Here is the solution: http://ebaumsworld.com/2006/10/consent.wmv
(Please note that I do not accept any liability from family law practitioners who bust a gut laughing while viewing this video.)
Unfortunately, the law is fairly ambiguous here.
Yes, if the man is threatening her, she shouldn’t be forced to fight back. However, if a man is not threatening a woman, she says “no,” but then continues to engage in sexual activity, then how responsible should she be held for her actions?
Stop what? Stop everything? Or just not proceed to intercourse? “No” may mean a lot of things and I think that a man is justified in using clues from a woman’s actions to determine what “no” means.
You’d also be back to the problem of “proving beyond reasonable doubt” that a woman made sufficient efforts to leave?
Depending on where you live, there are laws that say that anyone who is under the influence of alcohol (presumably enough to merit a DUI offense) is unable to give consent to sexual acts.
In that case, I’ve been raped dozens of times…
Oh, I do have opinions on the topic. But my statement you quoted was just meant to say that my point of describing the differences between then and now was not that I thought was one better than the other, but that there was in fact a big difference. And that difference may account for why back then there were not many “date rape” cases and now there are.
The old way left the girl feeling guilty if anything did happend to her. It was all her fault. She deserved no sympathy. So when it happened, it didn’t get reported. And I am not sure the old way really did prevent that many from happening because so many women my age have stories of date rape or attempted date rape. But is was likely to only happen once, because after that we really were much more careful. We knew then that there were certain situations that saying no just wouldn’t matter. And we knew once we were in that situation that it was too late. So to avoid that from happening, we did feel we needed to take responsibilty.
My best friend my freshman year was a virgin when she came to school. She wasn’t exactly saving it for marriage, but she did want to save it for someone very special and have it mean something to her. One of the good looking jock guys started paying attention to her. She was flattered and thrilled. One night at a party he had some excuse to get her to leave with him and go his room. Once there, they started kissing and she was fine with that. At a certain point she realized he was expecting to have sex with her. She told him that she didn’t want things to go any farther. She even told him she was a virgin, and wasn’t interested in having sex with anyone who she wasn’t seriously dating. He told her that should wouldn’t be a virgin after that night. When she started to fight him he made it clear he could physically dominate her. It was going to happen, he wasn’t going to take no for answer. She could either fight, or lay back and enjoy it, as he put it, it didn’t matter to him, but it was going to happen.
She gave up fighting after a while and cried the whole time. After she left his room she came over to my room. There were a couple other freshman girls there. She was still crying but was able to tell us what happened.
It is hard for me to believe now looking back, but none of us realized she had just been raped. Not even her. We equated rape with the boston strangler or someone like that. A person who preys on strangers. Not guys we go to school with.
It didn’t occur to us to tell anyone. Not the school authorities, the police, her parents. That wasn’t even an option to consider. We just consoled her the best we could. We all knew it was not her fault and we told her that, but we knew she felt it was. She hated herself for not seeing that that would happen. She felt she was wrong for not being more careful, like she was warned by her parents to be.
In an enviornment like that, there was no way that rape was going to be reported and go to trial. So I think 20 years ago, if a rape case did go to trial, chances are it was a rape by a stranger, not an aquaintance. And a jury would likely believe a woman accusing a complete stranger would only do so if she was raped. There wouldn’t be a question of her consenting to a stranger in a dark alley he dragged her into as she was walking to her car at night. Or if a stranger broke into her home during the day, she would not likely be giving her consent. So more of those cases would end in conviction.
But now, with girls more apt to report a date rape, and more of those going to trial, then the question of whether she gave consent to a guy she was drinking and having a good time with would come up. More of these cases are about whether or not she did say no.
I do think girls should know they do have the right to say no. And if they are forced to have sex with someone they shouldn’t feel guilty or that it was their fault. But I would also like them to understand having the right to say no doesn’t prevent men from forcing sex on them. And knowing it wasn’t their fault doesn’t erase what happened to them. So for their own well being, they need to consider what situations they are putting themselves in.
And the reality may be that if a situation like happened to my friend happend to a girl now, but she reported the rape, the end result is likely she wouldn’t be able to prove it. The older jury members may be wondering why she went to his room and started making out with him in the first place if she wasn’t interested having sex. They might think she consented at the time because she was drunk, but then regretted it. They might think she said no, but must not have meant it if she didn’t fight until she was black and blue and had a few broken bones. So her knowledge that what happened to her really was a crime may not make much of a difference. I am just afraid that telling the girls over and over that they have the right to say no gives them a false sense of security. I don’t want them to feel like if they do end up in a risky situation and are raped that it was their fault. What I want is for them to be more able to avoid the risky situations so the rape never occurs.
When I went away to college, we had to attend a mandatory rape lecture. The main purposes appeared to be to inform the clueless and scare those who might have taken a few things for granted (like, permission).
The lecture was given by a stern female police officer who projected a certain tightly controlled aura of anger at the bad guys she was describing. Probably very effective at her job.
Then she startled me by asserting two things:
“Rapists are not one-time offenders. Almost every rapist turns out to have committed multiple offenses.”
and later:
“We have a perfect conviction rate. For every rape that occurs here, we get a conviction and send someone to jail.”
I admit I was troubled.
“Excuse me,” I raised my hand. “How does the math work out on that? If each rapist has committed more than one rape, and you send a person to jail for every single rape committed, haven’t you sent some innocent people to jail?”
She responded with an icy glare.
I still don’t know how the math works out.
Sailboat
And of course it’s completely unreasonable to expect a man to be able to accurately gauge a woman’s level of intoxication in all instances. It’s obvoius when someone is unresponsive or unconscious, but is it always obvious when they’re legally intoxicated? Not without a blood alcohol level, which isn’t going to be determinable without scientific testing, and particularly not by the estimation of someone who is also drinking and may be intoxicated.
And what happens when intercourse is already underway when she says ‘no’? How long does the guy get to register the objection and cease his actions?
Who on earth would reasonably be able to determine without blood, breath or urine testing, that someone else has a BAC of .08%?
I intend no offense with this, but it really is quite possible that he just asked her to go with him. I also question the veracity of any statement like ‘When he asked me to go back to his room and I accepted, I wasn’t expecting sex.’
I would be, and I’m not that old. Mostly because I’ve never made or accepted an invitation like that and not had it mean sex was going to happen.
Here’s a thought if someone is too drunk to legally give for someone else to have sex with them are they still able to understand someone else’s refusal?
No offense taken. Like I said, when thinking back on what the situation was like back then it all seems very odd to me, so I can see how it would sound odd to someone else, especially now days.
But I do remember when one girl would mention a bad experience with a certain guy, and she would describe what happened, very often another girl would tell about the same thing happening to her. Included in that was the same “excuse” that was used to go back to the room. They were simple things like, “We need better music here. I am going to go back and get a couple of albums, want to walk with me?” “They are collecting money for a beer run, I need to go back to my room and get some cash, why don’t you come with me?”
Very simple things, but the same guys tended to use the same line every time. And they were usually something that implied a short trip to get something then return. So some girls really were surprised when it was clear the guy had no intention of going back to the party.
I am sure there were some girls that took the invitation as an invitation for sex, and were fine with it. But for the less experienced, perhaps less secure in themselves, they really did not feel agreeing to go for a walk was agreeing to sex. Eventually they figured it out, but for many it took a bad experience to see that.
And you make a good point about it not just being the older people who might interpret things a certain way. Because of your experiences, you might be even more apt to come to certain conclusions.
And just curious, this is something that happened not long ago and made me wonder how much things had really changed since I was single.
Say you were at a party with a bunch of your friends. Even though you only live about 5 miles away, you are very cautious about drinking and driving and decide you are on the border of not being safe to drive so you ask to borrow a phone so you can call a cab. A friend of a friend overhears this, knows you live close by and says he is leaving also and can drop you off at home since it on his way anyway. You have not talked much to this guy, not flirted or in any way given off signals you are interested in him. You only know him casually, but he is a good friend of some of your friends who have known him for years.
If you accepted the ride, would you be aware that oral sex was expected in return for the ride home?
To all the people who are concerned by the “what ifs”, what do you think should be done to address the gray areas? I’m interested in hearing some ideas. If your answer is nothing, then speculating and fretting and theorizing about all these “what if” scenarios strikes me as a pointless exercise. The system as it is currently set up already makes it difficult to prove rape. What else could possibly be done to eradicate the uncertainties inherent to proving consent?
Theft is fraught with the same ambiguities that rape is. Just because its possible to be falsely accused of stealing something when really it was just one big ole misunderstanding (“You said I could have the money!” “No, I didn’t.” “Yes, you did!”), that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with the way we prosecute people for theft, and it doesn’t mean that we need to gnash our teeth over the mere potential of false accusations.
Women should protect themselves from rape by avoiding rape-risky situations. And men should protect themselves from “criminal misunderstandings” by avoiding situations where consent is less than obvious. Sleeping with strangers and bare-acquaintances that you know wouldn’t look at you twice if they were sober, sleeping with women that you know are psycho, sleeping with women that have said no even if you think they really want it…avoid these women. If you still want to sleep with these types, then I don’t know what to tell you but it won’t be sympathetic.
And before someone says the expected: I will be equally unsympathetic if you’re a woman who wants to dress in provocative hooker clothes, get sloppy drunk and take strange men home after the last call and then complains when the highly probable happens. I can be cold-hearted sometimes.
I would think that he was hitting on me, trying to get in my pants, and using the ‘drive you home’ thing as an excuse to come to my house with me. If I were interested in a potential hook-up, I would go. If not, I’d take the cab.
Of course, this is unlikely to ever happen, since 1) I never take cabs 2) I have my own mobile phone 3) I’ve never been that way about drinking and driving and 4) If I wanted to take him home I’d have already asked.
If I’ve gone there with friends, I’m either leaving with those specific friends or I’ve told them I’m gettin lucky. It is, however, extremely rare that I don’t have my own car wherever I go.
I went to college for five years. and I don’t think I can recall a single instance where anyone asked me back to their dorm room/apartment from a bar or party and didn’t mean ‘Want to come back to my place and fuck?’, nor where I meant otherwise when I extended the invitation.
I would still assume that is the case at any party or bar.
I also remember waking up more than once and taking a minute to figure out where I was and who that guy was, and in some of those cases thought the previous decision was perhaps not a good one. But it was a decision, my decision, and therefore not rape.
Regret != rape.
I’m pretty much in complete agreement here, but I think the issue could be avoided by saying that some guys are Deciderers who will not listen when women tell them “No” and they have to have ways of avoiding them. I suspect a lot of women know this anyway. I think it’s really important to establish that right to say “no” in everyone’s minds, though.
Well, there’s your problem, see. When I was dating, I invited women to my room, etc., but it didn’t mean sex was going to happen. It meant sex MIGHT happen.
But sex was your reason for inviting them there, wasn’t it?
Or did you invite them up to watch cartoons?
Doubtless he invited her to watch PSAs about date rape and suchlike. 
Getting back to the OP, though, I think it’s clear that the feminists are, as is no great surprise, narrow-mindedly trying to advance their agenda, with little concern for the actual process and ambiguities of rape convictions. If anything, I think it should be made harder to prove rape, and harsher penalties applied to false claims. Unfortunately, these days, a mere claim of rape gives any woman a near-failsafe way to screw up the life of any man, as demonstrated both by the Duke case and a number of less spectacular false accusations. Of course, the concern to protect against false accusations has to be moderated by ensuring that it does not discourage legitimate accusations, but at this point I think the former a more acute problem.
A few years ago, I represented a defendant at a sexual assault (rape) trial. (It was such a dull affair that at the end of it, the judge rose from dais, turned, and walked into the wall rather that out the door.)
Essentially a woman passed out drunk at a house party while kissing a young fellow. He then continued on and had intercourse with her. The fellow never considered what he did as being wrong, and simply assumed that it was normal to move from necking to fucking when the woman passed out.
When speaking with the Crown prior to the trial, I learned that “sleeping beauty” rapes were very commonplace in a certain community (one that generally suffered poverty and cultural/racial issues), where drunken house parties are held most evenings. Since then, several young men of that community have told me that sex with drunk and passed out women is “the way it is”, and several women have told me that they have been raped that way, but did not report it because they did not want to be beaten by the young men.
I applaud those who are bringing this issue to the public’s attention, for there is something gravely wrong about sleeping beauty rape being the norm in a community.