<p>Eh. It’s her point of view, it’s not her STORY. Your posts are your point of view, but you aren’t telling your own story. Point of view and story are different issues. Hugely different.</p>
<p>Did you read her piece on how she ended up doing this particular piece? It’s pretty interesting. It’s not the story she originally set out to tell. She has a strong awareness of her point of view. Any sentence contains a point of view, including that last one and yours.</p>
<p>The reporter found her story at UVA but freely admits it could have been found almost anywhere. This is interesting. Apparently, she spent 5 months figuring out what really should have taken about 5 minutes.</p>
<p>Erdely said one thing she learned through her research, universities are not equipped to deal with issues like sexual assault. “These cases are no disciplinary problems, they’re felony investigations and they should ideally be handled by police,” Erdely said.</p>
<p>Some of this seems like two steps back for every one step forward, at best.</p>
<p>Marie1234, where did the reporter say it took her 5 months to discover rapes are occuring at other campuses?</p>
<p>Many people agree that universities should not be adjudicating this stuff. And many of us agree that there needs to be more education at the police level about how to work with the victims. I know more today than i did last week simply from this thread. We all have alot to learn. Tell that to folks at the DOE.</p>
<p>“reading some of the posts on College Confidential is even more disturbing. Some of them are based in parents’ fears that their sons are going to be wrongly accused of rape at college,”</p>
<p>Not just sons, but anyone can be wrongly accused rape if the bar is lowered. Should those men that “Jackie” has said gang raped her be punished, arrested, jailed, expelled? I say absolutely NO without a thorough examination of the evidence if there is any. I think that UVA should insist that Jackie name those guys, and they should be questioned, investigated. I think the frat should insist on the same. How would you like it if someone is panning, say your company, your family, with pseudonyms and saying s/he was gangraped by your employees, your family members, your friends. You have no idea about the case, who did it, what happened, and you are getting shunned, your rep is being ruined. You had better believe, I d insist in getting some names and some investigation on something like this. Someone has just announced to the nation, the world, in a public paper, that this has happened at a place, that people ignored it, the perps are still there doing the same, repeated the gang rapes even. I’d be beside myself to find out who, what. Some very sick dangerous people there that can hurt others. What Jackie is saying is that those predators are there, but won’t ID them. We need to know who these perps are so they don’t do this again. Would they have to kill someone before anything can be done? Who are these men? How much evidence can we gather at this late time to reconstruct what happened? If nothing else, those men should be put on notice that such a report was made about them so that if any of the should make this a pattern, as serial rapists tend to do, their chances of getting away with this has diminished. </p>
<p>I don’t think for one second that people should be allowed to air accusation that hurt others with no proof, and then refuse to move forward in follow up. I think the same way about the current Cosby case. It matters not a whit whether I or anyone thinks the stories are true; to give the credence just on word is not right. </p>
<p>Jackie needs to ID the men, and those “friends” and the story needs to be investigated. </p>
<p>The reporter told PBS she spent 5 months researching the story. What she says learned and what I was referring to is that schools are not equipped to litigate rape. I agree with her I just don’t find it to be a surprising revelation at all.</p>
<p>Seriously? Researching a story and figuring out schools are not equipped… Is not the same thing.</p>
<p>There is a lot more to the story than the revelation. </p>
<p>It takes time to research a story like this.</p>
<p>You know that.</p>
<p>Your comment denigrates what the reporter wrote. So why did you make that comment? </p>
<p>The article is having an impact. </p>
<p>The schools are not equipped to litigate rape, murder,assault,… most crimes. That’s why we have LE. What they are equipped to do and don’t do is pick up the danged phone and call LE when they get wind of something like this. They are so holier than thou about saying the Catholic church should not have handled molestation cases themselves, and they don’t do much better as very high profile cases like this one and the Sandusky case clearly show at very highly regarded universities. That the Clery act is little known to most employees at the universities when it is specifially aimed at them. Ironically the act was the result of a rape of student who was killed as well </p>
<p>I think those who are told of a crime and do not call LE, and decided to have their own opinions, take care of it their own way, should be under sanctions right now. It’s a requirement for those who deal with children to report suspected abuse and neglect. It’s not too much to require universities to report suspected what are crimes. Not up to a professor, an administrator, anyone at the school to make own decisions on this. Police should be called.</p>
<p>Here’s the thing. The population at every university in this country, except MIT, Caltec, GAtech, etc…, is made up of at least 50% women. In most cases, it’s made up of a much higher percentage of women than men. This is a safety issue. And if they have to shut down every fraternity on every campus, they will do so eventually. I promise.</p>
<p>Instead, it is in the best interest of these institutions to begin to work with the survivors and find a way to keep these campuses safe. This is the real reason this has been being swept under the rug for so long. Administrators are well aware that their campuses are not safe places for freshman women. And they aren’t.</p>
<p>So… Something has to be done and something will be done.</p>
<p>Whether a mechanism gets put into place to get these victims to the hospital for rape kits and get them to the police with an advocate, or whether the schools themselves continue to attempt to deal with this inhouse, something is going to have to be done by the schools. </p>
<p>In the end, the schools originally set up these boards to protect the men from prosecution and investigation. That is the history of how these investigations, if that’s the euphamism we want to use today, came into being. It’s why they are structured the way that they are. That women now want to use them to get the justice they were pretending to be meting out to begin with shouldn’t come as any surprise.</p>
<p>Given that the schools themselves have been fighting up until about ten minutes ago to KEEP this inhouse, to protect the rapists from consequences, let’s not pretend the DOE and DOJ made this system up.</p>
<p>Another problem is the victims who don’t want law enforcement called. They won’t report to the school if they know that’s part of the deal. And, they are not usually children.</p>
<p>Let me reframe it for you:</p>
<p>if there was a school in which 1 in 5 men would leave the school having been mugged at knifepoint or gunpoint would you say this was a police matter or both a police and university matter?</p>
<p>If this was EVERY university, do you think something would be done?</p>
<p>yes.</p>
<p>exactly.</p>
<p>Something is going to be done.</p>
<p>Cpt, I agree that an exploration of the facts is what is needed. I don’t think UVA is doing that. It’s possible that the very thorough article in Rolling Stone was pure fiction, of course, but it is currently being scrutinized by a lot of people and whether or not the story is discredited, UVA did not, in fact, notify law enforcement, and judging by comments not only on CC but in other news sources, it’s business as usual for them and just part of the campus scene. I don’t see UVA as being victimized any more than I see the Catholic Church as being victimized by those altar boys who come back 30 years later and describe what happened and how they were not listened to. It is likely that the truth will come out, ONLY if the injured parties are not silenced and suppressed and made to feel that they are the guilty party for making the allegation. I don’t think UVA has been encouraging that sort of investigation, because it would do what it really should do, which is give people pause when their kids consider their college choices. I do believe there should be consequences for the school, and by that I don’t just mean firing an administrator here and there. </p>
<p>Cpt she is morally obligated now to work with the police, name her assaulters) and her friends in my opinion. It is unethical, again in my opinion, to work with a major news organization to tell her story and then treat it like Real Wives of Somewhere. But I do believe somewhere in one of those articles cited the police are now investigating and it appears she is “known” although I do respect her privacy not to have her name publicized but in this day and age with all the unethical media i doubt she will be afforded that privacy. I suspect the police will be very careful to the letter of the law as her ‘story’ is so volatile. </p>
<p>I actually don’t think all fraternities and sororities are “bad.” There are some really wonderful ones out there. If my son would have joined Triangle I would have supported it. <a href=“http://www.triangle.org/”>http://www.triangle.org/</a>
But then my son played football and then lacrosse during the Duke fiasco so I stayed away from that thread. He declined fraternity invitations so I can stay here.</p>
<p>“Then I watch the Beatle’s movie Help (1965) with my younger daughter. Now Help has race and gender issues, but the ever so popular Beatles are singing “you better treat her right” and “I need somebody, not just anybody.””</p>
<p>Well, John Lennon also sang “Run For Your Life,” which is pretty misogynistic (I’d rather see you dead, little girl / Than to be with another man), though he later disavowed the song. And he physically abused his first wife. He wrote “Imagine”, which everyone idolizes him for, at the same time he was being unspeakably cruel to his son Julian.</p>
<p>And “Gloria” by the Doors is a pretty rape-y song.</p>
<p>But I digress. Carry on.</p>
<p>Well, put, Poetgirl.</p>
<p>One in five college women are not gang-raped, even at UVA. Sexual misconduct is a much broader category and does include things that police will likely dismiss. That’s part of the problem. The college women want an alternate system because the criminal system is not addressing their issues. I don’t have the answer and I wasn’t denigrating anything. The reporter was asked what her takeaway was after 5 months of research. This was her answer. “These cases are no disciplinary problems, they’re felony investigations and they should ideally be handled by police.” </p>
<p>Women don’t want to go to the police, because they think they won’t be believed by the police, and they’ll be grilled and cross-examined by contemptuous cops after they just experienced the worst trauma of their lives. And they are correct in this belief: We have the research posted by dstark, saying that 86% of rape cases that are reported to police are not even referred to prosecutors, because the police don’t believe the accusers.</p>
<p>Before we start urging women to go to the police, let’s teach the police how to take rape reports without delivering a second assault, and without telling the women they must have wanted to be raped. Let’s teach the police how sexual trauma affects people. Let’s teach the police that a woman drinking, or going to a frat house, or going to a guy’s room, or wearing revealing garments, does not constitute consent to sex. </p>
<p>If women think they have a good chance to nail their attacker they’ll be more willing to use the justice system. As it is, most rape victims get no justice from the justice system.</p>
<p>No I still think we need to urge women to report it to the police. I agree that training will help, but simply trying to shift the burden elsewhere, to universities or something else, is equally wrong. Simply using the word “nail their attacker” is why we have police to investigate. Not all rapes accusations have “an attacker” that is a problem. it takes careful investigation of all the circumstances. Most people associate rape with force…in which case “attack” would be an appropriate word but there are many degrees of criminal sexual conduct and then conduct that is does not meet our current definition of criminal. Change the definitions. Change the way police operate, but understand that not all criminal sexual behavior includes force. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is not a solution because it doesn’t do any good. If the woman goes to the police, in almost all cases she won’t be believed and she will be treated badly by police.</p>
<p>Look at the stats. Of ALL rapes reported to police, only 14% even get to prosecutors according to the Campbell research. That number might be different in different jurisdictions, but in all jurisdictions only a tiny fraction of rapes result in a conviction.</p>
<p>And let’s realize that women are not stupid. They know which rapes will be viewed as “legitimate rapes”: horrific stranger rapes with violence where the victim was sober. And they know most rapes will be viewed as questionable where the woman really secretly wanted sex: rapes where the woman knew her attacker, where she had been drinking, where she initially agreed to spend time with him, where she was wearing a dress or heels or a low-cut top or something else the cop can leer at.</p>
<p>So we can reasonably assume that the rapes actually reported to police skew more towards the rapes reports that cops believe. And even so, even then, only a small fraction of rapes result in conviction.</p>
<p>When you urge women to report acquaintance rape to police, you may be making yourself feel better, but you are not doing anything good for the victims. They’re not going to be believed, they’re not going to get justice, and they’re going to feel like reporting the rape was a second rape. </p>
<p>Instead of going after the women to report their rapes, go after the people who take those reports and don’t believe the women. Reform the system.</p>
<p>If something has happened to you and you are unsure if it’s criminal the police can sort that out. If it’s not criminal at least for now it can also be reported to any college or university as a conduct violation. Sometimes a situation is both criminal and a conduct violation and sometimes something is a conduct violation but doesn’t meet the state test for criminal prosecution. The test for finding guilt is lower in a college or university but make no mistake that both are equal as they are not. There is no easy out either. If the colleges and universities are doing a good job procedurally they will ask the same questions that will be asked by the police. Maybe the police are more scary than a female dean, but the investigative portion will occur and the person that is accused will be able to tell their side. There will probably never again in our society be a free pass for someone to accuse someone of something without impunity.</p>