<p>Also, when we have this going on in our country, as a measure to keep residents of an area “safe” from criminals,
<a href=“http://www.thewire.com/politics/2013/10/appeals-court-gives-nypd-go-ahead-restart-stop-and-frisk/71153/”>http://www.thewire.com/politics/2013/10/appeals-court-gives-nypd-go-ahead-restart-stop-and-frisk/71153/</a></p>
<p>I think we can have some safety measures in place to protect young women living away from home for the first time from predators.</p>
<p>@poetgrl “But, even more than that, if a student is found to have stolen computers or tresspassed, the college will suspend and bring disciplinary action, without any kind of court conviction in the matter.”</p>
<p>@ Hunt “Of course, the rub here is what it takes to “find” that somebody committed one of these infractions.”</p>
<p>Comment
But why is it harder to prove? One big reason in my mind is that there is an unspoken presumption on the part of many people that women who file rape charges are more likely to be lying, than people who file any other type of charge. </p>
<p>Is there any clear justification for this belief, or is this just some sort of zeitgeist misogyny? Is there actual data to support that the false rape charges are more common than any other type of false charge? If not then the higher level of challenge that rape victims tend to receive is just sexual bias.</p>
<p>I strongly disagree with you, Poetgirl, about the resuming of “Stop-and-Frisk” and it’s relation to young women being “safe” from criminals. We don’t need the “Stop-And-Frisk” equivalent for rapists and predators. Stop-And-Frisk is highly controversial, as I am sure you know, and has its own measures of “effectiveness” as you know. If anything it’s an example of an ineffective standard. </p>
<p>Yes, well, I think you should pay closer attention to what I am saying. Right now, in this country, we have a government reading all of our online correspondence and listening to all of our phone calls to “keep us safe.” We have stop and frisk, and we have the same groups defending those measures to keep them safe railing against the idea of a few DOJ recommendations to keep women safe from rapists on college campus. You can disagree with me all you want. But, we make exceptions all the time in this country.</p>
<p>It is simply fascinating to me the places we do and the places we do not. Our actions reveal our priorities.</p>
<p>Acting as if we have some pure standard of justice and civil rights in this country is preposterous. We do not. We never have and maybe less now than ever before, for that matter. However, maybe if we can find a way to label campus rape a national health issue, we can break some laws to enforce the protection of rape survivors from the self-interested college administrators’ cover ups.</p>
<p>Just because we wrongly make exceptions in one area, does not mean we should make poorer decisions elsewhere. Two wrongs don’t make a right. But if you’re so dead set on making a “Stop-And-Frisk” equivalent, how would you go about it? And how do you think the men would feel? The men who you just said are key to this movement progressing?</p>
<p>I don’t know where you thing MY values lie, but you seem to have them misunderstood. </p>
<p>@ Niquii77 “I strongly disagree with you, Poetgirl, about the resuming of “Stop and Frisk” and it’s relation to young women being “safe” from criminals. Stop and frisk is highly controversial, as I am sure you know, and has its own measures of “effectiveness” as you know. If anything it’s an example of an ineffective standard.”</p>
<p>I am not sure that @poetgrl is disagreeing with you.</p>
<p>I think she is just pointing out that there is this inconsistency. Many groups have supported stop and frisk. They believe it is acceptable because even though it is not fair to everyone and violates people’s rights, a special higher standard is okay if the result is safer streets. </p>
<p>In contrast, the same groups seem to believe that any special higher standard that would protect women would be unfair and unacceptable, and spend a lot of time talking about protecting people’s rights and fairness to everyone. Essnentially, keeping white men safer is worth an exception, keeping women safer is not. </p>
<p>I don’t think she is saying that Stop and Frisk is great. Rather, she is pointing out the inconsistency in people’s views. In each case, they choose to focus on the thing that they think benefits them, and then argue for it, rather than having a consistent set of principles to work from. </p>
<p>@alh Ok, I’ll make the thread. I’m unsure when, but it will make it. </p>
<p>Eactly.</p>
<p>And, quite frankly, if people consistently argued for individual rights? I’d buy in. But, they simply do not. </p>
<p>I used to have a purer view of things, too.</p>
<p>Now, I know that all “justice” is political to one extent or another. The girls should keep shouting. Until they shouted nobody had to explain a single thing about the way campuses protect and harbor rapists. </p>
<p>It’ll take a while before people get used to it. Change takes time. But, there is no reason why young women, the majority of the college going population, should accept anything less than fairness and justice from their schools.</p>
<p>I actually think that it is perfectly possible that the <em>system</em> is adequate, it is the societal assumptions surrounding it that are the problem.</p>
<p>I look at the remarks of the jury in the Gilbert case, and I see something like 12 Angry Men without Henry Fonda. Jury cases often depend largely on who is believed and who is not. If you have juries that more often than not make cultural assumptions that a woman is a slut, a tease, that it is a man’s natural urge and in fact his RIGHT to “score” if he can, and so on, it will continue to be extremely difficult for rape cases to succeed. If the behavior of rape victims is expected to be the same as victims of less personally violating crimes, they will continue to be viewed as liars, neurotic, and generally untrustworthy. And since the prosecutors <em>know</em> it is very difficult for them to succeed, they will continue to discourage the victims from pursuing them. (This seems to me to be at the core of the Harvard letter. She was actively discouraged from making a formal complaint. I wonder, did anyone at any time take a look at the bite marks? Were they photographed as evidence?)</p>
<p>I really think that a massive public education needs to take place. It actually is, I think, taking place, and it started back in the 60s when feminists did battle with the notion that a woman was “asking for it” if she was dressed in certain ways, if she had ever engaged in consensual sex with anyone, and so forth. Remember when the reaction to outspoken women was commonly that she needed a good lay? I do. </p>
<p>Imagine a society in which a man would be looked at with scorn if he took advantage of an intoxicated woman. Imagine a society in which girls were not required to be trained in how to avoid rape, any more than boys were.</p>
<p>The threat of rape has been used as a tool to control women for millennia. (Women are raped in droves in all wars, but doG forbid any of them should pick up a weapon. They might be raped! Naturally any soldier who encountered a female soldier of the opposite force would rape her, the Geneva Convention or whatever be damned! Because that’s just what men do, it’s natural!!)</p>
<p>poetgrl, I do not agree with a good amount of your approaches. I am not trying to come off as confrontational, as I like this thread and want to see development from it, but some of the things you suggest and are dead set on, in a way, can turn people away from the cause. Unwavering opinions are great, but flexibility is great, as well. Again, not coming off a confrontational. I assure you this is one of the last few things I’ll say in this thread mainly because of the rigid all-or-nothing approaches. </p>
<p>N. I don’t know what approaches you are talking about. I am suggesting that universities have demonstrated, over decades, a desire to bury the rape statistics on campus, and, like the DOJ, would like to see some standards put into practice. Others suggested this ended in 2009. I have cited five cases SINCE 2009. I can find you many more, but that ought to suffice, given the fact that the complaints cover nearly 100 girls.</p>
<p>Those who argue against the DOJ suggestions hold up standards of law which do not actually exist in real practice in this country. But, it’s fine. It will all work itself out, one way or the other. You say my opinions can “drive people away from the cause.” I say that until the girls began to involve the DOJ and speak up for themselves there was no cause, just business as usual.</p>
<p>carry on.</p>
<p>Not all that long ago, Hunt posed a query about adult m and f at a frat party, both drinking heavy, the female aggressively pursues the male, they had sex, was the fellow raped?(this is an abbreviated version).<br>
Few people responded to his scenario. </p>
<p>But let me add a twist to it: what if they weren’t college age individuals, but instead were married adults(not to each other) at an office party. Some here have said it’s rape if a drunk college girl gives consent because as a female, her consent while drinking really doesn’t count. Will they think the same thing of the married man? In other words, to the women here, if your hubby came home and explained he was drinking at a party and a woman came on to him, they walked to a private area, and they had sex, and at no time did he say No! or Stop!, would that be ok? Or if he claimed he said Yes, but that his Yes shouldn’t count as consent because he’d been drinking? Would the women here say- Oh you poor dear! You were raped! Let’s file charges against that woman! There lies the double edged gender sword. If a gal chooses not to say stop, or says Yes but has been drinking, it is assumed by most here that she was raped, but the opposite if a guy chooses not to say stop.
Reminder- my scenario refers to adults, voluntarily intoxicated.</p>
<p>That excuse wouldn’t work for me for one single second! There are many micro-decisions along the way that set up a situation like the one you describe. I’d hold my H responsible for failing to make the correct choices many times before the situation ever evolved to that final outcome. If, however, we apply that standard to a female student, then we are victim-blaming.</p>
<p>
Well, another way of putting it would be that the crime here–nonconsensual sex–is, in terms of facts and evidence, not all that different from a non-criminal act that occurs frequently, namely, consensual sex. This is not the case for other crimes, like theft. This is what makes it difficult–as I noted back in my thought experiment, if you have a truly he-said she-said situation with no other evidence, it’s awfully hard to make a decision that is principled.</p>
<p>I guess one issue is whether the willingness to file a complaint should, by itself, be considered evidence that a crime was committed. I don’t think so. I think the evidence has to be the testimony by the parties and witnesses about what actually happened, as well as any physical evidence. I wouldn’t support any version of the idea that innocent people don’t need to worry, because nobody will make claims against them–our history teaches differently, about all sorts of crimes.</p>
<p>Here’s another complicating factor I just thought about: in criminal prosecutions for rape, we already have something of a modification of the standard of proof, because some evidence that could be relevant is excluded by “rape shield” laws. In general, these exclude evidence of the victim’s past sexual behavior (depending on the state, there can be certain exceptions). Thus, a defendant would not be able to bolster his claims of consent by showing that the complainant had engaged in consensual sex in similar situations before. I suspect we can all see why this evidence is excluded, but I think it’s pretty obvious that a truly unbiased decisionmaker would want to have that evidence in determining how likely it was that there was consent in the present case.</p>
<p>So, in the college situation, we–including me–are saying that we will want to expel a man who has had multiple supported claims of sexual assault, even if none of them has enough evidence on its own to support a criminal charge. In other words, he doesn’t get a shield. (I assume, although I don’t really know, that college tribunals also apply a shield to evidence of the accuser’s prior sexual behavior.) I’m not saying this is inappropriate, but it does suggest that we should be careful in just how far we go in reducing the rights of accused persons.</p>
<p>@younghoss</p>
<p>Did you read the article from the Dartmouth girl that @consolation linked last night?</p>
<p>I never said it “ended in 2009” I said it has changed since 2009…and it has because of the DOJ letter. My main beef has been and is simply that some standards of investigation and procedure must be involved and that starting with a presumption of guilt is repugnant to me, personally. I’ve said that universities should be mandatory reporters - they don’t get a pass to “hide” issues of a criminal nature. I guess I found a rare case where I’m not posting behind you going “I agree with everything you said”</p>
<p>@poetgrl wrote:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I agree with half of this.</p>
<p>I agree the system is there to find facts and should be interested in finding those facts.</p>
<p>However, on the other point, I disagree. It is incorrect to say our system was / is set up to prosecute crimes because the founding purpose and philosophy of our judicial system was and is not a prosecutorial system. It was just the opposite. The designers of the Constitution wanted a system where common citizens who were unjustly charged by tyrannical governments, kings and others have a system in which they could fairly defend themselves.</p>
<p>More specifically, the system is there to investigate IF a crime has been committed and that is where the fact finding comes in. That is a huge difference than creating a system, which advocates prosecution. Our system does not advocate prosecution; it advocates adjudication, of which prosecution is one part, if the facts support. In many places, the facts and the case do not support, and the system does not prosecute. </p>
<p>In one way, the accuser is more burdened than the accused, as should be the case. The burden is on the accuser to support his / her case. If the accuser does not support his / her case well, then the case is weakened. It is not up to the prosecutor to present a stronger or different case than the accuser is willing to support. If that is being expected of the system, then those expectations, by definition, have to fall short simply because the system is not set up to advocate prosecution; it is set up to advocate fair adjudication. </p>
<p>I understand that you do not see this as a neutral system, and you may be correct there in some parts, as it exists right now. However, its goal should be to be neutral because for the system to be taken seriously it cannot favor one or the other. And any system that guarantees a certain amount of convictions has to have crossed that line of just finding and adjudicating the facts.</p>
<p>The system as it stands, in regard to rape, is not really a neutral system. It is not even a fact finding system, though that may be changing. I really do not know. There has been a strong built in bias against rape arrests, except in the case of stranger in an alley rape, for quite a long time now. </p>
<p>We will see how it goes. As @consolation pointed out upthread, there have been biases at work in the justice system vis a vis rape for a long time, and it will probably take a while longer for them to disappear. Change takes time.</p>
<p>@momofthreeboys I don’t mind that you don’t agree with me. I didn’t even realize it was you specifically who brought up the 2009 number. To be honest, I find the new format hard to read the names on my phone, anyway. But, I’m not upset we disagree. If we don’t disagree on this, nothing is actually changing.</p>
<p>I think mandatory reporting would be a good thing, too, by the way.</p>