At what point will older females tell young females that being drunk in a frat house is not a good idea AND that is not victim-blaming to be smart enough not to get yourself in that situation?
And no matter what people would like to believe, in society, there will always be sick people. Always. Basic proactive safety measure - do your best to not be around them and best of all do not go to their houses and get drunk with them.
But worse of all is that alcohol and drugs make many even good people do things that they would not normally do or even think of doing. Therefore, no amount of teaching or training young men not to rape will help once the alcohol and drugs kick in. That is the hard reality of much of these alleged rapes on colleges - there is a point of no return where the thinking has stopped.
<<<<<
Have you ever met a rape victim or somebody that has been sexually assaulted? I have and they certainly weren’t “asking for it.” That’s like saying “Why do you go to banks, where there is a statistically significant higher chance of being caught in a bank robbery?” That is the worst kind of victim blaming.
[QUOTE=""]
[/QUOTE]
First of all, I have been sexually assaulted.
Secondly, your bank analogy is not good, at all. Keep reading.
Thirdly, getting drunk and then going to some guy’s room is the same as leaving your new, expensive, unlocked bike on the front lawn. Maybe tomorrow the bike will be there, but maybe it won’t. If your bike is stolen, are you saying that it’s wrong to “blame the victim” for doing something so stupid as leaving his new bike on the lawn, instead of ONLY blaming the criminal who stole?
I bet every parent on this board would scold their child for having left their new unlocked bike on the front lawn after it was stolen. Yet, these same parents aren’t supposed to tell their DDs, “don’t drink a lot and then hang out in some boy’s room”?
At some point, we have to acknowledge that some crimes are “helped” by putting yourself unnecessarily at risk.
When we teach women how “not to get raped” all we’re really doing is passing on a rape to another woman.
We need to teach people how not to rape. Period. Yes there will be many people that this won’t work for but those are the same people that will take pretty much any target regardless of their “vulnerability”
And yes, sexual assault survivor here. I wonder if it was my softball uniform or being a young teen that set off my rapist 8-|
<<<
When we teach women how “not to get raped” all we’re really doing is passing on a rape to another woman.
<<<
While that may or may not be true, it doesn’t matter. That’s like saying, “When we teach stores how not to be robbed, all we’re really doing is passing on the robbery to another store.”
We shouldn’t stop teaching how to protect ourselves just because doing so means someone else may be attacked, robbed, killed.
Some rape incidents are totally beyond any cautious preventative measures a woman can take. Just like some airline deaths are beyond any cautious preventative measures an airline passenger can take (like getting shot out of the sky by a missle; having a suicidal pilot; PanAm 103).
But a prudent airline passenger can take some initiative in avoiding airlines with known bad safety records, just like a prudent young woman can take some initiative in avoiding high-risk places while drunk.
I won’t fly some airlines, period. And I always lock my bike.
<<<<
When we teach women how “not to get raped” all we’re really doing is passing on a rape to another woman.
We need to teach people how not to rape. Period. Yes there will be many people that this won’t work for but those are the same people that will take pretty much any target regardless of their “vulnerability”
And yes, sexual assault survivor here. I wonder if it was my softball uniform or being a young teen that set off my rapist
<<<
[QUOTE=""]
Some rape incidents are totally beyond any cautious preventative measures a woman can take. Just like some airline deaths are beyond any cautious preventative measures an airline passenger can take (like getting shot out of the sky by a missle; having a suicidal pilot; PanAm 103).
[/QUOTE]
But a prudent airline passenger can take some initiative in avoiding airlines with known bad safety records, just like a prudent young woman can take some initiative in avoiding high-risk places while drunk.
I won’t fly some airlines, period. And I always lock my bike.
[QUOTE=""]
[/QUOTE]
I was a very young child when I was sexually assaulted. Obviously, the event was completely out of my control. So, yes, some crimes are beyond any cautious measures a person can take.
I will go into a bank at virtually any time. I can’t control that some random person might rob the bank at that moment. However, I’m cautious about when I’ll go to an ATM if it’s in a place where I’m vulnerable.
Of course we need to teach people not to rape…we also need to teach people not to steal, murder, and not to do a host of other crimes. Who doesn’t agree with that?
We also need to teach people how to protect themselves and make good decisions…that’s why there are burglar alarms, locks on doors (and bikes), etc.
In a perfect world, we could leave an unlocked Mercedes in the driveway with the keys on the seat.
In a perfect world, a jewelry store could lay out its wares sans glass barriers.
In a perfect world, an intoxicated person could spend a year in a drunken orgy and come out untouched.
We don’t live in a perfect world, hence locks, alarms, and caution.
Unfortunately, this philosophy would set up young females for a world of hurt.
At some point, people need to understand that some things cannot be taught; that is why the words, such as “pathology” and “sociopath,” exist.
And as for the more party-centered situations that happen at colleges, when was the last time has anyone been able to get a drunk or high person, male or female, to follow rules or the law? Impossible after a certain point. Need to deal realistically with the scenarios at hand, not be wishfully thinking we can expect behaviors were no expectation is warranted and is not practically possible.
And no, teaching a female how to think ahead and avoid situations is not passing the rape on to someone else, You are falsely assuming a zero sum game out of something that is not one. This is why we teach defensive driving; not to pass the accident off to someone else, but to reduce the number of overall accidents. Others will still drive terribly and accidents will still occur, but enough defensive drivers do reduce the number of accidents.
Statistically, rapists need targets of opportunity, so if a greater percentage of females are thinking ahead, then there is a reduction in the number of targets, meaning less overall opportunity, and thus, less rape.
Thinking ahead is not going to stop everything from happening, such as in the couple cases cited on this thread - but, reduction is the goal. However, waiting on the perpetrators to reduce their activity, while the number of targets remain the same or even increases because females are not being proactively preventative is total dependency. In this situation, dependency is not good.
I have a radical proposal. Since sexual assault is a criminal matter how about we leave it to the criminal justice system and not to the whims of university administrators.
I thought I’d get attacked from the left on a college forum, but instead everyone is to the right of me. Of course this time it is the parents forum, not the college life forum.
As a guy, I hate it when an otherwise willing woman won’t go home with me only because she does not like taking chances with her safety. If she knew she had some legal power over me, she might feel less afraid and give me a chance. However, I don’t want someone being able to ruin my life just on her word. Expulsions, records, and news reports do that. A private jail sentence with 10 hours per day of release for me to go to my job would not have long term harm, but might make her feel safe. Do you think most women would feel safe giving more guys chances if they knew they could have him jailed 7-30 days almost on her word?
What if instead of this being mandatory law, we have contract app on the police website. Before they go home, they get out their phones and go to the police site, where she can say how many days of sentence she would feel safe with and he can agree to give her that power, provided she report the incident within 24 hours. It could be like a 24-hour version of snap chat, where the contract ends later.
Sounds like a good plot device for a dystopian novel. Maybe if the man breaks the contract, the woman has the right to decide what kind of animal he will be turned into.
It is difficult to prove sexual assault to a legal standard, so few of the guilty go to jail. However, if the prosecutor makes the burden of proof, the guy may be there for a very long time.
The first defendant in the Vanderbilt case was recently found guilty of multiple charges. The most serious of those carries a 15 year minimum. So that will be lowest sentence the judge can give, but it could be a lot more.
There are many good reasons to care about the issue. Many guys overlook the fact that if women are afraid to trust them, it does mean they get rejected, whereas giving women more power could mean guys being given more chances.
There is rarely such a thing as proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Prosecutors sometimes railroad people under pressure from victims, and juries sometimes convict when given the choice between extremes and the knowledge that these cases are so hard to prove.
Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is just to make normal people feel safe. It rarely exists. I say we acknowledge this fact and design a system that is more logical.
1/3 of convicts whose DNA was tested later were found to be innocent. That does not count consensual sex. How is that for a report card grade for proof beyond a reasonable doubt?
Victims don’t go to police because they know that proof beyond a reasonable doubt is not real and that they could be charged for lying. They also know it is all or nothing: be believed, or be disbelieved and have him glare at her.
That is why I propose women should be able to report guys privately without very little risk of their own conviction. Police should investigate only to the extent they can keep it private from him, and then database the accusation according to how much or little evidence there is. It would include sexual assault too.
Finally, they share the data with other states and see which guys have an unusually long list of accusations.
If a woman says she was raped and she thinks it was that guy, and she does not have his DNA anymore, that should be enough to get a sample from him to add to the database to see if any women with nameless DNA match his.
This is far far better than tossing a coin in an all or nothing case, which is what police currently do.