<p>For alot of reasons my youngest son cannot drink alcohol but he is very social, plays a sport in college, has (older) friends in frats as well as on the team so he has quite the social life. I was alittle worried about him heading off to college because I thought it would be difficult being “the kid who doesn’t drink” and my older ones certainly did (drink). </p>
<p>He walks lots of kids home (or so he tells me), boys and girls, on his big university college campus. Sometimes he does it because he doesn’t want the person to get in trouble (a friend, someone he knows), sometimes he does it because someone asks him to. He’s actually getting tired of it because sometimes those kids puke and he hates that and sometimes the kids are practically falling down and he hates dragging them along. I’m guessing that he won’t continue this behavior much longer, but he’s a freshman so it’s all new. Never is an awful broad brush word. </p>
<p>Tell your daughters to call security for a walk home if you are nervous about them walking with a male or they are among strangers at a party…most campuses have that service.</p>
<p>We’ll have to agree to disagree. Are there cases like the one you describe? Yes, certainly. But there are also studies that show that the majority of acquaintance rapes on college campuses are committed by a small group of repeat offenders who DO act with premeditation.</p>
<p>A couple of years ago, I was talking to a woman who had a son who was a new EMT for his college. He was really upset. It seems that he’d been called in several cases where a female student was really intoxicated and had quite obviously just had sex. In many cases, it was easy to figure out whom the intoxicated woman had had sex with. He was stunned when he realized that in MOST cases, the male was not inebriated. Moreover, after a few weeks, he saw some of the same males again. Anecdotal, I know…still.</p>
<p>As for calling security…unfortunately, on some college campuses, if you do that, the intoxicated person and others present when security arrives can be charged with MIP. And, awful as I may sound, you can’t always trust security either.</p>
<p>Hunt, thanks for the article. I don’t know if I ever read that account before. IIRC, I read an article in the Yale Daily News about this case before it was resolved.</p>
<p>You’re right, zoozermom. I agree that the Maryville girls were too young to know that what they were doing was truly dangerous. When you’re young, you think you’re invincible. You think because you know someone from school, he lives in your town and comes from a “good” family, he’s OK. I’m sure they knew they were wrong in sneaking out, etc but they had no reason not to trust the boys they were meeting, and they may have thought they were safe because there were two of them. Talk about learning adult lessons the hard way …</p>
<p>Actually, Sally, this is not what is happening. the evidence shows otherwise. look at mini’s link on page one, for starters. Others of us have posted the studies on other threads on CC. Rapists are sexual offenders. Like all sexual offenders they have patterns. There is no such thing as “date rape,” only rape.</p>
<p>That said, blaming the victim or not, anyone who sends a daughter into the dangerous world Austindad described, which is what a college campus is for women when they first arrive, without discussing the dangers of drinking and the importance of making their own drinks, never putting their drinks down, leaving with every girl they arrived with from any party, making sure everyone gets home…etc… is doing their child a disservice.</p>
<p>I also think the more we can let young men know that this doesn’t happen accidentally, that these are the same guys who do this, the more the bystanders will be likely to step in.</p>
<p>What these guys do is inconcievable to “normal” guys. Normal men don’t do this or think this way. So, when somebody says “she consented” they think, “Yeah, of course she did. Who would sleep with a passed out woman? Who would want to have sex with someone who didn’t want to have sex with them?”</p>
<p>When my husband finally read the studies, he said, ‘yeah, it would be pretty difficult to make that mistake.’ I mean. Whenever I hear a guy say, well, maybe he made a mistake, I think, “You aren’t even capable of thinking like a rapist.” I think that is good that most men can’t think that way, but I also think it causes a lot of confusion.</p>
<p>These are predators, not guys who made a mistake.</p>
<p>The young women most at risk are those who are first on campus. By thanksgiving most of them know which fraternity houses are full of rapists and not to be alone with groups of guys and to watch their drinks, etc… But it’s a lot to figure out the first few months. If the guys could step in and help out a little bit, that would be a good thing.</p>
<p>Before sending him off to school a little over a year ago (even though he had a GF at home at the time), I reiterated the new teaching that instead of “No means No” now “ONLY YES means Yes”, but added that when alcohol is involved even that is not entirely true. I’m sure all state laws vary slightly, but around here, an intoxicated woman can not legally consent. Therefore even if a young woman is drunk and is doing the instigating and repeatedly says that she is willing, if she is intoxicated and her judgement is clouded, legally it is still rape.</p>
<p>It is VERY important that we teach our S’s that it is ALWAYS their responsibility to maintain control. If they lose their self-control even as a result of their own intoxication it can have a devestating impact on their entire futures.</p>
<p>What if men who drank to excess faced a greater risk of being raped? Would we tell them to stop drinking or would be try harder to stop rape from happening?</p>
<p>“Which is better? Avoid accident or assign blame after the accident? Doesn’t mean that you have the right of way, you should go full speed ahead”</p>
<p>Men ARE being raped while drunk. (by other men - heterosexuals, by the way) (We have some pretty good data on this.) </p>
<p>Most men don’t rape - drunk or not - and whether the woman is drunk or not is irrelevant. They don’t need any extra education. But it would be good to remove serial rapists from their company.</p>
<p>Part of the reason for having police, courts, and prisons is to deter criminally-inclined people from committing crimes. Of course, not all criminally-inclined people will be deterred, but some may be.</p>
<p>Another reason for having police, courts, and prisons is to keep those known to be criminally-inclined (due to having committed crimes) people away from society as a whole so that they do not harm additional people through criminal activity.</p>
<p>Yet another reason is rehabilitation to get criminally-inclined people to be less criminally-inclined, although that has widely been seen as a failure in most cases (there are successes, but they appear to be the exceptions).</p>
<p>Of course, police, courts, and prisons are not zero-cost (both in money, and in civil liberties questions), so society must make a choice as to how much to spend to reduce crime (or specific types of crime). But given that crime cannot be reduced to zero through societal measures, individuals still need to exercise care to reduce the risk of becoming crime victims.</p>
<p>They do (in addition to other increased risks of drunkenness like getting into fights, getting stuff stolen, walking in front of a moving car and getting hit, etc.). Which is why getting drunk is not a good idea for anyone’s personal safety and security.</p>
<p>Women seriously need to avoid getting drunk. That is definitely a risk reduction. You can’t always teach the rapists to stop raping. Seriously, we have criminal penalties and yet these rapists rape. But when you focus the attention on helping women avoid the situations, folks attack the messenger. </p>
<p>I’ve told my D to avoid a home robbery to lock her doors. To avoid assaults, avoid walking out late at night. To avoid having your car broken into, lock the doors and don’t leave valuables out in the open. To avoid being murdered, don’t get involved with illegal drugs. So why can’t I say don’t get drunk?</p>
<p>As an RA, I would beg my new 1st year women to avoid the parties and definitely to not get drunk. I started to notice how the alcohol, drunkenness and rape were often associated. Making things worse was the fact that most of these rapists got away with it. They were never reported! I also tried education focused at the men, but that didn’t work. </p>
<p>Out of all of the women I knew who were raped on campus, all were drunk. Is there any crime out there where we don’t try to teach potential victims risk reducing behaviors? In addition, men need to be taught to be responsible and report their rapist friends.</p>
<p>mini, if the men are raping other men how can they be “heterosexual” by any reasonable definition of the term? If such men usually have sex with women, but at times rape other men, then they would be more accurately described as “bisexual,” wouldn’t they? Calling men who sometimes willingly have sex with other men “heterosexual” sounds a bit Orwellian to me, twisting definitions for the purpose of some agenda.</p>
<p>It depends on what you’re asking a woman to do. Are you asking her to restrict her life in ways that she would find unacceptable or simply to take precautions that don’t interfere with her ability to do what she wants or needs to do.</p>
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<p>Few people would think that locking your doors restricts your life. But some people would have to drastically change their lives to avoid having to be outside late at night. Many jobs involve working until late at night, either regularly or occasionally. The person then has to get home, which involves walking to a car and from a car to their home (or walking to a bus or subway and from that to their home). Should such jobs be off-limits to women? Many women would consider such a restriction unacceptable.</p>
<p>Apparently, all of those college students who leave their doors and windows unlocked and get their stuff stolen, or lock themselves out of their dorm rooms, after having grown up in low crime areas where one can leave doors and windows unlocked and not have to carry keys, may feel that locking doors and windows restricts their lives.</p>