Seriously? You want to dispute such an obvious mathematical fact? If I said that elephants were bigger than mice, would you want a cite for that?
But, I’ll play.
They got these figures from the Center of Disease Control and the Department of Justice.
In fact, you can take women completely out of the picture. A man is statistically more likely to be a victim of rape than a victim of a false rape accusation. cite
By the way, neither of those men was accused of rape. They were both accused of taking too much interest in the woman. Harassment, I guess. The junior professor was accused because he let the student talk to him in his office with the door closed. He wasn’t paying attention because he was distracted by his engagement to a woman he was actually interested in. My brother was targeted after he told the admin, “why don’t you put us on the same flight” when the two of them were flying (for work) to the same convention.
I would guess that false rape accusations are a lot less common than false “he looked at me” accusations.
You have yet to offer an option that doesn’t harm people. I nev
I responded to at least one other poster, so I assume you read that and promptly ignored it.
I wrote nothing about whether I like the statistics or whether they are correct or not. The proposal is trial by statistics. Punishing people based on historical data. That’s wrong. And terrifying.
There are other ways of interacting, and you are taking one away that everyone is paying for… There are not other classes; you take them in sequence. Break the sequence, then wait a year.
Again, there may not be a better solution, but to pretend yours is without harm is incorrect.
My goal isn’t to prevent all harm as there is no option that doesn’t at the very least inconvenience someone. But there’s no reason a student needs to be forced to drop a course. It is certainly possible for the university to offer an alternative method for completing coursework despite your insistence otherwise.
There is no way to avoid all harm. Rape is harm. Being forced to sit in class with your rapist is harm. Being forced to sit in class with a person who falsely accused you of rape is also harm. My goal is not to remove all harm, but to minimize harm.
The school can almost certainly find a way to avoid keeping a student an extra year, however. There are lots of ways to complete a course. My husband used to teach at the college level. He had to do crazy stuff to accommodate students with learning disabilities. He could go a little out of his way to accommodate the students in this hypothetical situation.
This is a very strange spin honestly.
“Trial by statistics”, either explicitly or implicitly what the evaluation of every bit of evidence is in criminal cases.
How likely is it that the sample we have came from the accused v could it have been someone else? Can we exclude it and if it is a “match” to what degree of confidence? The subject is literally called “forensic statistics”.
What do I think the odds are A is being truthful? B? If A identifies B as the person who had held them up and B denies it, and there is no other evidence, then we would likely say that A is less likely lying than B. We are using historical data that victims are less likely to lie in this circumstance.
So on.
Your position is that using science is a trial is wrong and terrifying. That making an assessment informed by historical information is wrong and terrifying. That position frankly is wrong and terrifying.
Again in a legal trial the standard is “beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt” and a college administrative has a lower standard. The college administrative action also does not have the same punishment stakes as a rape conviction in the courts.
In this hypothetical one or the other will be harmed to some degree. A decision has to be made as to whom. That decision has to be informed by an assessment (based on history, based on statistics, based on rational arguments) who is more likely telling the truth, and an assessment of the harms of each action, both to the individuals and to others.
To ignore statistics would be reckless.
I find this bizarre. Which takes priority, the state justice system or the university? This would appear to be “we can’t convict him in a court but we’ll punish him anyway.” What legal basis does the university have for punishing him? And what would it do/ My feeling is that any attempt to punish someone who firmly believes he is not guilty would bring hordes of lawyers down on the university. IMHO, you cannot have private justice, and with little or no appeal. If the student is expelled, then the university needs to say why, and even if it does not, people will wonder and start talking. The student would have the stigma of the crime attached to him, with no formal charge.
In short, surely this kind of thing is beyond a level that a university can or should handle.
To save the OP, let’s say you were just appointed as university president last week in order to clean up after the lackluster administration of your predecessor.
But sometimes you need to suck it up and make a decision. That’s your job in the situation described by the OP. And if you have to decide which way to go, doesn’t it make sense to make the choice that is significantly more likely to be correct?
I think you’re looking at this the wrong way. The university has nothing to do with prosecuting criminal offenses. From the university’s point of view, their priorities lie with enforcing their code of conduct, protecting students, and protecting the university. The criminal justice system is not connected to the university at all.
Who is the we in question? The university has every right to create a code of conduct policy and take adverse action when they find students who violate it. Their policy has nothing to do with criminal law.
Perhaps. In my experience plenty of employees certainly threaten litigation when they feel wrongly terminated but it rarely amounts to anything.
The university generally keeps students records private. They’ll tell the student why he is expelled but they’re not going to share that with the public at large.
If you get into a physical altercation at work your employer will investigate. If they find you violated policy odds are good you’ll be terminated. Even if you aren’t prosecuted they can still fire you for violating policy. The university investigating allegations of sexual assault are no different.
Again, what is the methodology behind these conclusions? How does one determine when an allegation is “false”? None of you cites explain their conclusions.
I didn’t quote stats, but I would have guessed that various entities poll groups of people and ask questions like “have you ever been sexually assaulted?” and “have you ever been falsely accused of sexual assault”. Without litigating any particular case, it’s easy enough to compare the relative frequency of people who claim on an anonymous survey to have been assaulted with those who claim to have been falsely accused.
There are numerous problems with that method, if true:
The truth of allegations is what we are getting at. Self-reporting is the raw input. Many people who are guilty of sexual assault will report being wrongly accused and many who made false allegations will claim that they were sexually assaulted.
Did the poll get the right cross section of people? Did they ask convicted rapists to give their input?
How is “sexual assault” defined? A person could have been smacked on the ass at one point in her life and therefore answer “yes” to the question, but then subsequently made a false allegation of another sexual assault. Another person could be like the woman in the links posted above by Ann Hedonia and say that they were sexually assaulted because they had two glasses of wine prior to consensual sex.
The methodology is important. If it turns out that 5% of allegations are false, but 90% are undetermined and 5% are confirmed, the statement “only 5% of allegations are false” is pretty meaningless.
If I am the dean I reserve the right to expel any students who are found to have committed rape, even if it was off-campus. We might not be able to investigate as effectively if the rape takes place at a third-party who refuses to comply with our people, and there’s nothing the university can do about that. But if we’re talking about frat houses we can write it into the charters that they are required to comply with our investigations or lose the fraternity.
~Max
I agree. Just like any other organization, the university can have rules for its members. It would be like saying that your local Elks Club cannot expel a member who murdered his wife because he did so off the Elks’ property and the Elks should only police stuff that occurred inside the lodge.
Urbanredneck may have had a point about the apartment, though. Let’s say I’m the dean and a student comes to me and accuses another student of raping her at his off-campus apartment. She says nobody knows she was there and otherwise refuses to consent to any evidence or municipal police involvement. The question I’m wondering about is whether we, the university, should have the right to force the accused to let us search his home for evidence.
Legally we could try to write it into the enrollment contract - if you attend our university and live within X miles, you have to let us search your home whenever we want. That might be found unconscionable, since students don’t really have any bargaining power and we wouldn’t be liable for the crime anyways. Such an intrusion would only be justified by claiming that it makes all of our students safer, but it would be highly inconsistent since we don’t investigate other crimes committed off-campus in private establishments. Just imagine the headlines… “Florida man asks for totalitarian school policy” “Warrantless searches backed by threat of expulsion” “Students protest: we have rights”
Contrast with frat houses which are actually affiliated with the campus and probably receive title IX funding.
I’m leaning heavily towards telling the girl that a complete investigation will require cooperation with municipal authorities who have warrant powers, and that as the case stands we don’t have enough evidence to act.
~Max
A university Title IX investigation is independent of a criminal investigation. If the student reports to the police, the university must still conduct its investigation. It cannot make its investigation in any way dependent on a student filing a police report. The investigation consists of:
•gathering information, including social media posts, cell phone records, documents, video recordings, etc.
•interviewing the victim and the alleged assailant
•interviewing any potential witnesses*
It does NOT include searching an off-campus apartment. Nor can the university force students to waive their Fourth Amendment rights . On- or off-campus, neither a university nor anyone else can search a student’s resident without a search warrant, which requires probable cause.
The burden of proof for a university investigation is lower than it is for a criminal investigation. It’s important not to confuse the two.
*The OP says there are no witnesses, but the investigation would determine that, not the student.
I’m a student employee at a public university (I work in recycling). At the state level I’m required to report* any instances of child abuse or neglect (even if I only suspect it).
In addition to that, at the university level, I’m required to report* any instances of physical or sexual assault, harassment, or discrimination that I am made aware of.
Both of these apply both on and off campus if they involve university-affiliated persons (students, teachers, employees, etc). In the case of child abuse, the person(s) involved do not matter.
This example of mandatory reporting may help shed light on how at least my university would respond to off-campus incidents like the one described by Max S.
*Report to appropriate authority. For example, call 9-1-1 if it’s an emergency, state human services if it’s child abuse, or relevant university department if it’s harassment or discrimination.