We don’t really have a need to know what happened between them. It should be “good enough” that the college two times told Emma she did not have .0000001% more credibility to make a misconduct charge and it should be “good enough” that the prosecutor decided not to charge rape.
We need to stop this nonsense that is happening on college campuses. All this media hype which ends up far too often being a fictionalized accounting by disturbed women desiring attention is sucking the lifeblood out of the public’s appetite for issues surrounding women who have been raped, report it and deserve the attention of the local police.
In this case the college absolutely was complicit in Emma’s on-going harassment campaign and they should have stopped it even before it even got started and it matters not a wit that any of us learn anything more that happened in that bedroom because it is not relevant to the issue that the college allowed harassment… Which is the underlying principal of Title IX and certainly, while the college probably shouldn’t be adjudicating felony offenses, the college should probably have an eagle eye a firm hand on harassment occurring on campus.
Nine percent of freshman women at Syracuse say they were forcibly raped during their freshman year, or someone tried to rape them forcibly. You may call that “media hype,” @momofthreeboys, but many of the rest of us believe it’s a serious problem.
And what happens outside of college campuses when people do not like judicial rulings or our system fails to indict someone that they think is guilty of a crime? Well, they protest. Sometimes they just do the talk show circuit and refer to the person as a “murdered” and sometimes they burn down cities, loot or harass the person they think is guilty into hiding (Casey Anthony comes to mind.) Does anyone stop them? Should anyone stop them?
That’s why the solution is going to be in things other than adjudication reform. Prevention, self-defense training, bystander intervention, counselling etc. etc. etc.
The reason so few of these incidents are proven fundamentally is not because colleges, police and prosecutors suck. It is that they are stuck with the usually impossible task of trying to prove something for which there is no proof. You simply can’t get there from here. That’s why the DOE OCR’s Dear Colleague initiative is so stupid and so ineffective.
I personally doubt that mattress girl was raped. But it is 100% certain that her rape allegations cannot ever be proven. Columbia and the NYPD could have hired scores of Perry Masons and Eliot Nesses and the allegations still would be not proved.
If there’s no proof, then the quality of the process does not matter. If there is proof, then just about any process will get the right result. Unless you are going to require students to wear body cameras during sex, you are not going to fix the proof problem. So reforming your processes is a complete waste of time and will do nothing to protect or help your female students.
@“Cardinal Fang” , to be accurate 9% of the survey respondents say the rape or attempted rapes occurred. It was not a survey all the freshman had to complete. It was a voluntary survey where those who completed the survey were paid.
The article is one persons interpretation of the study. I only took out that not every freshman female student had to complete the survey. Not sure if the survey is representative of the female freshman class at this one university.
I wonder what the percentage would be if only rapes were counted and not the combination of rapes and attempted rapes.
The first step is to admit there’s a problem. We’ve got several posters here who can’t even make that first step. They bring out more and more implausible excuses to explain away the fact that 9% of Syracuse women say that in their freshman year, they were forcibly raped or someone attempted to rape them forcibly. And 15% say that someone raped them or tried to rape them when they were incapacitated.
No, 9% of women who took the survey said that they forcibly raped/attempted rape. We don’t know how many women took the survey, or where the survey was given. If only 5% of the female students took the survey, the number tells us nothing. If 100% took the survey, the statistic is much more important. If only women who were seeking medical care were given the survey , the numbers will be skewed to those who may have been raped and thus needed the medical care.
We’d also need to know how the word ‘rape’ was defined in the survey. Some people would answer ‘yes’ if anyone tried to kiss or touch them. Although unwelcome, I think the number of people who had been kissed in a bar is fairly high. Some might consider this rape or attempted rape.
And the second step is to get off the dead end path of trying to get more convictions by watering down fairness. That’s the primary cause of the blow back you object to.
The flawed premise is that all these rapists go unpunished because the processes used by colleges and cops and courts are bad. But the actual reason why those rapists go unpunished is there’s no proof.
Mattress girl’s protest is ultimately a waste of her time. Because all she was advocating for was for someone to punish the guy for allegations that could never ever ever be proven. Since that can’t ever happen (and shouldn’t happen) what exactly was her point on all this? I don’t see her proposing any solutions. I just see her flaming the dude and basking in her 15 minutes.
Nope, in my opinion, she should be allowed to advocate for whatever she wishes. But I believe that freedom goes both ways and the guy should be allowed to walk around with a sign saying Mattress Girl is a big fat ugly slut. But no one here believes that he would be invited to the State of the Union if he did, that Columbia would allow that to happen, or give him course credit for it. That is the problem. People object to the obvious one sided ness of the manner in which the Title IX rules/guidelines are interpreted and how the dominant media culture seeks to champion one world view.
Maybe she should advocate for something useful or practical.
Her project was to carry the mattress until her “rapist” was kicked off campus. Lacking credible proof of rape, he was never kicked out. That’s what should and does happen in the absence of proof. So the point of her protest was what exactly…?
That we should punish guys for unproven allegations?
@Ohiodad51 but how do the words “fat” and “ugly” help you in you proving or persuading anyone that she is not telling the truth? This is a woman who believes she is a victim of a crime that has gone unpunished. I personally have no experience with sexual assault but I would imagine that a tribunal telling me he was “not responsible” would not have ended the matter for me either. She chose her own way of protesting that finding - might not have been my or your way of doing things. But she did stick to the issue at hand - rape.
And as far as the extraneous name calling that can go both ways. She could have taken that road easily especially in view of the nature of her allegations.
She chose to protest the finding by harassing a fellow student, and making his life miserable. I don’t think she had the right to do that, once the judicial process found him not guilty.
Wow, that’s really twisting her performance art. The piece was called “Carry That Weight,” not “Get Him Off Campus.” It wasn’t about him. It was about her, and her belief that she was assaulted, and was carrying the weight of her assault.
People who liked the art like the symbolism of the mattress as a symbol for the enduring pain that a person carries after an assault. Favorable comments were things like, “symbolically laden yet drastically physical,” and “pure radical vulnerability.”
Sulkowicz has graduated, but activists against campus rape aren’t going away. And they were hugely energized by Sulkowicz’s art. That’s why it wasn’t a waste of time.
What a misrepresentation of the entire episode!! This is why it is difficult to take advocates seriously, as they just distort and think they are smart in these type of responses to affect the uninformed.
Emma did not shut up. She did a lot, rather loudly and publicy:
She filed charges against Paul with Columbia.
She went around and enlisted other groupies to say things about Paul.
Columbia did not believe her enough to find Paul responsible of sexual misconduct. (Same for one of the groupies, who just lost a case, and showed to be a liar too)
Emma did not accept that and tried again with Columbia. Again, the tribunal found Paul not guilty of sexual misconduct.
In the interim to the above, Emma filed a real police report, BUT she refused to pursue that avenue because she was too darn lazy to do it.
Only after the above steps did she decide to take the faux art project way out.
Therefore, the adult, logical thinking answer is after all of the above Emma should have accepted her two tribunal loses and her personal decision not to follow through with police and move on with her life, especially since she is now a proved liar.
I am still shaking my head how advocates take disturbed, lying women as normal examples of females to promote vis a vis rape culture. Are these what advocates consider to be standard female behavior? Yikes. And they think this helps people take this cause seriously?! No, the effect is real rape allegations are viewed with more skepticism with the first thought being, “Are these people promoting another messed up female?” Seems like a step backwards to me.
What do you mean WE don’t know? I know, because I bothered to read the survey and the quotes from the authors. The survey was conducted at an upstate New York private college, probably Syracuse since one of the authors is from there and the numbers work. There were 483 respondents, a quarter of the freshman class, and they were demographically representative of the school. The survey was mailed out to all freshman women.
@awcntb my comment was in response to the suggestion in the previous post that the protest was a waste of time. I was posing a hypothetical question of what her alternative might have been. Please keep posts in context.
@harvestmoon1 Maybe he feels she is fat and ugly? Why shouldn’t she be forced to prove beyond question that she is not? How is that in any way different from the position supporting her?
And I know we just disagree, but it makes my blood boil to hear any attempt at equivalency between what Emma (or Lena Dunham) has done with something as comparatively trivial as making comments people interpret to be about someone’s weight. It just seems to me to indicate a real warping of what is at issue here, and the scope of the problem that confronts all of us.
It makes my blood boil when men who have disagreements with women are unable to stick to the point, and start making it all about the woman’s appearance.