I was convicted in 2001 of embezzling more than a million dollars, for which I served 1-1/2 years in prison. I may come at this from a different angle, being a gay man who was raped in prison, rather than a straight women raped in college. I didn’t report my rapes (there were three). I didn’t even discuss them with friends.
First, if you think reporting a rape in a college environment is hard on the reporter, it is pure hell in prison.
The very first thing that happens is you’re transferred from your housing unit, so you lose your job and program. I was in a terrific program with one of the greatest teachers of my life, so the loss would have been substantial.
Second, why one was moved becomes common knowledge very quickly (in prison, gossip travels faster than the speed of light), so you will be a target, an known easy mark, wherever you’re put next. Third, the accused, at worst, suffers the loss of a few days good time. Most of the time, the event is found to be consensual sex (because I was gay, so of course I’d want to have sex with a man) and both are punished. I wouldn’t even be able to get medical care to ensure I did not seroconvert (I am HIV-). There was very little upside to reporting. So, I kept quiet and found ways to keep myself out of the situation.
I am sad to say that being raped was not the most traumatic thing to happen in prison. But even now, ten years later, every so often, I still wake in the middle of the night shaking with fear because of my stay there. On the other hand, I wouldn’t now report either. It is over with and done. I’ve moved on and don’t want to be involved in anything there. If this places others in danger, so be it. I don’t think the report would be fair to me or to anyone I accuse. After so long, even I don’t trust my memories of the events.
Thus, I don’t blame people for not reporting – it is a very personal decision. But I also don’t think accusations long after the rape are helpful either. Either go forward at the time, letting the chips fall where they may, or let it go.
I’m writing you back on the topic of rape once again, but it’s important and I’m glad you continue to have this conversation and that you are focusing on the real issues, and dissecting them, especially now that the UVA story has muddied the waters for so many.
I also didn’t report my rape. If I could explain why in one simple sentence, I’d say this: because my brain didn’t have space for a fight, or a crusade, or a trial. It was too busy dealing with having just been raped. Believe me, that’s plenty to absorb. Living quietly in shame felt like the default, not going straight to the police.
To put it another way, I’ll refer you back to the marvelous essay “No. No. No.” you posted from the reader recounting her horrific rape:
Rather than openly confront what had happened, I tried to bury it. I couldn’t say anything. I wasn’t worried about what would happen to him; I was worried about what would happen to me. … I never wanted to be a victim, even though that’s what I was. It’s why so many of us don’t tell a soul, especially initially. You figure if no one knows they can’t look at you differently or treat you differently than they had before. You won’t receive their looks of pity, or even worse, some sense of skepticism or disbelief. They won’t see you as damaged, somehow less than the woman you were before. Even though that’s how you feel.
That’s exactly right. Or think about it in terms of cost vs benefits. The benefit of putting your rapist in jail, or at least getting him thrown out of school, is not small. It means knowing he will pay for what he did to you and that he will be less likely to do the same to another woman. That’s not nothing.
But the costs are also great, and it’s all of the things mentioned above and more. Add in the less than 50/50 chance you have of getting a conviction, or even having people believe you. The prospect of going through all of that (in my case, while I tried to get through my freshman year of college) without much of a chance of success, knowing it would turn into a he said/she said, tilted the balance for me – even if we pretend I was making calm, rational decisions at that point!
Then add in how the people around you, especially the men but also the women, will perceive you once you go public, how their opinions will change and how they need to treat you will change, and it tilts the balance toward not reporting further. I didn’t want to be “the girl who’d been raped.” I knew that I would be. So, from two bad options, and at a horrible, vulnerable time, I choose not to report.
To put it more accurately, it chose me. That brings with it another level of pain. Or as that woman put it:
And yes, part of the shame is knowing I did nothing to hold him to account, and that I may have put other women at risk by not doing so. …So, add that on to the shame of something I’m not guilty of, that I didn’t ask for.
Right again. Let’s not pretend that not reporting is some great weight off our shoulders. It wasn’t for me, and I know it isn’t for other women in these situations. Not reporting, not standing up, adds another layer of shame on to what’s already happened. It made me feel weak all over again. It still does. Do I sometimes wish I’d made a different choice? Yup, I do. I try not to second guess myself because it hurts too much, and because it’s over. Mostly.
Hope that helps. It’s one more story anyway. Much love to you guys. You’re the best site on the Internet!
We just have the best readers. More of their stories here.
You didn’t ask for answers to your question, but I’ll give you one, since McArdle’s doesn’t really do that. You can try to relate, but you can’t put yourself into the mind of someone who has been traumatized by sexual assault. I often reflect on why I didn’t report being raped by two men 15 years ago and what I would do differently if it happened today. I’ve thought a lot about this recently, as the story told in Rolling Stone bore some striking resemblances to my own. There are many reasons why I didn’t report my rape:
I just wanted it to go away, to forget it, to not talk about it. I felt ashamed, I blamed myself. While I was in shock from the trauma I had experienced and talking myself out of telling anyone outside my close circle of friends, those same friends helped to reinforce my decision. They reminded me that I had been drinking the night before and that I had kissed one of the men, willingly, earlier in the evening. These things were true and I would have to explain them to cops, lawyers, judges, my family, possibly my employer and I would be judged by them.
One comment from a friend that day haunts me still. She said, “You can’t go to the cops, T is on probation and could go back to prison”. It haunts me because it made perfect sense at the time, in the mental state I was in, I didn’t want to be responsible for someone going to prison. I was already blaming myself for their crime and its consequences.
Couldn’t this kind of reaction also help explain why a person’s memory of an assault could become warped over time? Just as forgetting key details is said to be the result of a coping mechanism, so could exaggerating details as a way to overcome feelings of guilt and shame. You were scratching your head over this yesterday, so it’s one possible explanation.
I’d like to think that if faced with the same decision today, I would be stronger, that I would “be the girl reporting it, sitting on a witness stand and pointing a finger”, that I would know that what mattered was what they did to me against my will and not what I did to deserve it – because I didn’t deserve it, and no one deserves to be violated in that way.
It’s been very difficult to read your blog lately, and I think that’s okay. Some of your posts on feminism and the Rolling Stone story have weighed on me in a way that those on other topics in which we disagree do not. Ultimately I appreciate your perspective, even as I dissent, because it forces me to check my biases, especially the ones that I know are emotionally driven and (hopefully) it helps me see with a bit more clarity.
Another reader:
I wrote once before (in the context of race and criminality) about being sexually assaulted by a man who was later convicted on multiple counts and sentenced to a long prison term. What I didn’t mention was the attitude of the police when I first reported it. They were extremely skeptical that I’d actually been attacked in my own apartment at 3 a.m. They asked if I was in a relationship, and I said I’d recently ended one but was still friends with my ex – whereupon they tried to convince me that he (the least violent of humans) was the man who’d “showed up” in my bed, and therefore it couldn’t be rape, so it really wasn’t a matter for the police.
It was only months later, when the pattern of a serial rapist became blindingly clear (with a dozen victims in my area) that they finally took me seriously. If being raped by a stranger at knifepoint can be spun away by police, think how they might treat an eighteen year-old who was drunk when she was raped by her date. If police believe you when you report your car stolen, shouldn’t they extend the same benefit of the doubt to a woman who reports a rape? Her claim may or may not hold up under investigation, as with any reported crime, but that’s no reason to assume a woman is lying or exaggerating. Yet all too often police do.
Another:
I completely agree with Megan McArdle’s comments: I have never been sexually assaulted, but I find it 100 percent easy to believe that a victim of a traumatic sexual encounter (even one that might not rise to the level of rape) would not report it or report a somewhat confused story with lots of second-guessing herself.
At the wedding of some friends several years ago, I had the surreal experience of being weirdly groped by a married friend of mine while we were in the middle of a conversation with another friend: the three of us were talking, and friend A kept running his hands up and down my thigh (I was on a barstool) and I was just drunk enough and just confused enough by the weirdness of what was happening that all I did was push his hands away each time (but he kept coming back!) and friend B didn’t do or say anything.
In my retelling of it to a friend who knew all the parties, I kept second-guessing myself: why would anyone do that?? He seems like such a normal guy! Maybe I was imagining it? Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it seemed? Maybe I’m making too much of this super weird situation. Especially when you’re a little buzzed, or tired, or whatever, I can completely understand not wanting to subject your brain and psyche – which are already confused and traumatized enough – to the skeptical questioning of some cop or campus security who might just see some drunk, slutty girl who’s angry at some guy.
New Jersey state Assemblyman Troy Singleton is proposing a law that would make it illegal to lie to a prospective sexual partner in order to get them in bed. The bill – which is unlikely to pass – defines “sexual assault by fraud” as “an act of sexual penetration to which a person has given consent because the actor has misrepresented the purpose of the act or has represented he is someone he is not”. Elizabeth Nolan Brown loses it:
No no no just no: we do not need a legal remedy for people having bad judgement. Is it a shame that some people misrepresent themselves to get people to sleep with them? Sure. But not every aspect of social and sexual relationships can be a matter for government concern. What’s next, making it a misdemeanor to use outdated photos on your Tinder profile? Criminalizing push-up bras? Throwing people in jail who say they’ll call the next day but don’t?
The situation Singleton says spawned his proposal involves Mischele Lewis, a woman defrauded by a man claiming to be a British military official. The pair had sex and Lewis also paid the man, William Allen Jordan, $5,000 for an alleged security clearance. When Jordan turned out to be a scam artist, Lewis pressed charges and he wound up pleading guilty to defrauding her. Justice served, right? Not in the warped worldview of New Jersey prosecutors, who apparently can’t stand the idea that some areas of interpersonal dynamics aren’t within their prosecutorial reach.
Given that this law has very little chance of passing, it shouldn’t matter much. But it does! Because it gives those who oppose any legislation attempting to address sexual abuse (affirmative consent laws, for instance) the ability to point and say: Look, those crazies think everything is rape, even fibbing!
Rape is a fairly straightforward crime. It’s a matter of having sex with someone who does not want to have sex at that moment in time. Despite claims to the contrary, affirmative consent supporters don’t actually want to make it legal to retroactively retract consent. But this law would open the door to allowing people to do so, which actually does muddy the definition and understanding of rape. Jerks who exploit people’s desire to be loved in order to defraud them can be convicted under other laws. Otherwise, relationship fouls are simply not criminal offenses.
It’s good to see that there’s a limiting principle in the state’s sexual policing power. Even for Marcotte.
A few readers offer their perspective on the awful situation at the University of Virginia:
I’m a former federal prosecutor and an alum of UVA. I think those who advocate for the criminal justice system being used instead of having colleges investigate sexual assault are asking too much of the criminal justice system. While the gang rape at the center of the Rolling Stone article would be a good case for full prosecutorial investigation, most sexual assaults occurring on most campuses would not. Most “date rape” scenarios would never be prosecuted. Without third-party witnesses or evidence of a “roofie” in the girl’s blood, prosecutors would generally not find enough evidence to indict. The beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard is simply too high in those kinds of cases, and if we left them for the criminal justice system to handle, it would likely end up being an excuse for inaction.
Another goes out on a limb:
As a 2005 UVA grad and fraternity member, I am having a lot of trouble formulating any sort of reaction to this situation without coming off as some sort of rape-supporting monster, but I am very uncomfortable with the rush to judgement and the urge to punish the “bad guys” as quickly and severely as possible.
The Rolling Stone story made me feel sick to my stomach with anger when I started to read it. However, by the end of the article, I was surprised that they even agreed to publish it, considering the explosive implications of the allegations and the lack of proof or corroboration that the story was true. The victim deserves to be believed by her friends, support network, and any counselors or professionals whose job involves helping rape survivors, but a journalist is not supposed to be a credulous scribe for any allegation.
There are some people who will literally wish my violent death for saying this, but there is a chance that the accuser made it up or exaggerated. It happens. That doesn’t mean that we refuse to listen to the allegations and say terrible things about her, but it does mean that we as a society should still ask for proof. The fraternity in question has been essentially destroyed as an institution because of this story, and if it’s true, they totally deserve it. But I would have been much more comfortable if the accuser had at least tried to press charges with the police or the university.
I also see many calls for collective punishment for all fraternities, regardless of their actual record of behavior. This is simply unfair. There are 30 frats at UVA, representing about 30% of the males in the student body. It is absurd to claim that 30% of UVA men are rapists, rape supporters, or otherwise implicated in a “rape culture”.
If anyone had that sort of attitude about women, they wouldn’t even be invited back to a rush event at my house or many others. We voluntarily worked with One in Four on educating every single pledge who came into our organization about consent, preventing assaults, and monitoring each other’s behavior to prevent bad situations. We had multiple sober party monitors at every event with alcohol to go from room to room and make sure nothing bad was happening. That included telling brothers not to bring stumbling drunk girls to their rooms. It included helping find people at the party when their friends were looking for them. It even included calling 911 to get an ambulance to our own doorstep to help a girl who was either drugged or drastically over-served at another house and then wandered to our house looking to drink more.
In a deeply reported, deeply disturbing story published late last week, Sabrina Rubin Erdely exposed how the University of Virginia has repeatedly mishandled and covered up rape allegations, including the gang-rape of a first-year student at a frat house two years ago:
UVA furnished Rolling Stone with some of its most recent tally: In the last academic year, 38 students went to [Dean Nicole] Eramo about a sexual assault, up from about 20 students three years ago. However, of those 38, only nine resulted in “complaints”; the other 29 students evaporated. Of those nine complaints, four resulted in Sexual Misconduct Board hearings. UVA wasn’t willing to disclose their outcomes, citing privacy. Like most colleges, sexual-assault proceedings at UVA unfold in total secrecy. Asked why UVA doesn’t publish all its data, President Sullivan explains that it might not be in keeping with “best practices” and thus may inadvertently discourage reporting. Jackie [the 2012 gang-rape victim] got a different explanation when she’d eventually asked Dean Eramo the same question. She says Eramo answered wryly, “Because nobody wants to send their daughter to the rape school.”
Erdely’s exposé has already had consequences: UVA’s president has suspended all fraternities and associated parties until further notice and belatedly asked the local police to investigate the 2012 incident. Dreher compares the UVA coverup to the Church’s sex abuse scandal:
This is what the Catholic Church did. The first case I wrote about, back in 2001, involved an immigrant teenager who was passed around priests in a Bronx parish. When the boy’s father learned what happened, he went to see an auxiliary bishop. According to the victim’s lawyer, the auxiliary bishop allegedly pulled out a checkbook and offered a payout in exchange for the father signing a paper giving the Archdiocese of New York’s attorneys the right to handle his case. The father may have been a laborer and an immigrant, but he knew a scam when he saw it. He left and hired his own lawyer. And here we see the University of Virginia following a similar script.
Dahlia Lithwick’s takeaway is that the Title IX-mandated system by which college administrations are expected to adjudicate rape cases outside the criminal justice system is fundamentally flawed:
If the purpose of the current internal adjudication is to increase transparency and reporting, that runs against the most basic institutional incentive to hide bad news. If the object is to counsel and support survivors, it’s not clear that has worked very well either. And if the object is to keep the campus safe, it has failed spectacularly.
According to one Justice Department report, less than 5 percent of attempted or completed rapes on campus are reported to law enforcement. Universities attempted to create a second-tier system that bypassed that criminal justice process, softened the impact of filing a complaint, and lessened the process obligations and the fact-finding capacities of internal reviews. It worked. And in so doing, it largely failed. The question we should be asking ourselves is not simply what it is about campuses that lead the friends and counselors of the victim to discourage her from seeking help from the police and the hospital. The real question is whether, having crafted an internal system that either masks or exacerbates many of the worst features of the systems it seeks to replace, do we want to stand by it? After reading the Rolling Stone piece do we think universities are moving toward solving the campus rape problem or inadvertently colluding in hiding it?
So what should universities be doing about violent sexual assault? In those orientation sessions, they should be teaching students to see sexual felonies as felonies—not as violations of campus policy, but as crimes to be reported as soon as possible to police officers trained to investigate them so that prosecutors can prosecute them. If local cops and courts aren’t doing their job, then universities should use their considerable clout in make sure that they do.
A study published this year in the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, for instance, suggested that if universities want to make women feel more comfortable about reporting rape, they should add more women to their campus security police force—as of about half a decade ago, only 17 percent of campus police officers were women. A body of research on regular female police officers shows that not only to women prefer to report rape to them, they’re better at eliciting painful details from victims, which leads to higher rates of conviction. There is no reason that university officials couldn’t be working to help their local police departments make reforms like these.
On a related point, McArdle responds to our reader’s contention that the concept of due process is not cut-and-dry and that making it easier to expel accused rapists from college is not that big a deal:
In the first place, the government is pushing for these relaxed standards of evidence and due process, via Title IX, which means that this is the government doing something to you. Not putting you in prison, to be sure. But — and I hardly believe I have to say this — getting expelled on a sexual assault charge is, in fact, something very bad happening to you. I don’t know why people keep saying that this is “all” that happens, as if it were the educational equivalent of having to change hotels mid-vacation. …
Rape is a terrible thing, which is why we try it in courts, and lock rapists away for a good long time. It’s also why we treat rapists like they are terrible people who may be admitted to normal society only after convincing repentance and rehabilitation. That’s precisely why it’s problematic that we’re adjudicating these charges through such a weak process. Expelling someone for rape creates an official record that brands them, in the eyes of society, as a rapist. We should do that only after careful examination, giving the accused every chance to tell his side. Not because we are making light of rape, but because we are treating these terrible events, and the punishment we mete out, with all the seriousness they deserve.
Whoopi Goldberg, a diehard Polanski defender, is skeptical of the allegations against Bill Cosby:
Readers react to the disturbing story:
I certainly understand Barbara Bowman’s anger. I think the answer to her question, of course, has more than a little to do with race. In this country, accusing a black man of raping a white woman comes with the burden of our racism and history of oppression. And when that man is a beloved entertainer and symbol of American fatherhood? You are right that his accusers had and have absolutely nothing to gain and everything to lose. I just can’t imagine what these women have gone through emotionally.
Hannibal Buress, by virtue of his gender and race, made it possible for us to have this conversation at long last. That it took a man to legitimize their stories is most unfair. We owe Buress our gratitude nonetheless.
Another wonders why Cosby didn’t get his comeuppance sooner:
Ten years ago we still had more of a top-down media structure. “Going viral” was not a thing yet. YouTube hadn’t even started. Instead, shocking things generally had to pass through gatekeepers, whose incentives were basically not to piss off the wrong people. Rape accusations at the time were considered not appropriate for polite company unless it reinforced an existing narrative. I’m sure many media outlets heard of these accusations, but dismissed them because they weren’t “truthy” enough.
He said / she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said.
But a couple readers share Whoopi’s skepticism:
You wrote, “Believing Bill Cosby does not require you to take one person’s word over another – it requires you take one person’s word over 15 others.”
I have no idea what Cosby did back in the day. It would seem highly risky for a black man in the ’60s and ’70s to force himself on a white woman, but people have done risky things before. It was a long time ago, however, and it seems like too long a time to determine the truth of his or any other case without any real evidence.
The reason I’m writing this email however is to point out the problem with the “15 others” claim. The longer the time period, the more numerous the false claims/false memories. Did they get drunk and have sex with Cosby and regret it later and they have now over the years convinced themselves he must have slipped something into their drink 30 years ago? Did Cosby just hit on them years ago and grabbed a boob and they story grew in their mind? (Still bad, still inappropriate, but not as bad as rape). Did they have a sleazy experience with Cosby, believe that he could have raped somebody and embellish their story to help other victims?
Another:
If Bowman really wanted her story to come to light, she should not have settled and allowed the other assaulted women to testify in a trial. She accepted a settlement, and the reason to settle something like this is so the perpetrator can keep it as quiet as possible. She had a hand in keeping this quiet, and was financially rewarded for doing so. To complain about it now is disingenuous.
Update from a reader:
Cosby’s settlement was with Andrea Constand, not Barbara Bowman. She came forward to testify on behalf of Constand in a potential trial. That trial never took place because of the settlement, but Bowman has every right to speak up and is under no obligation to keep anything quiet.
Another adds:
As Bowman states in her Washington Post op-ed, “I have never received any money from Bill Cosby and have not asked for it.”
A torn reader rightfully falls on the side of the many female accusers:
I’ve been having a hard time dealing with the evidence that Bill Cosby is a rapist, but at the very minimum its helping me to understand why people sometimes defend and even excuse celebrities that are caught doing horrible things. Cosby was a fixture of my childhood. His public persona wasn’t just a source of humor for me, growing up, but also of comfort. I didn’t have an admirable father, so having someone like him as an example of what a father could be was meaningful to me. It’s not an exaggeration to say that he helped me through some hard periods.
Realizing that the real Cosby isn’t the same as the person I admired is hard. I’m feeling a profound sense of loss because that man I admired isn’t an admirable man. So what do I do with all of the positive experiences and, yes, values that I got from him? Is it still possible to admire the message while being disgusted with the messenger? Does the hypocrisy and evil negate the virtue?
Ultimately, I must side with the victims. If he hurt people (and I think he did), then he’s scum. And he’s a worse sort of scum for pretending to be a friendly, fatherly figure. I won’t make excuses and I won’t try to seek out some sort of false balance. But I also can’t do that without feeling hurt and without having to fight an urge to defend the man that I thought he was, even though that man was just an illusion.
Another update from a reader, who spreads the blame around:
I think NBC – who had a show in development with Cosby – is getting off awful lightly.
Yes, the accusations against Cosby slipped out of mainstream consciousness – but it was certainly no secret at NBC! For years, women have alleged that he used his position at the network in the 1980s to host private counseling sessions in which he drugged and raped them. These claims must’ve made at least some impression when they were aired in court just eight years ago.
Consider also that the claims against Cosby stretch into 2004(!) when Andrea Constand, a young employee at Cosby’s doting alma mater, says she was drugged and assaulted in his Philly mansion. Is it any mystery what Cosby had in store for the young female professionals that NBC was prepared to hand over to him? Do 67-year-old rapists not become 77-year-old rapists? Is this how cataract-eyed octogenarians find new verve for a career comeback?
The shameful truth is this: the only thing that stopped NBC from furnishing a serial rapist with a new crop of eager young professional women was a 90 second cell phone video of a stand-up routine. And that’s a scandal.
In the renaissance age of feminist, woman-focused journalism, how was that allowed to happen? Why did spaces like Vox, Gawker Inc. and Slate XX devote coverage to the sexism of The Amazing Spiderwoman, but let NBC announce a deal with a prolific rapist without a peep? Why was gamergate covered like the modern triangle shirtwaist fire, but the new Cosby show ignored entirely? Why dig so obsessively into nerdy, off-the-beaten-path subcultures when fucking NBC is setting Bill Cosby loose on a new group of subservient girls?
NBC, for their part, announced the cancellation of the Cosby project in the protective wake of Netflix’s announcement. They’re now attempting to quietly tip-toe away from this mess as the public descends on Cosby. They should not be allowed to.
In the most recent crime data released by the FBI, only 40 percent of documented rape cases ended in “clearance.” Clearance indicates that officers were able to close a case, either via an arrest, or in some cases due to victim non-compliance – this latter method is called an “exceptional” clearance. This percent of rape cases cleared has declined sharply since 1995, while clearance rates for murder and aggravated assault have held steady.
But the reality is far more troubling than these numbers suggest.
Earlier this year, law professor Corey Yung released a lengthy paper providing evidence that police departments are systematically undercounting rape in large cities across the country. His numbers, which he calls “conservative,” suggest that “an additional 796,213 to 1,145,309 forcible rapes of women have been reported to authorities, but police have hidden them from the public record, thereby feeding the myth of the ‘great decline’ in rape.”
On Monday, Amanda Hess hoped that reporting will soon improve:
Last year, the FBI finally updated the definition for the modern era. Rape is now defined as “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” Now, the FBI hopes that the statistics will finally reflect “a long list of sex offenses that are criminal in most jurisdictions, such as offenses involving oral or anal penetration, penetration with objects, and rapes of males” that had previously been erased from the big picture. The new definition also drops the “forcible” qualifier in favor of “without the consent of the victim,” encouraging jurisdictions to report rapes perpetrated without a show of physical force.
Today, the FBI released Crime in the United States 2013, its first annual report to rely on this more inclusive definition of rape. The agency estimates that when crimes involving male victims, oral and anal rape, and sexual assaults committed with objects are included, the numbers of sex offenses reflected in the UCR program could increase by more than 40 percent. That hasn’t happened yet: Because “not all state and local agencies have been able to effect the change in their records management systems” to reflect the new terminology, the 2013 numbers actually reflect an estimated 6.3 percent decrease in rapes, as calculated by the old definition.
Dara Lind further unpacks what the definition change means:
[T]he FBI now has to consider unreported rape of men. Rape of men is a tremendous problem, especially in US prisons. Some estimates have indicated that, because of prison rapes, more men are actually raped in the US than women. But prison rape is especially likely to go unreported, and it looks like that’s a huge issue for the FBI. Among the 14 states that sent detailed reports to the FBI last year, there was one rape of a male for every 44 rapes of females. So if the FBI’s definition of rape is going to include rapes of men in practice, not just in theory, it’s going to have to figure out how to get a better handle on prison rape.
After conducting a voluntary survey of its student body, MIT reported this week that 17 percent of female students and 5 percent of male students had experienced sexual assault. But the university’s administration and the students surveyed seem to subscribe to different definitions of that term:
M.I.T. asked about several forms of unwanted sexual contact, from touching to penetration, “involving use of force, physical threat or incapacitation,” that it said clearly constituted sexual assault — the kind that 17 percent of undergraduate women and 5 percent of undergraduate men said they had experienced. In addition, 12 percent of women and 6 percent of men said they had experienced the same kinds of unwanted sexual contact, but without force, threat or incapacity — some of which, depending on the circumstances, can also be sexual assault. Yet when asked if they had been raped or sexually assaulted, only 11 percent of female and 2 percent of male undergraduates said yes.
There was a similar result on sexual harassment. Among undergraduate respondents, large majorities of men and women said they had heard sexist remarks and inappropriate comments about people’s bodies … But the number who described what had happened to them as sexual harassment was relatively small: 15 percent of undergraduate women, and 4 percent of men.
Their consciousness obviously needs to be raised – and pronto. “The university is clearly using a broader definition of sexual assault than its own students,” Batya Ungar-Sargon concludes:
Perhaps the discrepancy lies in the staggering 44 percent of incidents related to being incapacitated by drugs or alcohol, which some students don’t regard as assault.
It seems unlikely that students would underreport sexual assaults caused by force, or a weapon, or threats of physical harm. Eighty-three percent of respondents disagree with the statement that “An incident can only be sexual assault or rape if the person says ‘no.'” In other words, 83 percent of MIT students can distinguish between a nonverbal lack of consent, and sexual assault. If this is the case, why does the survey then disbelieve the female undergrads when only 10 percent say they have been sexually assaulted? To take the 17 percent of “unwanted” sexual behaviors and turn them into sexual assault, despite the 7 percent of female students included therein who do not believe they have been assaulted, is to remove the students’ very canny ability to distinguish the criminal from the unwanted.
After pointing out some problems with the survey’s methodology, Elizabeth Nolan Brown highlights a finding that she finds disturbing:
Contra the affirmative consent crowd, it doesn’t seem that a lack of respect or enthusiasm for obtaining sexual content is a big problem: 98 percent of females and 96 percent of males agreed or strongly agreed that it’s important to get consent before sexual activity. But students are confused about how alcohol and intoxication affect consent, which perhaps speaks to increasing progressive activism around the idea that drunk people can’t give consent. Only about three-quarters of respondents said they feel confident in their own ability to judge whether someone is too intoxicated to consent to sex. And more than half agreed that “rape and sexual assault can happen unintentionally, especially if alcohol is involved.”
I just want to repeat that one more time: Half of the MIT students surveyed think it’s possible to “accidently” rape someone. When you consider undergraduates alone, this rises to 67 percent. This is what we get when people push an idea that rape is really often a matter of consent confusion or a drunken misunderstanding and not something that one person (the rapist) intentionally does to another. This is exactly what those of us opposed to affirmative consent standards mean when we worry about it muddying the waters of consent and confusing the definition of rape.
I haven’t weighed into the debate over California’s sexual consent law or the new regulations in many colleges, including my alma mater, Harvard, that defines any sex without vocalized continuous consent as sexual assault or rape. One reason is my lack of any real experience of male-female sex where the power dynamics can often be very different from gay sex. But what does concern me a great deal is the lack of any due process for the accused in these unfortunate and often deeply contentious circumstances. Mercifully, some of the faculty at Harvard – specifically the law school – have now risen up against what look to me like kangaroo courts, designed to instill fear into one gender alone. In an open letter, published in the Boston Globe, the law profs write:
Harvard has adopted procedures for deciding cases of alleged sexual misconduct which lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process, are overwhelmingly stacked against the accused, and are in no way required by Title IX law or regulation. Here our concerns include but are not limited to the following:
■ The absence of any adequate opportunity to discover the facts charged and to confront witnesses and present a defense at an adversary hearing.
■ The lodging of the functions of investigation, prosecution, fact-finding, and appellate review in one office, and the fact that that office is itself a Title IX compliance office rather than an entity that could be considered structurally impartial.
■ The failure to ensure adequate representation for the accused, particularly for students unable to afford representation.
Ezra Klein – in a remarkable column that we featured yesterday – actually defends the lack of due process as a positive aspect of the new regulations, because their inherent bias against accused men will create a climate of fear that is necessary to curtail male sexual violence and assault:
To work, “Yes Means Yes” needs to create a world where men are afraid … Critics worry that colleges will fill with cases in which campus boards convict young men (and, occasionally, young women) of sexual assault for genuinely ambiguous situations. Sadly, that’s necessary for the law’s success. It’s those cases — particularly the ones that feel genuinely unclear and maybe even unfair, the ones that become lore in frats and cautionary tales that fathers e-mail to their sons — that will convince men that they better Be Pretty Damn Sure.
Jon Chait and Charles Cooke both note the profound illiberalism here – and it’s enabled by the pomo gender ideologues who now control most discussion of sex and sexual identity in the academy. But what’s also impossible to ignore is how the social left is now trying to micro-manage what goes on in the bedroom with almost as much assiduity as the social right – and to do so in order to target one gender alone.
When all men are regarded as potential rapists, and when you have bought into the argument that the patriarchy is so entrenched that only radically illiberal procedures to punish, stigmatize and shame them will suffice, you have embraced a new Puritanism almost as troubling as the old. Play out this scenario: If a judicial process were set up that assumed that all women reporting sexual assault and rape were liars until somehow proven truthful, there would be an outcry. But if an identical judicial process is established that assumes all men accused of sexual assault and rape are guilty until proven otherwise – with no due process allowed – that is, apparently, a progressive move.
And it may well be a progressive move; but it sure isn’t a liberal or fair one. This does not mean that I don’t take the issue of sexual assault and rape seriously. In fact, it’s precisely because I do take it seriously that I’d support laws and regulations that allow real justice to be done, in which the accused have some basic right to defend themselves. The rest is a function of a leftist academic culture in which men are somehow inherently a problem; and almost anything is justified to make sure their “privilege is checked” and their gender stigmatized. At some point, the sexism inherent in this needs to be confronted as well.
The Dish 