mate… 
They have to be, because…
Postal Police officers are just your run-of-the-mill postal facility patrol. It’s the Postal Inspectors who are elite federal law enforcement agents. They are 1811 classified, so on par with FBI, DEA, and ATF Special Agents.
I’m skipping a lot of this thread because it’s upsetting and I don’t want to know the details. I just wanted to say that when you change the definition of rape to include being forced to penetrate, a surprisingly high percentage of men report having experienced this, usually while incapacitated by alcohol. It seems likely to me that they don’t register these experiences as sexual assault. This is true of both men and women. If you ask a woman on an anonymous survey if she’s ever been sexually assaulted, she is less likely to say yes than if you ask if she’s ever been forcibly touched, undressed, digitally penetrated, etc. People tend to underreport these things on surveys if you don’t ask specific questions.
I think there are aspects of sexual assault that affect women differently than they affect men. While I can describe in detail all the ways women survivors are treated badly, I don’t even know how to begin to conclude that it’s objectively worse for women because men overwhelmingly do not talk about it. If these surveys are true, we are missing a huge piece of what sexual assault looks like in the United States.
I appreciate the OP’s outrage if not the extreme conclusions. My life is full of good men. I absolve you of guilt for feeling up your girlfriend or whatever. If she had enthusiastic sex with you, good sign.
While men do need to check in more, a lot of our prevention education programs emphasize teaching bystanders safe intervention skills and teaching women to be assertive about what they do and don’t want. That’s another piece of this - we, women, have both a heavy socialization and probably primal instinct to get along and not cause trouble. This creates real problems in unwanted sexual situations. Compounding matters, society makes us doubt the validity of our own experiences, often while we are in the process of having them. Our denial about what is happening starts in the moment of the assault. So I think a girl could benefit from the messaging that actually her instincts are correct, she does not have to be nice, she needs to get the hell out of dodge by any means necessary and is well within her rights to tell anyone she wants what happened.
That’s ideally something that happens long before an assault takes place. You can’t always stop an assault but you can prevent a lot of psychological damage by teaching people how to think about these things when they do happen, and giving them resources for figuring out what to do next.
Even aside from the speed of response, calling two entities is better than just one, because it makes it less possible for one LE entity to ‘sweep under the rug’ something it finds inconvenient.
The victim will have accomplished putting something on the record. That might make a difference if, say, a campus security force has an orientation toward ‘protecting the university,’ or an individual employed by LE has an orientation toward ‘not ruining the future of Promising Young Men.’
(Or ‘promising young women’ in a case of female(s) being the accused perpetrators, of course.)
This is true. I also think it would help everyone if we taught kids how to initiate and consent to sexual activity. I look at my square dance example. There’s a lot of close contact. We have very few incidents of dancers being forced to do uncomfortable things – many fewer than most square dance groups – because we give everyone clear rules to follow. (A lot of the “uncomfortable things” that happen in square dancing are “he wrenched my arm”, “she held my hand in a death grip and it was hard to escape when i needed to”. Not just, “he felt me up”, although that can happen, too.) We also have more swinging and twirling and other flourishes, because everyone knows how initiate those moves initiate those moves in “safe” ways. We’re even better at initiating extra contact with people in other venues, because a lot of it is pretty obvious, when it’s on front of you.
If everyone is on the same page, we can reasonably move on to whether there’s a better page to be on. But if no one knows “the rules”, then there’s going to be a certain amount of misunderstandings and some hurt.
And if everyone knew the same rules, even if they were imperfect rules, some of those 50 guys invited to abuse that girl might have thought, " hey… That’s a clear and obvious violation of the rules we all talked about. Maybe i ought to do something."
Eh, injuries at phys ed classes tend to be along the lines of, “he slipped, and accidentally hit something hard enough to cause damage”. Not anything that anyone is likely to try to do cover up. Although, i guess I’ve never had an incident where i called anyone for help. We once had a woman (who wasn’t a student, our students dance with community members, too) fall and sprain her ankle near the end of the evening. At her request, I took her to urgent care after the dance. (Because i had a car.) That’s the worst injury i can remember.
I have no idea what the students are told to do if someone assaults them.
As it turned out, she did and we had a good six-month relationship, but in retrospect, or if I had to re-enter the dating world, I would certainly ask/confirm from now on.
I think that, in not asking, and relying on unspoken “signals”, one could perceive consent that actually isn’t there.