What makes you think it isn’t? You don’t know any college-aged women? I can’t imagine that if you knew even a few you could possibly be unaware of this phenomenon.
You miss the crucial distinction between a DUI and sex - the presence of another actor. In a DUI or murder situation, the drunk is the person who causes all the events - the drunk chooses to drink and the drunk chooses to get behind the wheel/pull the trigger.
OTOH, in the rape situation, there is another actor that causes events to occur - the other actor chooses to take advantage of the drunk’s mental state.
Look at this analogy - it’s your birthday and you go out partying. You’re three sheets to the wind when your buddy presents you with a contract giving him your house in exchange for a peppercorn (lawyers and law students may knowingly chuckle now ;)) and gets you to sign it. Morally or legally, do you consider that contract valid?
Remember, in both situations the key is the actions of the perpetrator, not the victim. In the DUI situation the key is that the perpetrator chose to get drunk then chose to drive. In the rape situation, the key is that the perpetrator chose to have sex with someone he/she knew was not coherent.
Sua
We hear about the unusual, not the normal.
The fact that you have heard about one or two instances demonstrates nothing about how often the scenario occurs, because it provides no comparative data. What you would have to know is (a) how often teenage girls in your area drink to the point of unconsciousness over a given time period and (b) how often those unconscious girls are sexually abused.
If your 1-2 instances were out of a total of five girls who passed out over the time period in question, then yeah, it’s not unusual. If your 1-2 instances were out of a total of 500 girls who passed out, it qualifies as unusual. And I’m guessing that 500 is the more likely figure.
Due to our innumeracy, we tend to overestimate the odds of an event occurring. Say 20% of women are victims of date rape in their lives (I don’t know the actual number). A scary number, but that same number also means that the odds of a women being the victim of date rape on a particular night are vanishingly small. Think of how many social interactions a woman has with males in her life. Under the stat I’ve given you, one in five women will be date-raped once in the course of hundreds to thousands of social interactions over their lives. The odds that a particular woman will become a victim on a particular evening is tiny.
Sua
I already stated above that taking advantage of soemone drunk is seedy. But I disagree this the idea that in most case, the situation is of someone “taking advantage” of someone else.
I don’t accept that as a valid analogy. The equivalent of this example would be someone making you sign a paper stating that you agree to have sex with him the next day, and turning up the following day (when you’re sober and don’t want anymore to have sex with him) and enforcing the “contract”.
In the case of drunk sex, the whole act is done with the agreement of the supposed victim. She doesn’t merely consent to have sex, she engages in it and participates willingly. She doesn’t only agree with something without realizing the consequences like in your example. The consequences immediatly follow and she’s a participating actor. The only issue is that on the following day she thinks she shouldn’t have done that. That’s fine, but she nevertheless did. I would add that a drunk guy is as likely to regret having slept with a girl on the following day and nobody would call that a rape.
A second flaw in your analogy is that it includes inequal terms : peppercorn (whatever that might be) against a house. In the case of sex, there’s no inequal term. The girl has sex with the guy and the guy has sex with the girl. That’s a perfectly equal deal.
What bothers me in this debate are the two implicit assumption :
-Sex is something extremely special and can’t be compared with any other stupid thing one might do when drunk. I totally disagree. You could decide to have sex with someone when drunk, or to walk on the roof of a 6 storey building, or find it would be fun to trash your own house. Trying to put the blame on someone else when you realize later it was stupid doesn’t cut it, IMO. Sex is an everyday occurence, plenty of people regret having had sex with someone else for various reasons, and not necessarily because they were drunk. Plenty of people regret having done a lot of things for various reasons. Having sex while drunk is merely one of these numerous, extremely common mistakes, which sometimes have very serious consequences, people do every day. It doesn’t deserve a special treatment.
-Second assumption : the girl is a victim of a cold-hearted and mischievoius guy. Nope. She was drunk, she lusted after someone who lusted after her, both were in agreement about what they wanted to do, and they acted upon their desires. That’s perfectly fine. The desire could have vanished on the following morning, but still she did exactly what she wanted to do at that moment, she gave what she wanted to give and received what she wanted to receive. Nothing was “taken” from her. I remind that sex involves the participation of (at least) two people, and usually benefits both. There seem to be some ugly underlying assumption that only the guys get something out of sex, hence that a girl who made a poor choice was somewhat “stolen”, has had something taken from her without having receiving anything. It doesn’t work this way. She had sex, she didn’t lost sex.
Of course, there could be situations which are clearly abuse (the extreme case being the supposedly “very common” passed out girl raped by a guy while unconscious). But these are extreme cases. The usual situation would be a girl and guy who are both drunk to some extent, are uninhibited as a result and lust after each other. If you assume that sleeping with someone drunk is a rape, there would be as much guys raped by girls as girls raped by guys.
A question : is your desire or will to do something less real when you’re not coherent? If you’re drunk and want, say, to have a walk on the beach, could you state that actually you didn’t want to have a walk? If you want to play tennis when you’re drunk, could you say that actually you weren’t willing to play tennis? If I go for a walk with you on the beach, could you state that actually I forced you to go to the beach with me, since you weren’t coherent?
Why would it be different concerning sex? My take is that it’s not different. You actually, and really wanted to have sex, whether you were coherent or not. There’s no lack of consent.
I think that part of the issue (apart the “women are poor victims and men are ugly rapists” concept) is also that a lot of people perceive sex as being inherently bad by default (i.e. bad except is some specific circumstances), hence that people must be protected from sex much more than from other activities they engage in. I plainly disagree.
Here’s a question I desperately need an answer to… If a person has already been drinking alcohol and someone makes them take say 2 kolonopin even though this person has already said “NO” is the person responsible for what they did as a result of the two being mixed?
“Makes them take?”
ok he said he did not want them, he was still in shock from losing his house. his mother, age 68 who’s pills they were, forced two between his closed lips and waited there while he swallowed
he doesnt remember anything past that, but is now sitting in jail on trumped up charges from her and the police that purposely instigated him that night. However, I remember and saw everything. He was talked into a plea agreement by the DA before the preliminary hearing because the DA did not want me taking the stand.
Yeah, you need to be asking professional legal counsel, not a message board.
yeah dont I know it!
It’s not really his problem though. His buddy is the one who needs to talk to a lawyer.
And presumably has, if only a PD.
Ghostwriter913, no one is going to be able to answer your question but a trained lawyer with knowledge of the case. In the interest of not having this thread running off into oblivion and not inviting various people with nasty ideas of fun to begin tormenting you, I am closing this very old thread.