You clearly had a very different college experience than I did. There were no “alternative” anything after freshman organic chemistry other than waiting an entire year for the required classes to come up.
You haven’t made the case for why the “best” course of action is to kick a student out of class, dorm, etc., based solely on an accusation.
One or the other does not need to have a negative impact. You are not required to kick anyone from a class.
Clearly. So given how the class situation can vary radically from school to school you’ll no doubt appreciate the difficulty of coming up with a single answer applicable to all situations.
Best in that it protects the the accuser from further harm and protects the school from lawsuits.
I don’t see why anyone should make the case one way or the other.
This is why I hate hypotheticals. They assume certainty, and that all the relevant factors can be laid out in a few lines, as if that is ever going to be true in a real-world rape case, and then the people putting forward or endorsing the hypotheticals are shocked—shocked I tell you—that the opposition has no answer, or at least no perfect solution, for the hypothetical as posed.
Personally, I strain to envision a university that couldn’t, in extraordinary circumstances that you probably never personally encountered because you were probably never put into the precise hypothetical situation demanded of this thread, come up with a way to ensure that at least two offerings of a necessary course were made or, failing that, that something couldn’t be worked out with the professor.
Bias, much? The only harm that we’re certain of is on the student you’re kicking out of class.
This is the part of the hypothetical that sticks out to me.
Its a rape accusation, a very serious accusation of a very serious crime but she does not want to go to the police? She wants the university to punish the guy but does not want the fullest investigation possible of what actually happened?
That doesn’t work for me at all. To my mind a pre-requisite of the university doing anything at all is the crime being reported to the police and their investigation taking precedence. Frankly, anything else is bullshit and ripe for abuse.
I think you’re confused. I didn’t say anyone needed to be kicked out of class. You’re the one insisting that’s the only method to separate them.
Does anyone know if university employees are mandatory reporters?
According to the OP
So the police have not investigated. I would assume that the woman will cooperate to some degree with a university investigation. The accused man denies it, so he is apparently aware of the accusation.
But the investigation by the university is where it gets complicated. Does the accused have the right to confront his accuser? What is the standard of evidence - a preponderance of the evidence? Can either side subpoena witnesses? Do people have to testify under oath? What, if any, consequences follow if the accused refused to cooperate with the investigation?
Or, maybe it would go down like this. I, the university administrator, have an investigation. I interview the woman, and the man.
Woman: “I was at a party. I had a few beers - I don’t remember exactly how many. I was sort of flirting with a guy at the party. After a while, we went into a bedroom, we were kissing, he wanted to go further, I said No but he raped me anyway. I didn’t say anything at the time because I was ashamed. After a few weeks, I recognized that I didn’t do anything wrong, so I decided to confront him. I want him kicked out of the university.”
Man: “I was at a party. I had a few beers - I don’t recall how many. I was flirting with a woman there. After a while, we went into a bedroom and started kissing. I unhooked her bra, she undid my pants, and we had sex. Afterwards, I asked if I could see her again, but she said No, she would rather just forget all about it. Now I find she is accusing me of rape. It wasn’t rape, it was consensual.”
How does the university proceed from there?
Regards,
Shodan
There is an accusation of physical assault-It should be reported to the police.
Do you specifically just want DSeid’s thoughts? Because otherwise, I believe your question has been asked and answered elsewhere in this thread.
This is another instance where hypotheticals fail. You may be right, but then you may not be, and it may all come down to laws in effect and existing university procedures.
For example, in the military, which would include the service academies, a sexual assault allegation can be made as a restricted report. By which I mean, the victim could choose not to have it treated as a disciplinary matter involving a criminal investigation, but gain access to services and treatment options.
However, a “restricted report” can only be made under certain circumstances to certain people. A chaplain, a medical provider, a victim’s advocate. If the chain of command receives an allegation of sexual assault (outside of the victim’s advocate being required to notify the commanding officer that a restricted report has been made, but not by whom or about whom), even if the victim didn’t intend for the chain of command to become aware, the chain of command must refer it for investigation. It cannot hold back. The victim can still choose not to answer questions about it, but there has to be an investigation, and whether or not criminal charges are appropriate may go beyond the immediate chain of command’s level (out of their hands).
So yet another reason why I hate hypotheticals. There are certain things that get assumed away (whether or not and how much the university or the victim have discretion to investigate or inform other authorities) that really can’t be. Because in the real world, there are laws and regulations governing how certain entities must handle certain situations.
Ok, but how does that change anything? I agree with the post you were responding to. The school can’t do anything except call the police.
However, I’ll point out now that it is absurd to presume that any school at this time has no policy or procedure for events like this.
Then by all means tell me how I’m going to separate the students in Chem 032 at Swarthmore in late November without harming one.
So now this isn’t just a broad hypothetical (to which people have responded honestly), but it’s specifically a question about procedures at Swathmore, and the victim and accused must specifically be in the same Major with a very small number of required course offerings? Because I dare say no one here, unless we happen to have someone coincidentally occupying the appropriate office at Swathmore, is capable of answering that question.
What does that accomplish? The woman in question does not want the police to be involved.
So, against her wishes, it is reported to the police. They contact her, she refuses to swear out a complaint or make a statement. There are no witnesses to interview, no forensic evidence, not even an official complaint from the accuser. That’s hardly even reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed. So the police tell the university that there is nothing officially to investigate. How does that help?
Regards,
Shodan
Isn’t the guy she is accusing a “witness to interview”?
Either a violent crime has been committed and the police can gather what little information available(and perhaps persuade her to cooperate) to see if it fits other reports, or she is accusing an innocent man…which means that she needs to be prosecuted and he needs to be completely exonerated. Also, if someone else is attacked by this person and goes to the police and it is found out that there were accusations that it happened before then the college will be accused of covering it up.
There are many reasons that a victim can have to not wish to go the route of the courts. She can be scared by what she has seen other women go through in that venue. She may think that her assaulter ( working from a perspective of her as truth teller) deserves punishment but not the life ruined level a rape conviction would bring she thinks. I’d WAG this happens often and my fight of the hypothetical is that there no policy in place.
A large lecture hall gives plenty of ways to keep them apart. But an upper level class with small enrollment? Having to be in a small class with your rapist is a real harm. If someone has to bear harms from the report it cannot be her. And not only because the odds are she is being truthful but also because of the message it sends to others. If you are a victim and report you will pay a price.
Obviously details matter. The general principles though are that burden of proof is much less for class access than for conviction and the impact on others from the message sent.
I don’t know what police policy would be in a case where there was no official complaint. It may depend on what the woman says.
"“I was raped but I am not saying anything more to you - just the university” might be different from “I was raped by John Doe but I am not saying officially that he raped me”. If she says the second, they could send out somebody to talk to John Doe and see what he says, depending on how much time they want to spend on a case that probably isn’t going anywhere.
But supposing they do. John Doe says “I never raped anybody - it was consensual”. No witnesses, no evidence, not even anyone who will swear it happened. I don’t see that this moves an investigation forward in any way. Or John refuses to answer questions. Is that going to be used as evidence against him in the university investigation? If so, it only seems fair that the fact that the accuser won’t swear to it should also be included.
Suppose the police suggest a polygraph test, and John is fool enough to agree to it. Should the results be included in the university investigation? Polygraph evidence isn’t reliable, and the police mostly use it as a bluff to get people to confess. What if John passes the test? What if he fails it?
Even if we agree that these are the only available options - we don’t - the problem is that there isn’t enough evidence to establish either. Being falsely accused of rape is bad. Being falsely accused of lying about rape is also bad.
Regards,
Shodan