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<p>Men are physically stronger than women. I think that a very drunk man could execute a forcible rape, and if he did, he would be guilty of rape and should be punished.</p>
<p>To me, a woman is too drunk to consent when she is too drunk to have any coherent thought, barely conscious. AFAIK, a man in the same state wouldn’t be physically able to have sex. </p>
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<p>An excellent question by any standard.</p>
<p>@Cardinal Fang “What is representative is thousands of women on thousands of campus having to attend classes with their rapist.”</p>
<p>@awctndb “Wrong, wrong , wrong - being accused of rape is not equivalent of being guilty of rape. And it is not fair, in the least, to call the guy a rapist who has NEVER been convicted of rape.”</p>
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<li>Colleges can remove students for many reasons and almost none of them are proven in a legal court. Why should this be any different?</li>
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<p>If student is accused of murdering other students on campus and makes bail, should he/she be allowed to return to class because he has not been convicted in a court of law? I do not think that is reasonable, because they may reoffend and their presence is a distraction to the educational process for others on campus. This is no different.</p>
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<li>@awctndb “Where are all these guilty verdicts to back up these lots of rapes?”
Okay, now you are arguing something interesting. You are now suggesting that events that haven’t been proven in a court of law, did not happen. I think perhaps this is the root of many of your other arguments. You simply do not believe that the reports of rapes on campuses are true. </li>
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<p>Underlying all of your comments is a belief that what really happens is that both parties are drunk, and participate in consensual and enthusiastic sex. However, in the morning the lady feel embarrassed or ashamed or guilty or humiliated about her behavior, and in an attempt to protect her reputation, and remove her culpability, she falsely cries rape. </p>
<p>Well you are correct that this can and does happen. However, this is a small percentage of cases. We know this by talking to women who graduated and who are in college now. I do agree with you that I would like to see better data, and part of the problem is that rape cases are under reported because many women do not report them, and even if they do, the colleges may cover it up to protect their reputation. The current administration is pushing for broad surveys of college student across the country to get a better handle on the true size of the problem. Is it possible that the numbers being quoted are overstated? Sure. Is it possible that the 1 in 4 number that has been thrown around is only 1 in 6. Probably. But it is not possible that the number of rapes is small or virtually non-existent because ten of thousands of women are all working together to misreport the same types of experiences. I suspect that the numbers that are being quoted are about right because many colleges are pushing back and do not want to conduct the surveys and report the outcomes. If the surveys were going to show that their campus does not have a real problem, they would do it gladly.</p>
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<p>I simply do not see anything to back up this statement. You can believe it, but it does not make it reality. You produce ONE example of a student unjustly expelled. ONE.</p>
<p>Not a “Victim blamer”, but there are alot of slutty loose girls out there who don’t know how to be responsible. So, being drunk as hell around a bunch of dudes you do not know, is not a good idea.</p>
<p>In the Occidental case, reading the court document makes it completely clear in my mind that he is not guilty–or at least, no more guilty of assaulting her than she was of assaulting him. If they are going to expel him, they should have expelled her also. She obvious consented, she obviously was coherent enough to make plans and send multiple texts regarding her intent and take the precaution of asking him if he had a condom. If she felt badly about having had sex afterward, well welcome to adulthood. Deal with it. Make better choices next time. Maybe you should stop being sexually active until you are more mature. </p>
<p>I really blame this fiasco on the witch hunt being conducted by the persons who persuaded her to file a complaint (and made outrageous profiling allegations). They showed a complete lack of regard for HER, as well as him. It is incredible that even after the complaint was investigated by the college’s own people, and the texts were presented, that they STILL expelled him. </p>
<p>If I had a kid, especially a male, applying to college now, Occidental would be off my list. </p>
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<p>That is not my example, and was never my point.</p>
<p>Please note, I never focused on being expelled; I said punished. By punished, I mean any range of disciplinary actions based on hearsay of a female. </p>
<p>The important procedural aspect here is since there is often no breathalyzer test (too late to get a useful one) and no other sobriety tests, all the female has to say is, “I was drunk,” and the guy’s life is turned upside down. Again, something is not right in Kansas when such a system is standard operating procedure.</p>
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<p>Not sure what you are saying here.</p>
<p>What other fair standard is there? If someone is found not guilty of rape, then, according to our system, rape did not occur. </p>
<p>No one is disputing the sex event occurred. but just because sex happened between two people, does not mean rape occurred. And you have no basis to call it rape, until proved as such. That is our system. If there is no basis, then there is no basis to punish.</p>
<p>I suggest that women are on the losing end of this argument if they are going down the road that hearsay and accusation equals guilt. I suspect it will soon come back to haunt them in some other venue. That is not true justice; it is vigilante justice.</p>
<p>@druce1992 “Not a “Victim blamer”, but there are alot of slutty loose girls out there who don’t know how to be responsible. So, being drunk as hell around a bunch of dudes you know is not a good idea.”</p>
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<li><p>You are right that a young lady being drunk around a bunch of dudes is not a good idea.</p></li>
<li><p>It is a false to assume or imply that girls who are drunk are therefore “slutty and loose” (whatever that may mean to you). This is a common misconception that needs to change. Acting on that misconception could potentially result in a rape charge.</p></li>
<li><p>“A lot of woman” may not be responsible, and they may be “slutty and loose” and they may be drunk. None of those are good things. However, none of those things confers to a man the right to have sex with her without obtaining legal consent.</p></li>
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<p>In your judgment, what percentage of the students you see where expelled justifiably?</p>
<p>@awctdb “Not sure what you are saying here.”</p>
<p>I am suggesting that what happens in reality is not subject to courts of law or anyone’s opinion. Reality is what actually happens. You can’t just say that, in reality, there were very few rapes on campus last year because there were so few convictions. </p>
<p>If a family member of yours were raped, and you saw it happen, but the individual accused was found “not guilty” in court, would you go around telling people that you saw this rape happen, but after the court ruling you now know a rape did not happen? Of course not. That just means that in the courts opinion, the standard of evidence was not met to establish guilt. That is very different from proving that it did not happen at all.</p>
<p>Do historians argue that black slaves were not beaten and mistreated because there are few or no court convictions to prove it? Of course not, because there is a lot of evidence from other sources to show what really happened.</p>
<p>It is reasonable to look at a broad spectrum of evidence to understand what is happening in aggregate. By doing that, and by talking to many women and people on campus, it is clear that in aggregate, these events happen often. It is definitely possible that individual incidents may have happened differently than reported, but it is not possible that all of these reports are simply false representations by embarrassed young women.</p>
<p>I think we can agree that getting better, more comprehensive data on what is really happening and how often would be helpful to everyone. It seems to me that we do not really disagree very much on what is right and wrong. We disagree with regard to what we think is actually happening, and collecting better more and data can reconcile that difference.</p>
<p>Person A abducts Person B from the street, takes her to his cellar, puts handcuffs on her, duct tapes her mouth, and has intercourse with her, using a condom to leave no DNA traces. He cleans everything in his cellar up, then releases her in a remote location. When she is able to reach civilization, she calls the police. He denies everything. There were no witnesses. He is not convicted of rape.</p>
<p>So, awcntdb, you are telling me that wasn’t rape. I submit that your definition is preposterous. There is a truth of the matter, independent of the justice system, and the truth is, A raped B.</p>
<p>Using your definition, nobody ever gets away with rape. This does not seem to be a useful definition of the word “rape.”</p>
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<p>This is fine, as long as you understand you are then living in a potentially make-believe world. Reality exists by virtue of the fact that it can be proved to exist by some objective standard.</p>
<p>However, believing something alone is not an objective standard, by any stretch of the imagination. This is why courts exist and scientists, who do exhaustive studies, exist.</p>
<p>In this particular situation, hearsay and accusations are not objective standards; they are highly subjective to the point where no one knows what is meant by consent anymore; is it a verbal yes? a physical gesture? a text message? a phone call? and voluntary walk to an apartment? a basic kiss? getting naked? all of the above? or, none of the above?</p>
<p>Given these variances, there needs to be objective standards by which to judge things or else you get a situation where any semblance of logic goes out the window, mass hysteria sets in, and everything is as real as anyone decides they are. Sounds like the Salem witch trials. </p>
<p>I accept you can believe what you want, but that does not make it real. More importantly, when messing with someone’s life, what you believe is real is not a standard that can or should be used for punishment. Again, that is vigilante justice by all its known definitions. Dangerous. It is for exact reasons, such as this, that courts were created, i.e., people were believing and acting on guilt and innocence, which were not true.</p>
<p>I do think there is a need to think ahead a bit more. I wonder what people would say if there is such a backlash that the new believed reality (unproved by any court) becomes too many girls are lying and are simply covering up for bad judgement and then these claims just start getting ignored. In such a scenario, even actual, provable rape would get ignored. </p>
<p>Objectivity all around is the only way this will get sorted out in a manner acceptable to society, as fair adjudication. Anything else would be suspect, just as it is now.</p>
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<p>The true predatory rapists probably make sure that their victims are drunk or drugged enough to be unable to give reliable testimony to police and courts and probably make sure that there are no victim-friendly witnesses around.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, naive new frosh experimenting with alcohol and sex keep getting into unclear or misinterpreted consent situations that end up being dealt with by university administrative procedures – perhaps often resulting in questionable results due to the nature of such acts and the unreliability of the testimony of the drunk people involved and drunk witnesses.</p>
<p>For those with new frosh (male or female) going off to college, perhaps it would be wise to tell them how to avoid these both types of situations (which are different, and the methods of avoidance are not all the same, although they intersect in the area of alcohol management).</p>
<p>I was chatting with my niece, a rabid and sometimes overenthusiastic feminist, and she opined that it’s not for me to say whether a rape occurred; if a woman says it’s rape, said my niece, it’s rape.</p>
<p>And here we have awcntdb espousing the same odd principle. If a court of law says it’s rape, it’s rape, and not otherwise. </p>
<p>But here at the Fang Society for Materialism we think reality exists, independent of what we say or think about it, and independent of courts of law. At the Fang Society, we believe that some situations are rape (sexual intercourse at gunpoint), some situations are not rape (eating ice cream cones) and some situations are in a difficult gray area (two very drunk students in a sexual encounter), independent of what the participants and the justice situation say about these situations. At the Fang Society, we think that rape has a definition, and situations that fit the definition are rape. At the Fang Society, we don’t understand how someone can be convicted of rape, if the definition of rape is “convicted of rape.”</p>
<p>Also the Fang Society would like to point out that if the definition of “rapist” is “someone who has been convicted of rape” then no one has ever been falsely convicted of rape.</p>
<p>“In your judgment, what percentage of the students you see were expelled justifiably?”</p>
<p>Well, they were all justifiable, in that there was an alleged victim with a plausible claim of harm. If the schools are making decisions on a preponderance-of-evidence standard, I can’t say it’s unjustifiable that they found the alleged victim more credible than the alleged assailant. I haven’t seen any cases where the accusations were not plausible.</p>
<p>If you’re asking how many of my expelled students do I think committed serious sexual wrongdoing, there are some that intuitively seem innocent to me and some that I suspect. But I know that I will never know one way or the other. I’m a lawyer, so I come from the perspective that the accused needs an advocate even if he might be guilty. My job is to help them tell their story honestly, which is virtually always going to mean disclosing the accusation and disposition of the matter to other schools. In educational counseling as in law practice, you fire the client if he asks for help covering his tracks. I’ve seen that once.</p>
<p>Outside of the sexual assault context, almost all of my students who’ve gotten in trouble with underage drinking, drugs, etc., are definitely guilty. A lot of their essays are more or less confessions.</p>
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<p>In a college context, the “obviously rape” situations are probably most commonly the kind where a predatory rapist takes advantage of an intoxicated victim (sometimes getting the victim more intoxicated with “date rape drugs” or extra alcohol). These would be different from the “gray area” situations that are probably mostly naive frosh experimenting with alcohol and sex and using poor judgement, although a third party like police, courts, or university administration may have difficulty telling them apart.</p>
<p>@Much2learn “I am suggesting that what happens in reality is not subject to courts of law or anyone’s opinion.”</p>
<p>@awcntdb replies “Reality exists by virtue of the fact that it can be proved to exist by some objective standard.”</p>
<p>No one really believes that nothing happens in reality unless the court says so. You are just trolling and posting ridiculous comments for us to react to. hahahahahahahahaha rotfalmao very funny.</p>
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Bless her heart. </p>