<p>Of course cases can be investigated, and should be. The fact that they aren’t is a huge problem. The idea that an accusation can’t be proven to some satisfactory standard without DNA or scads of eye-witnesses is silly. Maybe not in court, but in a college, sure. </p>
<p>But some people seem to be advocating going further than that. If one student accuses another of stealing his wallet, presumably campus police will investigate. But if they don’t actually turn up the wallet, and no one else will come forward to say he took it, the likely thief isn’t going to get punished. </p>
<p>Let’s consider two scenarios. In the first, a woman reports having been raped at a frat house several weeks earlier. She had one drink, which she presumes was spiked, because she blacked out. When she came to, a man (that she can identify) was forcing himself on her. The man is questioned, and says they had consensual sex, and doesn’t know what she’s talking about - she wasn’t passed out, she was enthusiastic the whole time, etc. </p>
<p>That’s probably not a case that is going to get anywhere in court unless she goes to authorities early enough to get tested for evidence of date rape drugs in her system. But it is a case where I would say that even if there was nothing further to investigate, I would be OK with a college making the decision to expel the male student. A school needs to protect its students. Assuming that no motive for a lie could be discovered, there is a vanishingly small chance that this woman is a sociopath who just decided to make a random accusation of rape for the heck of it, almost to the point of straining credulity. In the high probability that this is a rapist, you are putting many women in danger by letting him stay. So, if the accuser seems more credible than the accused, in this case a finding of guilt would seem warranted.</p>
<p>But then let’s consider another case. A woman reports having been raped at a frat house several weeks earlier. She, a small woman, had several drinks; her date was a large male, and only had two beers. He offered to let her spend the night in his room in the frat, and when she got in the bed, he started initiating sex with her. She was kind of out of it, and didn’t tell him to stop, but didn’t say yes or offer any encouragement either. When the man is questioned, he says that as far as he knew she had only had a couple of beers, that she was a little buzzed, maybe, but didn’t seem impaired, came back to his room, and participated fully (including unzipping his pants and taking off her bra) during intercourse. </p>
<p>If I were playing the odds, I’d say this woman was more likely than not to have been raped. But I wouldn’t think there was enough evidence to impose harsh sanctions on the accused. In the first case I proposed, the two accounts are so radically different that, as I said, the girl would have to be a total sociopath - and a pretty motiveless one, to boot – to have invented a total fabrication in order to get an acquaintance expelled. But in this case, there’s a lot more room for doubt without calling the girl’s essential character and sanity into question. She admits to having been drinking, so it is possible that she doesn’t have total recall of the exact circumstances of the encounter. In addition, unless we want to say that all drunken sex is rape (which I don’t), since there is no way of determining her exact BAC, it is quite possible that even if she was more than “buzzed,” she was less than incapacitated, even if she recalls it differently now. In short, it is plausible that a woman might have had ill-advised but consensual drunk sex, felt ashamed of herself in the morning, and tweaked the narrative to make it more acceptable in her own mind, without intending to lie. Perhaps she even didn’t see it as rape immediately, but then talked it over with a well-meaning friend who interpreted her account of “bad sex” rather differently. The idea of the male being innocent in this case isn’t fanciful, it is a real and not insubstantial possibility. So, while I could see changing the man’s dorm assignment out of sensitivity to the woman, and making him attend some sort of class on consent as a condition of continued enrollment, I don’t see the basis for doling out serious punishment.</p>
<p>In terms of numbers, based on the articles I’ve read about situations in which colleges failed to act and/or found an accused student innocent, in MOST of the cases, I agreed, based on what was reported, that the college was in the wrong, and had failed to adequately pursue or evaluate the allegation. Yet there are also a handful of cases in these articles - and it isn’t like I’ve read dozens of them – where based on the victim’s story, the college’s contention that there wasn’t enough evidence seems potentially reasonable to me. This makes me wary about some of the more extreme proposals for solving the problem. </p>