'll.
That is one of the incredibly rare circumstances where a false accusation resulted in a conviction.
Firstly, it is very common that there are cases where there’s a very large amount of circumstantial evidence that the rape did in fact occur, just not quite enough to get a conviction, or the state fails to get a conviction because of whatever vagary of the legal system. We should have absolutely no problem behaving as if the rape did occur in those cases.
More generally, though, yes it would be very nice if we could all be evenhandedly agnostic when the situation truly is he-said-she-said, but unfortunately that’s not the way it actually goes in the real world. People are far more willing to believe that women made up an accusation for whatever bizarre reasons (jealousy, attention-seeking, etc) than that a rapist might in fact be guilty and there’s simply not enough to convict.
I would agree with that in the, again, extremely rare situation where a false accusation results in a conviction. In the more usual case where the accusation goes nowhere, people are usually willing to say “well nothing was proved…” about the rapist while characterizing the accuser as some sort of crazy person.
The other thing with the statistics are that even though 5-10% of accusations might be false, only a tiny fraction of real rapes even make it that far. We should be encouraging more victims to report rapes and both society and the justice system’s excessive skepticism of accusations is the major detriment to that. Innocent until proven guilty should certainly be the standard in the courtroom, but the police and society should assume rape victims are telling the truth by default unless some compelling evidence to the contrary emerges.
Cite?
Other people said the same things in previous threads, and it’s dumb. You are effectively saying that the worst offenses should get the least attention.
Yes to it being sexual assault to the extent that the details are exactly as she remembered and conveyed them.
That doesn’t even take an understanding of sexual assault like some college policies where every contact basically requires explicit and verbalized consent each and every time even in an existing relationship. There wasn’t a whole lot of reason to believe there was implied consent at the point of the first contact. We could create hypotheticals and go way down the rabbit hole about not having a clear answer before the first contact. We don’t need to. He didn’t stop after the initial contact. She clearly did not give consent and tried to end the contact. He didn’t let go at that point until she actively pushed away. He got no for an answer and ignored it. That’s sexual assault.
Stipulating that your interpretation of NY’s legal code is accurate, there’s a third way of looking at the phrase “sexual assault.” It can be looked at:
- According to statutory definition, which I’ve stipulated you’re correct that it doesn’t meet.
- According to common definition, which I’ll now stipulate (emphasizing the provisional nature of stipulation) that it doesn’t meet.
- According to Columbia’s definition, which is, according to the OP, “Any intentional sexual touching, however slight, with any object without a person’s consent.” If this definition is the one Columbia’s code of conduct includes, it strikes me as the most relevant definition for the phrase, and a definition met by the behavior in this incident.
Okay, we have a few questions here.
Let’s start with the easy one- did this situation happen as described? The answer to that is that we don’t know. We just don’t know. Fine.
Next question- is it okay to keep touching someone who told you to stop touching them (barring cases where you are stopping them from walking into an oncoming car or something)? This seems pretty obvious to me. Someone tell you to stop touching them-- you stop touching them. Why people choose this particular hill to die on, I don’t know. People-- why do you want to touch people who don’t want to be touched by you? Why is this right so important?
A related question- is it illegal to keep touching someone who told you to stop touching them? This probably varies by location, but I’m guessing in most places it is.
Finally-- is vigilantism okay in cases where the traditional justice system doesn’t work? This is a big qustion, few good answers.
+1
Actual courts have a hard enough time with this shit.
Putting administrators in charge is just recipe for disaster.
GreasyJack, I asked this before, but I’ll ask it again, to see if you’ll answer it:
Suppose the accuser is wrong, and the accused is innocent.
In that case, isn’t the accuser the victimizer, and the accused the victim?
If you err on the side of victims, whose side do you err on then?
https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/ExonerationsRaceByCrime.aspx
The rape conviction rate is about 5-6 times higher than the murder conviction rate, but there have been far fewer exonerations. That’s because usually when there’s a dead body, there’s a lot of pressure to charge someone with a crime but there isn’t really a huge amount of pressure to prosecute rapes unless there’s a pretty rock-solid case. Usually a victim’s say-so and no other compelling evidence isn’t going to end up with a case going forward so situations in which a false accusation sticks to the point of winning a conviction are pretty rare. (Of course one of the issues there is that prosecuting African-Americans on iffy rape cases is a lot more common, hence the much larger number of AA exonerations for rape.)
This wasn’t a situation with just the absence of consent. The woman in the OP says she told the man no and asked him to let her go, which he did not do. This was clear nonconsent.
Holding a woman after she’s told you to let her go is not an error in reading body language and non-verbal cues.
In America power is pretty much spread out amongst the upper class kids that get into Columbia University. We are talking about people, including myself, that live lives of incredible pleasure and freedom.
No, they should get the most attention. What’s dumb is thinking a Columbia kangaroo court counts as “most attention” for a criminal matter. Colleges should have a legal (and we can regulate this) requirement to pass on criminal issues to police, and remove pointless college courts from the process.
In the case of a real rapist, a Columbia court cannot provide any punishment close to serious enough–because it cannot sentence a person to prison. In the case of an innocently accused person, it lacks key protections when the matter is one that the real court system (with far more resources) requires a lengthy and elaborate trial process to adjudicate and the punishment is far too harsh given how important college education is. Colleges should not be allowed to operate as and should not be seen as private clubs where their actions are no different from Jim Bob getting kicked outta the Moose Lodge.
No, it’s not sexual assault. By your definition a pick pocket is also committing sexual assault when he grabs a wallet out of your back pocket, or a pushy salesman who shakes you hand when you’d rather he didn’t. You do not know what sexual assault means, and the words you’re using to try and define it turn it into a term so stupid it lacks any reason for existing at all.
I can’t even stipulate that under Columbia’s definition the alleged activity would be sexual assault, because I think it’d be difficult in any hearing body following normative judicial processes to demonstrate that all touching is sexual, which is roughly the bar required for the allegations to meet that definition. Criminal codes about unwanted sexual touching are general specific in text that it means genital or sexual areas of the body, and case law usually helps fill in any ambiguity such that largely most of us would “get” what is meant by these terms. The concept of a form of sexual assault which encompasses no unwanted touching of genital/intimate areas, let alone no penetration etc is hard to believe reasonable.
This certainly tells me exactly how much respect to have for the opinions of MrDible. Not that I had a lot before.
You only have her take on it. It’s easy to imagine a scenario where they had been talking in the living room, touched a bit, exchanged some glances. He thought (obviously he was wrong) they had something going, so he comes to her room and kisses her. Perhaps she says no a little feebly which doesn’t really sound like no (“Hey, no, come on, let’s go back downstairs”). But when she did it a little more forcefully by pushing him away he got the message.
The problem is that there are a very large group of girls who expect and want the man to take initiative, be pushy, forward, domineering. That does not include rape, but it may very well include following her into her room, closing the door, brushing off weak protests.
I didn’t miss the first, and I did miss the second.
One case isn’t going to change the general trend, though. Orders of magnitude more rapists get away with it than ever even get falsely accused, much less have their lives ruined by the accusation (which isn’t a forgone conclusion for every rape accusation by any means)
Did you really think social class was the unequal power dynamic I was talking about?
:rolleyes: Coming from you, and who you listen to, I’ll take that as a compliment.
This is where you lose the argument. If someone says “no” or “stop”, however “feebly”, there is no reason- at all- not to stop and reassess. Why would you ever keep going when someone just said they don’t want you to touch them?
The apologists claim to be frustrated by ambiguous signals. But what we are advocating for is making things LESS ambiguous. No means no. Stop means stop. It’s really straightforward.
I just don’t see it translating very well into the reality of human attraction and sexuality. And I think what drives this more than anything is female sexuality. What men want is secondary, when being ravished/domineered appears to be the number one female sexual desire. Men learn to brush off weak protests because women teach them through experience that that is what they want and desire.
You can try to teach girls to be attracted to other things, but I don’t think you’ll have much success. It’s also tweaking with some fairly fundamental human instincts one should probably be more than a little vary messing around with.