By Joy Pullmann
Tuesday, July 18, 2017
The Trump administration is reconsidering Obama-era
sexual assault regulations that have forced campus tribunals to put their
finger on the scale for accusers, resulting in students using tribunals for
score-settling instead of justice. Predictably, the victimhood brigade is
calling concerns for equality, accuracy, and equal treatment under the laws
“rape apology,” polarizing any reality-based discussion of these endemic
problems. They even got acting Office of Civil Rights head Candice Jackson to
issue an apology for making an accurate generalization.
Jackson, the acting head of the
civil rights office, told The New York Times that 90 percent of cases ‘fall
into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up, and six months later I
found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our
last sleeping together was not quite right.’
Later, in a written apology,
Jackson said that what she said was ‘flippant, and I am sorry.’
‘As a survivor of rape myself, I
would never seek to diminish anyone’s experience,’ the apology said. ‘My words
in the New York Times poorly characterized the conversations I’ve had with
countless groups of advocates … All sexual harassment and sexual assault must
be taken seriously — which has always been my position and will always be the
position of this Department.’
Monday, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington), a bitter foe of
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, used the occasion to call for Jackson’s head.
Immediately
Believing All Accusers Is Not Justice
If you, like me, are wondering how it can be
“insensitive” and “egregious” to give some perspective on the massively hyped
sexual atmosphere on college campuses, let’s recall the imprudent rhetoric that
fuels this system that eviscerates “innocent until proven guilty” and due
process as key fundamentals to the American system of law. We are literally
told that wanting accused rapists to be proven guilty before being punished is making apologies for rapists. Hillary
Clinton infamously tweeted this party line:
The question, of course, is how do we know a person is actually a survivor of sexual assault,
not someone who during an encounter consented and participated, then later
faced regrets? Well, it turns out we have a justice system precisely to sort
the answers to questions like this concerning a wide variety of objectionable
human encounters. I know from firsthand experience that our justice system
often does not deliver justice. But it is far
better-suited to investigating and prosecuting felonies than a bunch of college
students and administrators.
For one thing, as Jackson pointed out in her NYT
interview, “We have a justice system where nobody demands that the system
itself be weighted in favor of a plaintiff. In principle, there is no reason to
depart from setting up a Title IX discipline process on campus that is anything
other than fairly balanced and doesn’t prejudge and weight the system in favor
of a finding. We don’t do that in our court system, our criminal justice
system, and I see no reason why we would want to do it in a campus system
either.”
In the U.S. justice system, people are innocent until
proven guilty, allowed to present evidence supporting their case, allowed to
defend themselves and hire defense help, allowed to face their accusers and
question their testimony, not allowed to be prosecuted twice for the same
crime, and can only be convicted on clear and convincing evidence being
provided of their crime. These are all civil rights bundled into the concept of
“due process,” and none is available to those on campus accused of one of the
most serious crimes a person can perpetrate.
“[T]ypically the accusee doesn’t know the precise
charges, doesn’t know what the evidence is, and can’t confront witnesses,”
writes Northwestern professor (and card-carrying feminist) Laura Kipnis in her
recent book, “Unwanted Advances.” This is a violation of their rights as U.S. citizens.
There can be no excuse or argument for abrogating Americans’ rights in order to
give feminist hatemongers excuses to exploit victims of sex crimes for
fundraising and political power. Ensuring due process for all those assaulted and charged of assault is key to
prosecuting rapists, not an obstacle to that righteous pursuit.
What Is Rape? The
Definitions Matter
Let’s be very clear. Rape is a heinous crime. I would
countenance the death penalty for convicted rapists, as well as castration. But
forcible penetration is simply not
the same thing as, say, “He kissed me and I didn’t want him to,” or “I thought
I wanted to have sex at the time, but I was drunk then and after I was sober
knew that had been a terrible decision.” Primarily, that’s because neither of
these scenarios includes forced sex, which is the definition of rape.
Secondarily, there are further reasons.
Sexual interaction is largely nonverbal. Very often
consent is requested and given without any words used or needed, and that means
the person who initiates may make an unwelcome advance. An initial unwelcome
advance is not assault, it’s a request
for consent — unless the person doing it refuses to take no for a response
or ignored verbal or nonverbal rejection in making the advance. Bypassing
rejection is when it becomes assault, and there are levels to assault. Every
sane person realizes that an unwanted kiss, while unpleasant and objectionable,
is simply not the same as a man holding you down while forcing himself inside
you.
When both parties are drunk, it’s also unfair to blame
either one for a sexual encounter that later one or both decide was a poor
decision. At the time, they agreed, or thought they both agreed, and you simply
can’t erase history. It’s not fair to consent to an interaction then, once that
interaction is completed, attempt to change its terms. What’s done is done. The
person who attempts to change the terms after the fact is attempting to cheat
the other. “Please note that this makes anyone who’s ever had sex a potential
rapist,” Kipnis also notes.
Definitions matter because a rapist deserves to face
serious and lifelong consequences for his or her crime. But it is horribly
unjust to give these same serious, lifelong consequences to someone who has not
committed this crime. Expanding the definition necessarily dilutes the
punishments applied to those who fit in this category, because it is obviously
unjust (to all but moral knuckle-draggers) to apply the same punishment to a
groper and to a rapist. The more people are called and judged as rapists whose
offenses do not fit that term, the less rape victims will be able to secure
justice.
This is precisely what we see in campus tribunals. The
worst a college can do to an offending student is expel him with a black mark
on his record. Is that really a just punishment for a rapist? Hell, no! What
kind of misogynist thinks such a degrading, trivializing thing about a woman’s
virtue? A rapist deserves far worse than having to now get through community
college to move on with his life. Campus courts simply cannot provide justice for victims, and it’s utterly insulting to
say that getting one’s attacker expelled is a fitting consequence for a crime
of this magnitude.
Regret Over Bad
Decisions Doesn’t Prove Rape
Now, let’s get into some data about campus sexual
assault, because it shows that most of what is happening on campuses is simply
not rape, which reinforces Jackson’s characterization. Really what’s mostly
going on is “teenagers doing horribly stupid things while drunk,” not “a
pandemic of sicko male predators holding women down while they scream and
kick.”
A 2015 Kaiser Family Foundation/Washington Post poll found, for example, that 67 percent of college
students who said they had been sexually assaulted also said they had been
drinking before the incident. Kipnis’s book notes that many of the statistics
used to promote campus kangaroo courts are unreliable, such as the “only 2
percent of accusations are false,” claim, which is based on 40-year-old data from one police department.
While Jackson’s “90 percent” is a generalization, a significant majority of
campus assault cases involve alcohol abuse, and the connection is well-known.
One study even found 80 percent of campus sexual assaults to involve alcohol.
People know this, which is why we’re not seeing the moral
panic that the assault hypers want hitched to their power play. This, again, is
detrimental to real victims, who must plead their legitimate cases alongside
punks who use campus courts to get back at a guy for having sex with them then
refusing to be their boyfriends.
“[W]e seem to be breeding a generation of students,
mostly female students, deploying Title IX to remedy sexual ambivalences or
awkward sexual experiences, and to adjudicate relationship disputes post-breakup—and
campus administrators are allowing it,” Kipnis writes.
They May Not Have
Been Raped, But They Were Violated
As crazy as this campus situation is, and as legally
unactionable as it is for a woman to signal that she will have a sexual
encounter, have it, then retroactively decide she was raped, I actually think
there is legitimacy to that feeling so many women obviously can’t shake and
which they tell us haunts them for life. People can actually consent to an
encounter thinking it will be one thing, during or after the encounter find out
they were robbed, then be left to deal with the consequences they didn’t
foresee or were told didn’t exist.
This is what happens when you tell young people that sex
with someone you aren’t comitted to for life is perfectly good and normal, that
they can act callously about sex, that sex is just a bodily function, a
physical release we all need, that they’re dirty or dysfunctional if they have
qualms or concerns about intimate encounters with strangers. We end up with
young males (not men, certainly) who like a porn performer won’t kiss a woman
they’ve just screwed, so she doesn’t “get the wrong idea” that putting their
penis inside her, you know, actually meant
anything.
The link between drinking and perceptions of assault on
campus isn’t random. Young women openly acknowledge they get drunk precisely to
lower their inhibitions so they are as sexually promiscuous as our culture
insists they should be. Later, when they’re sober, they regret it.
It’s not crazy. It’s perhaps the most sensible thing
going on in this whole scenario. They have no other way to express their deep
feelings of violation besides accusing their partner of “rape.” It wasn’t rape,
as in forcible penetration. But it was a violation of something sacred, a
transgression. These young people are essentially “raping each other,” as one
assault victim told the Washington Post.
But how can a relativist legal system punish them justly for assaulting each
other? It can’t. So the least callous participant loses, and the more callous
participant walks — unless his tender counterpart starts looking for revenge
inside Title IX courts.
This is all called “sex positivity” by people with no
brains, souls, or hearts. I call it “rape culture.” It’s unfair to slap men
with rape charges for doing what our culture tells them women want, and the
women themselves are participating in. But, if not legally then morally, the
women are definitely victims, and so are the men. Victims of lies and the moral
cretins who tell them that the only thing you should consider before sex is
whether the other person isn’t resisting.
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