You’re remembering correctly.
But I don’t play politics with science, and that study is flawed. About the only thing we can take from it is (cliche warning) more studies are needed.
To echo camille with a “me too.” Creating a bad study to create a desired conclusion demeans science. I would guess that the conclusions mostly are likely correct … but this study is crap. My comments regarding the study are not about a pre-existing socio-cultural belief but about the science. (My separate comments about expulsion based on some undescribed “lesser standard” of evidence are socio-cultural belief based however.)
Not so sure that “more studies are needed” though, just some honest critical analysis of what we have. The CDC report I linked to, based off of an analysis of complete interviews obtained from 16,507 adults in the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS), provides plenty of quality evidence for how significant the issue is, and again, not just for or even particularly for young women in a college environment. And men are not immune from victimization either: nearly one in ten women have been raped (including completed forced penetration, attempted forced penetration, or alcohol/drug facilitated completed penetration) and about one in 45 men have been made to penetrate an intimate partner. Also an “estimated 16.9% of women and 8.0% of men have experienced sexual violence other than rape.” The risk is greater for bisexual women and for women the risk is clearly linear with the greatest risk for the lowest income groups and for those experiencing housing and food insecurity. And again other high quality studies that I have linked to come up with similar numbers which also further demonstrate that the risk overall is less for women in college but mostly correlates with demographic features.
Point being that while I want my daughter in a safe environment when she goes off to college in a few more years, I also want her safe where ever she may be, and I want others’ daughters, who may not go to college, safe too. They are not now. The CDC came to the following conclusion about reducing the significant public health burden of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV):
My personal political agenda is thus informed by what the data actually is. One in ten for rape is a horrible and frightening number and misrepresenting college as a uniquely dangerous environment distracts from creating more effective interventions for the real issue, the significant risk of sexual violence throughout our society, especially for younger and even more so less privileged younger women.
“The preponderance of the evidence” is the same standard of proof that applies in almost any civil trial. It means “more likely than not” or a probability of greater than 50%.
I’ll give you a real life scenario, though not a rape: OJ was acquitted on a criminal murder charge, but lost a civil action against him based on the same facts.
What are you talking about? I don’t care if you’re not a lawyer, but if you don’t understand what a burden of proof is, you should stop throwing around your wild-ass theories about them.
The rest of the country generally doesn’t have to conform to a student code of conduct, so this is irrelevant.
To return to the point I was making before, “significant doubt” is a drastic overstatement of what’s required to avoid a conviction; any reasonable doubt is what you mean to say. So, in the cases you’re talking about, if there is anything about the case that would make a reasonable person say “hmm, I guess I’m not certain about this” before they acted on a matter of great importance, then a jury can’t convict. They get a big lecture from the judge right before they deliberate about how important it is that they understand this. Innocent until proven guilty in the criminal context is a gigantic barrier to conviction, and for good reason.
(When I did criminal work, I used to say to the jury hey guys, think about what the judge is saying to you – if there’s enough here that it would make you hesitate before acting, that’s reasonable doubt! If it would be enough to make you take one second and say “… huh”, then that’s it, right there! That is a really really high standard they have to meet to prove this case!)
Preponderance means more likely than not. I’m not sure what sort of hypothetical example you think is going to illustrate this point better than the abstract, but in every case you start with zero evidence. Everything you hear, if it’s relevant, moves the needle in one direction or another. If you hear enough credible evidence, at some point you no longer have reasonable doubt that the thing happened. Just before that point, you do have reasonable doubt. So any case that gets to the point of almost, but not quite, beyond a reasonable doubt is an example that fits into this space. I mean, you’re an intelligent person, so the concepts of something being “probable” vs. “very probable” vs. “extremely probable” don’t need to be explained to you. A criminal conviction only happens when you’re all the way up past very probable to “happened beyond a reasonable doubt.”
So this could be any fact pattern you like; it’s an evidentiary standard, not a blueprint. Guy talks to a woman at a bar who he’s had drinks with before, and they’ve fooled around a little on those occasions. She texts her friend around the same time that she’s feeling dizzy and the gross guy from a couple weeks ago is there. She says she doesn’t remember what happens the rest of the night and doesn’t remember agreeing to go anywhere with him, but she gets a rape kit, and she had sex with the guy. The bartender saw them leaving and she seemed out of it. He testifies that they went home, she got on top of him, they had sex. She goes into work the next morning and her coworkers report that she seemed extremely groggy and hung over, but her bar tab was two glasses of wine. Beyond a reasonable doubt? More likely than not that he took advantage of her?
Well, no it doesn’t. That’s just an entirely unsupportable thing to say. You’ve even acknowledged above that you know there’s a burden of proof.
Going back to this idea that colleges shouldn’t be in the business of adjudicating guilt for serious crimes: it’s impossible to believe that the people saying this have thought it through. What you are effectively arguing is that colleges should only be able to discipline students for tiny infractions. If a student does something really awful, he/she would essentially be untouchable. Stole a soda from the cafeteria? Loss of parking privileges! Raped another student? Well, you haven’t been convicted of anything, so off you go!
Don’t care about about OJ, not material to this discussion. I am asking for a specific set of hypothetical facts that would fit your sufficient to warrant expulsion but not enough to likely convict on rape, specifically what sort of facts would meet your lesser standard. You don’t want to give one, fine.
Greater than 50%? So you’d expel someone with the significant lifetime consequences of that when there is in your mind (counting any pre-existing biases you may have) a just a hair’s breadth under a coin flip that they are indeed not guilty of the allegation made, nearly a 50% chance they did nothing wrong. Okay.
Clear enough now and that is, to me, way fucked up.
Still also no answer as to whether or not in your college enforce a perceived hair’s breadth more than 50% chance of guilt and a hair’s breadth less of nothing done wrong with expulsion includes the accused being protected from re-victimization and thus no questioning the accuser’s story by an advocate for the accused.
All of the country is subject to the laws of the country which supersede colleges’ “Rules of Conduct.” The bigger issue is what colleges shield from societal enforcement and protect law-breaking students from quite frankly as local law enforcement often lets the college handle things themselves, not only for drug dealing (up to significant points) and significant other criminal misbehaviors, but for rape. Yeah colleges “Rules of Conduct” seem to in practice mean that we will protect you from the real world consequences of breaking laws as much as we can.
If we are confident someone is guilty of rape, more than a best guess we suspect did it, you know how football and lacrosse players are, then that someone should be in jail and punished by society, yes reasonably certain Jimmy. Rape is not a code of college student conduct issue; it is a societal issue.
If I understand you correctly RNATB, and I may not be as you have so far not spelled it out, you’d further facilitate the current - “You are telling us you were raped? Don’t go to the police. Don’t get a rape kit. That’s a difficult experience, they will question you about it, want to collect evidence, and the court system will make you testify and well that is traumatic. We’ll take care of it as a college discipline issue. (And under the rug.)”
The only possible results of that? True rapists are more likely kept in the public sphere, putting other women at risk, maybe and maybe not at that college, but somewhere, and those who are actually not guilty (up to nearly half of those accused by your preponderance standard) have their lives significantly damaged.
Yeah. That is major league fucked up.
Sorry, the solution to being 50.1% confident that someone is guilty and 49.9% thinking they are not is not to punish everyone with 10% level of consequence what a guilty person should incur.
What? No. Colleges and law enforcement should be working in parallel. All crimes should be referred for law enforcement investigation. Colleges should not be shielding students. I don’t know where you got any of that.
Yes. Good. I’m glad you recognize that there’s nothing statistically improper about extrapolating from a small sample to a general population, and that the focus of your criticism should instead be whether the sampled population is appropriately representative.
So far, you haven’t offered any reason for why you think UMass is analogous to Utah in your comparison. Someone else pointed out that it is principally a commuter school. Do you believe more commuters are rapists?
I’m going to suggest two things here. The first is that you don’t know enough about sexual assault victims, perpetrators and cases, based on your characterization of universities pressuring them not to go to police. They don’t want to go to the police. The police are unhelpful to them in many cases. You have the cause and effect reversed. Universities are putting these measures in place to address the problem that is sexual assault victims who don’t report because they don’t get any help.
The second is that, with all due respect, you sound like you’re arguing based on emotions rather than reason here. I find it hard to believe that you actually think someone should be in jail where we are “reasonably confident” they’ve committed a crime. I don’t think you are actually having trouble, conceptually, with the idea that “beyond a reasonable doubt” is a really high bar, and that something less than that bar makes obvious sense in non-criminal contexts like employer and academic investigations. It seems to me like you want it to be true that universities have no good reason to take action on sexual assault complaints, so you’re advocating a frankly horrible notion about what criminal justice should look like, even though you know it would be horrible.
From reality.
It’s why the McCaskill bill specifically bars investigations to be run by the school’s athletic department.
Should be working together but are not. Schools more often than not do not want to get police involved in what happens on campus and many local police districts keep a hands off policy unless asked to be come involved. Schools protect students from the law within their bubble and are not held to standards that others are held to.
What do you think would happen to anyone else who was known to be knowingly looking the other way while those under legal drinking age binge drank and imbibed and sold a variety of illegal drugs on their property? Hell, schools even discussing actually trying to limit the breaking of alcohol and drug laws causes an uproar not only among students but among alums and even many parents … illegally getting shitfaced is a right man!
This from a bit encouraging the ability to report anonymously and to not necessarily involve the police:
Note: she was told to not go to the police. And she had already been reluctant to do so.
I am not sure I completely agree with the opposite perspective expressed in a recent Chicago Tribune editorial but I think it is better than facilitating and encouraging keeping the police out of it.
Let me re-emphasize that point: providing emotional and psychological support to presumed victims should be something colleges put a huge amount of resource to. Prevention programs, actually beginning in High School, make sense. (I’d love to see some studies to document efficacy too.) They should not be impeding law enforcement even with the best of intentions (which I do not believe they always have) or as an unintended consequence, they should not be playing CSI:Campus Police, they should not be providing a path that disables due process and rights for someone who is accused.
Hey, if you want Alexandra Brodsky’s opinion on whether or not campus sexual assault should be left to the police, maybe you could check out her piece entitled “No, We Can’t Just Leave College Sexual Assault to the Police” and see if she says anything about it in there.
I meant where did you get the idea that I am in favor of that?
You know the Rolling Stone story was false, correct? She says nothing about solutions. There is really no way to mete out justice without discovering a preponderance of evidence. And that takes time. The rights of the accused must also be protected to insure that the falsely accused arent damaged any more than they already have been.
That doesn’t have a whole lot to do with DSeid quoting her in support of the opposite of her opinion.
OK. She seemed to want to argue that students who are accused of sexual assault should be expelled but she doesnt seem to want to say it explicitly. There are no good solutions to this situation.
Thanks for the link. What does she say?
Mostly what she wrote there was about how universities protect the alleged assailant and mainly in regard to teacher sexual harassment.
How they fail to provide the social, emotional, and psychological support the presumed victims need deserve from them in their desire to keep things under the rug.
Extremely consistent with her having been told by the university to not report her own rape to the police, reinforcing her hesitation to do that which would have gotten who she knew was a rapist out of society and prevented the rapist from harming the next woman in line, be that a woman on campus or not.
I continue to agree that the schools have an obligation to provide support to victims in every case and that the schools should strongly encourage getting the police involved in alleged incidents very early on in every case and not be in the business of trying be all of investigator, judge, jury, prosecution and defense teams, and executioner, regarding accusations of serious crimes that fall under state and/or federal jurisdictions and deserve their expertise, not amateur hour. This is not deciding if an unattributed quote is plagiarism or what should happen to those caught pranking the school mascot.
No, merely that expulsion is a lesser sanction than conviction/imprisonment, and there is no reason why the same high standard should be required.
This is like OJ being acquitted of murder but held liable in the civil lawsuit.
As for “what sort of evidence” should be sufficient, that’s a matter of academic administrative policy, not law, and it is something for the colleges to work out, whether separately or collectively.
Really Jimmy did you read past the headline at all? She exactly confirms that the point I was making with more examples.
RNATB, I get the idea from lack of response to what kind of due process there should be, if any, and your statement that believing that there is anything more than a 50% chance of guilt warrants expulsion.
Did I read past the headline? Yes. I didn’t just learn about this for the first time today. Do you think I was just randomly googling people’s names from your links, or do you think I was already familiar with what her position is on Title IX and police involvement with campus sexual assaults?
It’s beginning to look like the question here is whether you really know what your point is.
Since most colleges and universities are run by the government and the rest get money from the government they will likely have to follow laws governing due process to anyone they try to expel. If they make rules that are too draconian they also run the risk of driving students away. Its a fine balance.