn’t mean the woman should win the 50/50 cases. She needs a preponderance of evidence. That’s hard to achieve in many sexual assault cases.
If the women can’t meet that standard, they are going to lose. Many victims are going to lose. The women were sexually assaulted and they are going to lose.
A sexual assault and a sexual assault case are two different events.
So… When a woman loses a case, it doesn’t mean the woman is a lying stinkin’ @@@@@. When a woman loses a case, it doesn’t mean she wasn’t brutally raped.
When a guy is accused, it doesn’t mean he is guilty.
We have at times cases where I think both sides think they are telling the truth. Their realities of the same event are different.
Or a shifting to the less dramatic, if the true facts of the encounter are unflattering to the person remembering. There could be a shift from “I thought she would consent if I asked her” to “I asked her and she consented.”
Dan Ariely did this famous, and extraordinary, research (I can’t believe they actually did this experiment, but they did, at Berkeley):
http://people.duke.edu/~dandan/Papers/PI/Heat_of_Moment.pdf
Guys who were sexually aroused said they’d be more likely to try to have sex with a woman after she said no (as compared to unaroused guys), and also said they’d be more likely to roofie a woman in order to get sex. So we shouldn’t necessarily trust guys’ unaroused memories about their aroused behavior. They might do something while aroused, but then re-edit the memories in their unaroused state.
The other two guys who actually assaulted the victim are going to trial. A couple of the guys who were sent the videos afterwards cooperated with prosecutors. But what about the roommate, Prioleau, who testified at the trial, at length, that he was there and did nothing to stop them? AFAIK he didn’t technically commit a crime, but is that the ethical standard Vanderbilt wants to uphold? It’s all right to turn away from a gang rape that is happening IN YOUR ROOM while you are there?
Dan Ariely does fantastic work. . CF, thanks for the link. Great experiment.
I tried to see what was going on with the two students who were dismissed from Harvard, mentioned in @itwillsnow’s #97. The article says that the students were dismissed for sexual misconduct. At Harvard, students who are expelled can never come back, but students who are dismissed can apply for reinstatement. Later in the article it says that one students was the subject of three sexual harassment complaints, and the other the subject of one sexual harassment claim. If that’s accurate, these students were not accused of sexual violence; they were dismissed for harassment.
In this thread, or maybe the UVa thread, someone wondered whether students could be expelled for fighting. Yes, at Harvard: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/4/2/three-undergraduates-expelled-violence/
There are so many things about Emma Sulkowicz’s accusations that have never made sense to me. She was allegedly raped in a crowded dorm room where she could have screamed or cried for help. She waited eight months before filing a complaint against Paul. During that waiting time, she sent Paul loving text messages. She decided to file a complaint, went through the Columbia legal proceedings and lost. Why did she then devote her subsequent college career to harassing Paul?
To those who say that there were three accusers remember - one was Sulkowicz. The second was a woman who had been in a long-term sexual relationship with Paul. Sulkowicz befriended her, and the woman confessed that she found him abusive. The third woman was a bartender at a party whom Paul tried to kiss - this is hardly a rape.
I don’t know if Sulkowicz is telling the truth, but the following are bad objections to her story:
She didn’t yell;
She waited eight months before pursuing an accusation;
She was friendly to her alleged attacker afterwards.
They are bad objections because we know that some victims of actual, documented sexual violence have done exactly those things. So you are objecting that Sulkowicz did what many victims of sexual violence do.
Of course, women who were not victims of sexual violence also have done those things. Therefore, that Sulkowicz didn’t scream, she waited to report, she was friendly to Nungesser afterwards-- those facts don’t allow us to conclude anything, unless we are ignorant about how victims of sexual violence actually behave in the real world. She could be telling the truth; she could be making the entire thing up; she could be telling the truth as she remembers it, but not the truth as an unbiased observer would have seen it. We can’t know without other evidence, and there is no other evidence.
I don’t think these are bad objections. I hitchhiked once when I was in college (which was a stupid thing to do) and was raped by the two men who picked me up. I went to the police immediately. I was in a rape support group after this and met many rape victims. Her actions are NOT those of “many victims of sexual violence.” I did not meet one person who reacted that way. It’s possible I guess - but not very credible.