When I was in college a girl who lived on my hall was being abused by her boyfriend. It was clear to all of us. We saw the bruises, heard the loud fights behind closed doors, saw him do things like yank her arm roughly and call her names. Yet we hesitated to report because she insisted nothing was going on. Many of us spent a lot of time talking with her about her situation. She steadfastly denied there was a problem, claiming any bruises she had were due to rough consensual sex. At that time there was no Title IX office, no effective place for us to go. We reported to the RA, who spoke to her, and hearing the same things she was telling us, let things drop. We should have made a report to the Dean of Students, but I think no one wanted to get that involved and it was clear from the way she kept coming back to him that it would be an uphill battle. I’m not sure if she dropped out at the end of that year or later, but I do know she didn’t graduate with the class.
My point is that, regardless of what someone reported to be a victim says a situation like this can upset the entire community. I was honestly scared of the boyfriend and stayed as far from him as possible although he was never anything but nice to me.
“I think it is easier to use a public health campaign to persuade people not to hurt themselves, as opposed to using it to persuade them not to hurt another person.”
Yes. Which is why the public health folks need to have freedom to explore any solutions that work, including interventions on the victim side. That’s politically difficult here. It’s not a coincidence that the best study done so far came out of Canada, not the US: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1503952?af=R&rss=currentIssue&#t=article
“When I was in college a girl who lived on my hall was being abused by her boyfriend.”
Me too. It got so bad one night, a group of hallmates called public safety. An officer came by and spoke to the boyfriend, then left. (Awesome policing job there.) Then the boyfriend menaced us for calling the cops on him. At that school, there are no adults in the dorms, only upperclassmen. We were scared to ever call police again. These problems affect everyone in the orbit of the violent relationship.
After I retire, I have joked about opening a bar called “QuantMech’s Place.” All of the swizzle sticks can detect roofies. If roofies are detected, the portcullis drops, and no one can leave until the security video is scanned and the person responsible has been identified.
There have been those who say the Place would be no fun. But it would be safer than some.
I am sorry about your experience when you were trying to help an abuse victim, Hanna.
The assault-resistance programs mentioned in the Canadian study linked by Hanna are certainly worth pursuing, but it would be foolhardy to rely on them for women’s safety. My high school days included a self-defense unit in phys ed. It was not very effective, judging by the later experience of my friends. One of the women who told me that she had been raped had studied hand-to-hand combat at a military academy.
Also, it is tragic that New York City needed “hot spot mapping” inside the schools, to reduce sexual violence at the middle school level (also from the Canadian article). If I had missed the last 50 years, I would have thought that this was completely insane.
If one party is under 21, someone is contributing to the delinquency of a minor. If both parties are at least 21, I don’t see how it’s possible to cause someone else to become drunk, unless you’re referring to cases where someone is physically forced to consume alcohol.
“it would be foolhardy to rely on them for women’s safety.”
It would be foolhardy to minimize promising lines of study because they don’t cut problem rates to zero on the first trial. The Canadian study regimen (of which physical self-defense was just 25%) has been shown empirically to cut assault risk almost in half – in just one year and at a scalable cost. This ought to be celebrated! Attempted replications and innovations should be going on at campuses across America. If you know of other interventions that have shown anything like this level of effectiveness, I’m ready to rely on them too, but as far as I know, they either don’t exist or have not been rigorously tested.
A new cancer regimen that prevented +40% more deaths than placebo in a randomized, controlled study would rightly make headlines all over the globe. My glee about that kind of finding would not be dampened by the fact that I knew some people from high school who took a drug that had 25% of the same ingredients as the new cancer regimen and they later got cancer anyway.
Re #244, yes, someone is contributing to the delinquency of a minor if any party is under 21–possibly the server, bartender, or bar owner.
If both parties are 21, while one can’t force the other to become drunk, there used to be situations where an . . . um . . . gentleman would ply a lady with drinks, with the idea of reducing her inhibitions. I don’t think this used to be cast as making her blotto, but I think it was sometimes rather done rather calculatedly. Perhaps that no longer happens.
The scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Marian Ravenwood drinks the Nepalese man under the table? It’s fiction.
The whole article that Hanna linked is certainly worth reading. The outcomes of other programs showed limited effectiveness (Ref. 17-21 of the article Hanna linked). The particular resistance program that is featured in the article did work better.
I think a key element of the article, however, is “Despite this, the risk of sexual coercion was high among this cohort, which suggests that adding more education related to resisting coercion in relationships may be valuable.” [Reference 38]
Sure, but rather than just adding more education about resisting coercion, what about addressing the coercers?
@QuantMech I agree with your thought and the original link in post #241 recognizes the concern about also addressing those who assault:
[quote]
Empowering women to resist violence and protect themselves, is a positive and sensible part of sexual violence prevention, and there is a long history behind these approaches. ** However, women-focused approaches used in isolation for prevention not only deflect responsibility from potential perpetrators, but also represent only a partial solution. We can have a greater effect through combined efforts that also focus on potential perpetrators, bystanders, and broader community-level influences.**
Well, for once I can agree with momofthreeboys–of course, women can get drunk with no assistance. And of course, they shouldn’t. But I would not be surprised if some do with the intent of relaxing their own inhibitions, or having an excuse for a later encounter. With this group and their partners, I think the university versions of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions with minimal sanctions would probably work, supplemented by a program on safe alcohol practices (for the over 21 group) and–sigh–since reality means that the safe-alcohol program is probably needed for the younger group, as well–for them, too.
On the other hand, the calculating predator who encourages a woman to drink beyond her capacity, but not beyond his does exist. I don’t believe it is correct to suggest that there is no one like that. Predators in that group are the ones I meant to exclude from the mediation via the university versions of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions.
This was in my Facebook feed the other day posted by a young woman who looked to be of college age. It got me thinking about scenarios like @QuantMech describes at the end of her last post where one party is intoxicated:
Guys who get wasted out of their minds, bring strangers home, and wake to find their wallets missing are rightly considered self-destructive at best and idiots at worst. Nobody pretends to think that this is a reasonable pattern of behavior, especially if he repeats it over and over. Is this example supposed to show the absurdity of questioning the high-risk behavior of crime victims? Because I think the male victim here is going to get an eyeroll if he goes to police, especially if there’s been a lot of publicity on campus about hookup theft.
I have always considered property crimes to be of less significance than crimes that involve personal injury.
I did not know until 11:04 pm today that “hookup theft” was a thing. Wow!
In a number of cases that involve sexual intercourse where the woman is intoxicated, the partner is not a stranger. The partner may well be someone that the woman trusted up to that point. (Not always, I know.)
I thought HarvestMoon1’s post boiled down to a revenge fantasy, and not something that should have exact parallels.
For the record, when the hypothetical breaking & entering and burglary of my IKEA Storp desk was committed, I was at the lab. Working.
It seemed to me HarvestMoon’s facebook analogy compares the perception of observers. Men who flaunt wealth and women who flaunt beauty are just asking for others to take advantage of them. It’s an invitation and they should know better. It shifts responsibility for preventing theft and rape from the perpetrator to the victim. It also points out gender stereotypes: women are attracted by material goods; men attracted by physical attractiveness. I see a whole lot going on in that paragraph and am still thinking about it.
It reminds me of the Brock Turner case. We teach our kids to protect themselves by not getting so drunk they pass out at parties. We also teach our kids to be the bystanders who intervene to protect those who aren’t necessarily protecting themselves. We don’t want our kids taking advantage of the risky behavior of others, and not just because their actions may be illegal.
Yes when I read that Facebook post my thoughts were as @Ahl expressed. When the underlying conduct is wrong, it’s wrong no matter the extenuating circumstances. Just because someone is in a state that another individual can take advantage of, it doesn’t mean they should or that if they do they might not be committing a crime.
And the male victim would not get an eye roll from me if he reported the theft to the police or to the university. Someone stole something from him – it is a crime and should be pursued. Because he was drunk does not alter that reality.
Another thought on the analogy: The perceptions of the police in both cases, hook-up theft and hook-up rape, could certainly be seen as pertinent to the sorts of posts dstark used to make about futility of reporting. Would a college respond differently to someone stealing from a dorm room in such circumstances than a police dept?
It is to the college’s advantage (I think) to give students as safe an environment as possible from theft, even when students get drunk and reckless. What would a college do with the student in the described scenario? I would like to think she is asked to leave campus, even if the police won’t take the case seriously.
She is not someone I want living on a hall with my kids, any more than the student beating a partner behind closed doors, because those actions do potentially negatively impact quality of life for the whole hall, not necessarily just those individuals the perpetrators target as victims.
I really do see a lot of consider there, HarvestMoon. Thanks again.
But it would be safer than some.