Turn the allegation over to the local police and get the colleges out of it.
That might impair the Alums shucking out money to support the athletic teams.
The horror, the horror.
The amazing story of the Yale kid is a wonder. He had sexual relations several times with the woman. She claimed that the last time was coerced, although she spent the entire night with him. She did not decide until a year later to promote the false sexual coersion story, and there are stories out there that she did not want the matter to proceed, but rather it was the Title IX coordinator who pushed the false sexual coercion story. Heās gonna get a lot of money from Yale, and she is going to have her name out there finally. A terrible story, for the guy.
It is understandable that there is a lot of confusion and emotion surrounding the issues addressed by this article, but increasing understanding of the underlying dynamics of sexual assault and both its precursors and aftermath can help dispel some of the confusion and emotion, and provide more clarity about how to effectively respond to the issue.
Perhaps what should be least controversial, relatively straightforward to implement, and remarkably effective, would be to provide mandatory training to all college students (and even before that - in high school), most importantly at the beginning of their tenure in college but preferably refreshed periodically.
What I have found in working with both targets (I donāt like the term victim), and perpetrators, is that they both often have considerable confusion about the roots and nature of their respective behaviors, the potential consequences of those behaviors, as well as what itās reasonable to expect and not reasonable to respect, for both themselves and others, in various situations they might expect to encounter.
Clarification of those issues can help both of them make far better decisions in the future, and can be done without either demonizing anyone or making anyone more vulnerable.
But I have also found that regardless of the feelings of any of the parties involved, once an assault has taken place and come to light, an immediate referral to law enforcement should be made.
I understand that such a move raises a lot of questions and concerns.
In many jurisdictions we have come a long ways since my early experiences of witnessing brutal interrogations of targets that often began with them being read their rights and promised that if there were any discrepancies in their accounts they would be prosecuted for making false statements. That having been said, there is still progress to be made in our law enforcement response to reports of sexual assault (progress which would go far in helping the vast majority of unreported cases emerge into the light and increase the likelihood of achieving healing for all involved), but the fact remains that date rape is rape, and therefore a crime, which vast experience says is only effectively addressed, not through civil, purely therapeutic, social, or religious intervention but through the legal system and the mandatory measures it can impose.
The most promising initiative that I am aware of thus far is the Restorative Justice approach which, when well implemented (not a trivial process) goes far towards promoting healing in all those involved in these kinds of difficult situations.
But, I reiterate, prevention is the best approach, and is best
effected via education of all concerned.
In the meanwhile, my experience has been that the best response for the target is also the best response for the perpetrator. We donāt have to make a choice between them.
I agree that there are many cases which seem to be appropriately considered assaults. However, there are also a huge number of cases which must be considered ādifferences of opinionā. The male sees one story, the female another. He-said-she-said. It is these cases which are the most troubling, because the pattern more and more is āif she said it, itās trueā. And THAT is false. Women do lie and women do retrospectively re-evaluate. The stakes are high for men. In the case of the Yale kid, he was tossed from Yale 3 months before graduation, missed playing as team captain in the National Tournament, and has had his name trashed. Due to a change of heart, that the woman later recanted. Thatās a high price to pay for a difference of opinion.
I understand the need to make campuses safer for everyone. The problem is that for any investigation on campus of what is essentially a criminal matter, universities are required by the Department of Education to uses a āpreponderance of the evidenceā standard, as this article mentioned. At my university the accused can have a lawyer present at a hearing, but they are not actually allowed to speak for the accused. The potential for something right out of Kafka is very real, and I canāt see how anyone can argue that there are enough safeguards. Universities are caught in the middle but it seems justice rushed can also be justice denied.
The other thing about this is the issue of memory, which for everyone is incredibly fallible. If someone changes their story a year later, I really wonder about the validity of it.
Iām reminded of an incident I experienced many years ago when I was first training as a volunteer in a domestic violence/sexual assault program.
We were listening to a presentation by a local representative of the State Police who was primarily responsible for local rape investigations. When asked by a volunteer what proportion of reported rapes were false, he immediately responded āabout 50%.ā
As it happened I had just read a report on the FBI statistics regarding false rape reports and immediately challenged his numbers. He quickly walked them back and acknowledged that the FBI numbers were probably more accurate.
I donāt remember what the numbers were that I had just discovered, but a quick search just showed up this Wikipedia reference: āFBI reports from 1996 consistently put the number of āunfoundedā rape accusations around 8%.ā They go on to report that Index crimes in general have a lower false report rate, namely 2%, but I think the public perception on the part of both man and women is more inclined to believe the 50% number than the facts.
To extend a bit and speculate about why the enormous discrepancy between perception and fact, is it just possible that we males have a vested interest in promoting the perception that rape is a less serious and credible issue than it proves to be in real life? That would certainly make our life easier, especially in the relationships with women which are such an important and sometimes even obsessive part of our life, often complicated by the fact that for some inexplicable reason they donāt always want to behave the way we want and expect them to behave.
Meanwhile, this helps us to gloss over the extent to which there is a huge discrepancy in the sense of everyday safety experienced by males, by comparison with females. This discrepancy is so profound and so much taken as a given by females, that many are not conscious of how much it informs their behavior.
Wake up men! Our fellow citizens have done nothing to deserve the environment we have created and maintain in countless ways.
Our lives, as well as theirs, would be profoundly better if we simply spent a little more energy and time reflecting on the consequences of our behaviors.
It is true that memory is often imperfect, as any police officer who has interviewed witnesses to an incident will tell you, and as numerous relatively simple psychological experiments have shown. It is particularly problematic when it involves attempting to recall events where stress levels are high, but to suggest that the truth is, as a consequence, undiscoverable (and Iām not suggesting that you took any such position, but I suspect others might) would be to vastly overstate the problem.
I believe that a skilled investigator who is careful not to contaminate the record with false assumptions and/or pre-existing prejudices, can usually divine the truth of the matter, but it requires the kind of time and dedication to sound investigative techniques which are often inconvenient at best, thus the human propensity for relying on snap judgments.
The question is can society tolerate any less a standard than an insistence on good training and sound investigative techniques?
How have they established what the actual percentage is?
But the problem in college is not āfalseā rape reports, but differences of opinion. They had sex, but he thought it was consensual, and she did not. Generally, a āfalse rape reportā is one in which nothing happened but the woman said something did. I can well believe that to be infrequent. 8% may be high.
In most of the cases now, the male and female accounts are just different. Sulkowitz, the mattress girl, waited a long time, and then decided it was rape. In the Yale case, she waited more than a year, decided she had been coerced, and now he has paid a huge price for her decision. It is not rape if it takes a year to decide what happened.
The problem is that women wake up in the morning, and retrospectively re-evaluate the situation. What was consensual morphs into coercion and coercion morphs into rape. In the Yale case, some reports suggest that she wanted to recall the charge, but that the Title IX coordinator needed a victim who was unconnected, not the son of a big donor, someone to throw to the wolves. Terrible for the guy, but my guess is that a jury will give him a big award.
Yes, especially when the standard is preponderance of the evidence.
I just received notification of your reply, which is why Iām so tardy in responding to it. Sorry about the delay.
A situation which I ran into a lot here, where there is an army base nearby, involved situations where a young man, often newly out of boot camp, met a girl in a bar, chatted her up, ended up having apparently consensual sex with her, then, a few days later, found the state police knocking on his door charging him with rape.
Not exactly the same as your situation, but I will deal with that issue in a bit.
He, of course was always dumbfounded, and very angry. But a closer examination of the situation usually showed that the circumstances were not quite what he wanted to believe they were. First, they were strangers when they met, and while they seemed to get along, there was often a lot of information that he failed to discover that, when uncovered, made a significant difference in his perception.
First, she was almost always underage, sometimes with fake ID so she could gain access to the bar, but he often didnāt ask for ID. So, why was she in the bar? Often she came from a difficult family environment from which she was looking for a way out. So she meets a nice guy in the bar, chats him up, finds him very simpatico, and decides that he is a good prospect for rescuing her from her home environment. He, in turn, is flattered by her attention and turned on by it. She consents to what she regards as a way of sealing the implicit deal that he will help her, they part, and go home, and she waits for his call.
A day goes by and sheās disappointed to not hear from him. Two days go by and she wonders whatās going on. Three days go by and sheās starting to feel used. Another day goes by and she feels raped, and talks to someone who calls the police, whether she wants them to or not.
There are countless variations on that theme, but almost always they involve very different perceptions of what happened, and what it meant. He was just looking for a good time and not thinking of the potential consequences of his actions, and she regarded it as a level of commitment.
The fundamental, underlying reality was that they were strangers to each other and formed their respective perceptions based more upon what they wanted to believe than what was reasonable to believe.
In college, and similar situations, often, but not always, the underage issue is not involved, but I suspect that if you dig into those situations you will find a significant dichotomy between the two perceptions of the transaction at hand, and it will be primarily rooted in the belief systems of both parties about the significance of the sexual act, and what should be reasonable to believe should be the circumstances under which it takes place, as well as what consequences and obligations it entails on the part of both parties.
The deep roots of misogyny in our society stem from the socialization by which we as males are often instilled with a very casual attitude about how much respect women deserve from us in any but a very limited scope of our relationships with them. Until we wake up to that reality and recognize that we need to rectify that problem for our own sakes as much, or more than, for the sake of the women with whom we interact, we can expect to have a lot more of these āmisunderstandings,ā along with the embarrassment and pain they so often generate for all involved.
So why arenāt women more savvy about us?
Well the truth of the matter is that we males often present two very differing faces to the world. When I talked to women who were in abusive relationships, the primary reason for continuing that relationship for them was because they āknew who he could be,ā and that is who they fell in love with, believed in, and would return to, āas soon as he got though this ābad patch.āā
He presented the nice face to them when he courted them, and subsequently often when he wanted something from them, but when they wanted something different than he wanted, they often were presented the other face which was not nearly as attractive.
Women want to believe in us, but are often disappointed. We males, on the other hand, are often socialized to believe that we are entitled to the loyalty of our women through thick and thin.
So, when we as males are so chary of stepping up and taking responsibility for our portion of the issue, is it any wonder that some look at us a bit askance, if not with downright hostility and contempt?
We need to clean up our act.