It is necessary and valuable to promote the free expression of a plurality of views, but this back-and-forth about whether or not certain statistics are valid is not the conversation that students should be having. Students should engage in a dialogue that focuses on establishing a safe space for survivors while at the same time tackling the root causes of sexual assault.It goes on for blocks from there; the comments are actually remarkably lucid, from which I'll pull one mainly for brevity and clarity:
Wow! To paraphrase the fourth and fifth paragraphs: “Don’t consider those facts that undermine the premise of your view; just carry on to your foregone conclusion.” This is the kind of elite undergraduate education that parents spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for? Incredible!Pity the poor Onion writers who find themselves woefully behind the times in matters such as these. It turns out that some of the protesters in the room at the time, at a public lecture with a video camera rolling, now wish to have their visages excised from the resulting footage. Predictably, the sponsors of the event reject this, while the university claims it may need to "step in" and force their hand:
The University claims that we must edit the video because students who asked questions did not agree to have their faces shown/voices heard:You truly can't make this stuff up.
What was the response from Clare Boothe Luce about the video? I see that is still up online. Please let me know asap as an edited version needs to be released without students who did not give permission to be taped.But it stretches credulity that Georgetown and its students would not understand that the lecture was a public event. The video camera was in plain view, and audience members themselves appear to be taking video and photos. It could not shock any student that he or she was on camera.
If they are unwilling or unresponsive to the request, Georgetown will need to step in. Let me know!
In addition, the mission of the protestors at the event was clearly to gain attention. Perhaps we are receiving this request because the students were too successful at gaining attention, and are now embarrassed at the reaction to signs like “Trigger Warning – antifeminist.”
He cries as he pulls you closer. You stay and are sexually assaulted. Such an action requires the passive voice because it is a passive act. Rape is enacted on someone, not with someone. It may be uncomfortable for you to tell people you were raped, so instead you tell them you were “sexually assaulted.” That is what the administration calls it; it is the legally appropriate term, and it seems more academic, safely distanced from the experience.The highlighted sentences strike me as being key to reading this as actual rape, but then, her "manipulation and blurring of consent" that makes me question it. It reads as though she might have been okay with this until he hurt her on that last thrust; she later writes that gay friends "[c]alling sexual violence “rough sex” makes it consensual", which, no; the point is more that she didn't say "no" clearly enough. More strangely, "Your female friends do not feel threatened by your rapist because he is homosexual", which implies to me he's actually bisexual. And why is she not kicking him out of bed? The mind boggles. (H/t @QuayBangz.)
...
You had told him no before, repeatedly, throughout the two weeks you dated. The night the assault occurred. The moment he held you below him. There was never consent. There was, however, the continued feeling of obligation to stay and the shock that caused your body to shut down, to become limp and compliant. Unprepared for abuse, you had no idea of what to do. So you lay there, stupefied. You were too afraid to move until he gave a last, too-hard thrust that jolted you from your inertness. You left. The pain stayed with you for the next week.
His perceived vulnerability, his stated mental issues: They are no excuse for what he did. To play both the victim of his own depression and the aggressor of sexual acts is not permissible. It is manipulation and blurring of consent that cause the victim to question, in that moment, their ability to leave their abuser.
So "Mattress Girl" held a talk at Brown University that was live tweeted, I will let her quotes speak for themselves pic.twitter.com/sLVWeQcVts
— Yeyo (@facerealitynow) April 24, 2015
University of Virginia associate dean of students Nicole Eramo on Wednesday publicly denounced a retracted Rolling Stone article that she says falsely portrayed her role in counseling a student who alleged that she was the victim of a fraternity gang-rape on campus.Reason links to a Volokh Conspiracy piece outlining the various parties who might have standing to sue for libel, and Eramo, as a public servant, is ineligible. That's unfortunate in this case, but her pleading is especially compelling, at least, to me. Here's someone who has, presumably, spent her entire career in the pursuit of actual sexual abuse, only to find herself labeled an indifferent abettor of gang rape.
In a letter to Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, obtained by The Washington Post on Wednesday morning, Eramo assails the article’s “false and grossly misleading” account about how U-Va. handled allegations of rape on campus. Eramo, who works with student survivors of sexual assault, had been characterized as callous and indifferent to what Rolling Stone described as a brutal campus rape, and other sexual assault cases.
“Using me as the personification of a heartless administration, the Rolling Stone article attacked my life’s work,” Eramo wrote in the letter, her first public remarks about the article since its online publication in November. Noting that the article has since been discredited and retracted, Eramo wrote that her name will now “remain forever linked to an article that has damaged my reputation and falsely portrayed the work to which I have dedicated my life.”
The lawsuit—obtained by VICE Sports and embedded at the bottom of this report—contains two new bits of information that could prove damaging for Winston. The first is then-Winston teammate Ronald Darby's remorseful Facebook message after the assault—Darby is one of two FSU players who was present the evening of the assault. The second is that Kinsman's legal team has located the cab driver who took Kinsman to Winston's apartment the evening of the assault—something both the Tallahassee Police Department and state attorney's office had failed to do.Erica Kinsman's accusations, published by the Washington Post in February, are that she was drugged and taken by cab to Winston's apartment, where he raped her before dropping her off near her home. Kinsman got a rape kit done immediately afterwards, and despite a positive match to Winston, the police never pressed charges. The case appears to have enough meat that writer KC Johnson, a professor at Brooklyn College famous for his coverage of the Duke Lacrosse case, observed that "Winston received preferential treatment from the Tallahassee Police". Title IX charges similarly went nowhere, which leads to a point about the overall value of Title IX sexual assault adjudication: if much of the impetus for creating a parallel, secret tribunal system bereft of representation for the accused is to stack the deck in favor of "believing" the "victim", it failed Kinsman spectacularly. It's hard to imagine a system in which a highly visible and popular student athlete would not have many advantages which would necessarily make prosecution difficult.
Newspapers across the country labeled the proposal and the North-American Interfraternity Conference as a "rape lobby" trying to keep sexual assaults from being investigated. That mischaracterization spread far and wide, even though the proposal was actually sensible: Let the professionals do their job, and punish based on actual evidence instead of a parallel kangaroo court system. That kangaroo system, by the way, has led to more than 100 schools being investigated for allegedly failing the accusers and more than 70 schools being sued for improperly punishing the accused.Even a mild change yields this kind of hyperbole and overreaction. The use of Title IX to create a separate, secret, due-process-free proceeding is unconstitutional and immoral, and needs to go; a great deal of public education lies ahead.