Tuesday Reads: Emily Yoffe and the Problem of Sexual Assault on College Campuses
Posted: June 2, 2015 Filed under: Crime, Criminal Justice System, morning reads, Women's Rights | Tags: binge drinking, Emily Yoffe, rape, sexual assault on college campuses, Slate Magazine 34 Comments
William W. Churchill, Woman Reading on a Settee
Good Morning!!
This morning I read a long article by Emily Yoffe at Slate about The Hunting Ground, a documentary about rape on college campuses, How The Hunting Ground Blurs the Truth. I haven’t seen the film, but Yoffe says that CNN plans to show it in the future so maybe we’ll all get to see it eventually. Anyway, I thought I’d present Yoffe’s arguments and some of the responses to her previous posts on the subject and see what you think.
In the article, Yoffe focuses one of the cases presented in the film, listing a number of facts and inconsistencies that she says were ignored by the filmmakers. She also demonstrates a great deal of sympathy for the man who allegedly committed the sexual assaults.
Arthur M. Hazard, Woman Reading in an Interior
Some excerpts:
The recent documentary The Hunting Ground asserts that young women are in grave danger of sexual assault as soon as they arrive on college campuses. The film has been screened at the White House for staff and legislators. Senate Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand, who makes a cameo appearance in the film, cites it as confirmation of the need for the punitive campus sexual assault legislation she has introduced. Gillibrand’s colleague Barbara Boxer, after the film’s premiere said, “Believe me, there will be fallout.” The film has received nearly universal acclaim from critics—the Washington Post called it “lucid,” “infuriating,” and “galvanizing”—and, months after its initial release, its influence continues to grow, as schools across the country host screenings. “If you have a daughter going to any college in America, you need to see The Hunting Ground,” the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough told his viewers in May. This fall, it will get a further boost when CNN, a co-producer, plans to broadcast the film, broadening its audience. The Hunting Ground is helping define the problem of campus sexual assault for policymakers, college administrators, students, and their parents.
The film has two major themes. One, stated by producer Amy Ziering during an appearance on The Daily Show, is that campus sexual assaults are not “just a date gone bad, or a bad hook-up, or, you know, miscommunication.” Instead, the filmmakers argue, campus rape is “a highly calculated, premeditated crime,” one typically committed by serial predators. (They give significant screen time to David Lisak, the retired psychology professor who originated this theory.) The second theme is that even when school administrators are informed of harm done to female students by these repeat offenders, schools typically do nothing in response. Director Kirby Dick has said that “colleges are primarily concerned about their reputation” and that “if a rape happens, they’ll do everything to distance themselves from it.” In the film, a former assistant dean of students at the University of North Carolina, Melinda Manning, says schools “make it difficult for students to report” sexual assault in order to avoid federal reporting requirements and to “artificially keep [their] numbers low.”
One of the four key stories told in the film illustrates both of these points. It is the harrowing account of Kamilah Willingham, who describes what happened during the early morning hours of Jan. 15, 2011, while she was a student at Harvard Law School. She says a male classmate, a man she thought was her friend, drugged the drinks he bought at a bar for her and a female friend, then took the two women back to Willingham’s apartment and sexually assaulted them. When she reported this to Harvard, she says university officials were indifferent and even hostile to her. “He’s dangerous,” she says in the film of her alleged attacker, as she tries to keep her composure. “This is a rapist. This is a guy who’s a sexual predator, who assaulted two girls in one night.” The events continue to haunt her. “It’s still right up here,” she says tearfully, placing a hand on her chest.
William W. Churchill, Leisure
You’ll probably have to read the entire article to get a full understanding of this case, but this should give you a sense of where Yoffe is coming from:
I looked into the case of Kamilah Willingham, whose allegations generated a voluminous record. What the evidence (including Willingham’s own testimony) shows is often dramatically at odds with the account presented in the film.
Willingham’s story is not an illustration of a sexual predator allowed to run loose by self-interested administrators. The record shows that what happened that night was precisely the kind of spontaneous, drunken encounter that administrators who deal with campus sexual assault accusations say is typical. (The filmmakers, who favor David Lisak’s poorly substantiated position that our college campuses are rife with serial rapists, reject the suggestion that such encounters are the source of many sexual assault allegations.) Nor is Willingham’s story an example of official indifference. Harvard did not ignore her complaints; the school thoroughly investigated them. And because of her allegations, the law school education of her alleged assailant has been halted for the past four years.
Yoffe has a history of denying the seriousness of the problem of campus rape (even though in this article she twice *says* it’s a serious issue). Her position seems to be that if college women just stopped getting drunk, rape on campus would be a minor or nonexistent problem.
I found it interesting that she refers to David Lisak’s research on campus rapists as a “theory,” and characterizes his work as “poorly substantiated.” The link to her evidence that Lisak’s work is somehow problematic goes to another article written by Yoffe in which she cites Lisak and another researcher explaining that it’s important to be aware that the (pretty large) sample of UMass students that Lisak used may not be typical of all college populations. This is a standard caveat given in most psychology research papers, because studies on human beings can rarely be representative of the population as a whole. The results need to be considered in the light of other studies and studies of varied populations. That doesn’t invalidate the findings.
Here’s the article in which Yoffe finds fault with Lisak’s research: The College Rape Overcorrection. Again, you probably should read the whole thing, because I can’t represent her arguments in a brief excerpt. Still, here’s a bit of it:
In recent years, young activists, many of them women angry about their treatment after reporting an assault, have created new organizations and networks in an effort to reform the way colleges handle sexual violence. They recognized they had a powerful weapon in that fight: Title IX, the federal law that protects against discrimination in education. Schools are legally required by that law to address sexual harassment and violence on campus, and these activists filed complaints with the federal government about what they describe as lax enforcement by schools. The current administration has taken up the cause—the Chronicle of Higher Education describes it as “a marquee issue for the Obama administration”—and praised these young women for spurring political action. “A new generation of student activists is effectively pressing for change,” read a statement this spring announcing new policies to address campus violence. The Department of Education has drafted new rules to address women’s safety, some of which have been enshrined into law by Congress, with more legislation likely on the way.
Unfortunately, under the worthy mandate of protecting victims of sexual assault, procedures are being put in place at colleges that presume the guilt of the accused. Colleges, encouraged by federal officials, are instituting solutions to sexual violence against women that abrogate the civil rights of men. Schools that hold hearings to adjudicate claims of sexual misconduct allow the accuser and the accused to be accompanied by legal counsel. But as Judith Shulevitz noted in the New Republic in October, many schools ban lawyers from speaking to their clients (only notes can be passed). During these proceedings, the two parties are not supposed to question or cross examine each other, a prohibition recommended by the federal government in order to protect the accuser. And by federal requirement, students can be found guilty under the lowest standard of proof: preponderance of the evidence, meaning just a 51 percent certainty is all that’s needed for a finding that can permanently alter the life of the accused.
More than two dozen Harvard Law School professors recently wrote a statement protesting the university’s new rules for handling sexual assault claims. “Harvard has adopted procedures for deciding cases of alleged sexual misconduct which lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process,” they wrote. The professors note that the new rules call for a Title IX compliance officer who will be in charge of “investigation, prosecution, fact-finding, and appellate review.” Under the new system, there will be no hearing for the accused, and thus no opportunity to question witnesses and mount a defense. Harvard University, the professors wrote, is “jettisoning balance and fairness in the rush to appease certain federal administrative officials.” But to push back against Department of Education edicts means potentially putting a school’s federal funding in jeopardy, and no college, not even Harvard, the country’s richest, is willing to do that.
Again, Yoffe focuses sympathetically on one case involving a male student at the University of Michigan, Drew Sterrett. She also cites research by Callie Marie Rennison and Lynn Addington, who found that non-college women are in greater danger of rape than college women. She doesn’t address the issue that universities are entrusted by parents with protecting young people who may be away from home for the first time.
In an article from October 2013, Yoffe really gets to the point: College Women: Stop Getting Drunk. It’s closely associated with sexual assault. And yet we’re reluctant to tell women to stop doing it. Again, just a brief excerpt:
Let’s be totally clear: Perpetrators are the ones responsible for committing their crimes, and they should be brought to justice. But we are failing to let women know that when they render themselves defenseless, terrible things can be done to them. Young women are getting a distorted message that their right to match men drink for drink is a feminist issue. The real feminist message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you will attract the kinds of people who, shall we say, don’t have your best interest at heart. That’s not blaming the victim; that’s trying to prevent more victims.
Experts I spoke to who wanted young women to get this information said they were aware of how loaded it has become to give warnings to women about their behavior. “I’m always feeling defensive that my main advice is: ‘Protect yourself. Don’t make yourself vulnerable to the point of losing your cognitive faculties,’ ” says Anne Coughlin, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, who has written on rape and teaches feminist jurisprudence. She adds that by not telling them the truth—that they are responsible for keeping their wits about them—she worries that we are “infantilizing women.”
So perpetrators are “responsible for committing their crimes,” but women are the ones who should change their behavior. Why not keep criminals off college campuses and try to prevent both male and female students from drinking so much? Yoffe explains her reasoning at the end of the article:
I’ve told my daughter that it’s her responsibility to take steps to protect herself. (“I hear you! Stop!”) The biological reality is that women do not metabolize alcohol the same way as men, and that means drink for drink women will get drunker faster. I tell her I know alcohol will be widely available (even though it’s illegal for most college students) but that she’ll have a good chance of knowing what’s going on around her if she limits herself to no more than two drinks, sipped slowly—no shots!—and stays away from notorious punch bowls. If female college students start moderating their drinking as a way of looking out for their own self-interest—and looking out for your own self-interest should be a primary feminist principle—I hope their restraint trickles down to the men.
If I had a son, I would tell him that it’s in his self-interest not to be the drunken frat boy who finds himself accused of raping a drunken classmate.
She is correct that women are affected more quickly by alcohol than men, but is that a reason to focus only on college women’s responsibility for preventing sexual assaults? She actually believes that we should just hope that if women drink less, men will emulate them? Good luck with that.
I’ve found several responses to Yoffe’s previous articles. I’ll watch to see the reactions to the latest one which came out yesterday. Here are some links you can check out if you’re interested.
Emma Gray at Huffington Post: What Slate Gets So Wrong About College Women And Sexual Assault.
Alexander Abad-Santos in The Wire: Slate Forgot That the One Common Factor in Rapes Are [sic] Rapists.
Kate McDonough at Salon: Sorry, Emily Yoffe: Blaming assault on women’s drinking is wrong, dangerous and tired.
Erin Gloria Ryan at Jezabel: How To Write About Rape Prevention Without Sounding Like An Asshole.
Jennifer Baker at Psychology Today (also cited in the main post): Campus Rape Skepticism. How Not to ‘Debunk’ Research.
Josh Beitel at Medium: A Rebuttal to Emily Yoffe’s College Rape Overcorrection.
As always, this is an open thread, so feel free to post your thoughts and links on any topic in the comment thread.
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Sky Dancing 
A recent piece on campus sexual assault:
One Woman’s Quest to Fix the Process of Reporting Sexual Assault, by Kate Wheeling.
I haven’t finished reading this one yet:
The Daily Beast: Breaking the Booze Taboo in the Campus Sex Assault Epidemic, by Emily Shire.
I’ve read it now and I have some serious problems with the article. The author suggests that “forcible kissing and fondling” should not be categorized as sexual assault, and that “rape while incapacitated” doesn’t qualify as “forcible rape.” Let me know what you think.
I do agree that universities need to do what they can to cut down on students’ drinking to excess, but it’s not clear how they can do it. They can ban alcohol on campus, but that won’t stop students from going elsewhere to drink. They could have severe punishments for getting drunk and disorderly. Would that work, or would colleges just fear they’ll drive students to other schools? I just don’t know. Kids are going to experiment with alcohol.
“Forcible” anything is assault. “Rape while incapacitated” means there was no ability to consent, therefore it is forcible.
Shire is merely peddling some of the same old excuses for predatory behavior.
As for college-age drinking — yes, that’s a problem, and the solution (if there is one) is not clear. But this issue is also used as a smokescreen and distraction from the issue of sexual assault on campuses.
Oh. My. God. Forcible kissing and fondling is not assault? WTF? And rape while incapacitated doesn’t qualify as forcible rape? That’s the most insane bullshit I have ever read.
My daughter just graduated from a university. They absolutely have policies against under-aged drinking both on and off campus. At her school, the university had a 3 strikes rule regarding under-aged drinking. First strike, you got counseled, second strike your parents were notified and third strike you were out. I thought that was a very reasonable policy. At the same time, once students are over the age of 21 and most of the time living in off campus housing, how is the university supposed to control that?
And you’re absolutely right, kids are going to experiment with alcohol when they go to college. So the people who insist the problem will got away if only college women didn’t drink alcohol is ridiculous and offensive. It’s like the people who say we can solve the problem of teen pregnancy by telling teens not to have sex. College women are going to drink alcohol just as college men will and that does not cause rape. My husband likes to say, “Drinking alcohol never makes you say or do something that you would never otherwise do.”
Inventing fake things to protect women from instead of rape from say, the Duggar brother.
Huckabee On Transgender People: I Wish I Could’ve Said I Was Transgender In HS To Shower With The Girls
“There is something inherently wrong about forcing little children to be a part of this social experiment”
http://www.buzzfeed.com/meganapper/huckabee-on-transgender-people-i-wish-i-couldve-said-i-was-t#.ioq1PVJ4yP
Ugh! I can’t turn on a radio in my car without hearing some gasbag giggle about Caitlyn Jenner. What an ignorant thing for Huckabee to say. And that’s saying a lot because so much of what he says is ignorant.
Huckabee is just a loathsome individual who gets away with it because he cloaks it with his religion. I wish people would stop giving these so called “ministers” a pass simply because they claim to be a reverend.
I’m with you.
Ditto.
Okay, if this is authentic WTF? Blogger catches Ted Cruz In San Antonia calling the President the N Word
http://www.thestatelyharold.com/#!Exclusive-Ted-Cruz-calls-Obama-an-Nword-on-secret-audio-recording/cmbz/556c8bde0cf2312d7962f040
The Stately Harold?
Think it’s just a local blogger
Yep. He said it. Sounds pretty clear to me.
Me too, but it’s apparently a satirical site.
It’s something the conservative trolls do to set bait for liberals, then call them out for it. I’ve fallen for it before, but from time to time I do read the Onion.
He should look at his heritage because there are a lot of white folk that would say very unkind things about him.
WTF? So Yoffe thinks that should excuse the culture of rape on campuses?
And it’s a standard, indeed traditional, caveat in medical and all other scientific studies. You always put in that type of wording. But then readers look at the n of your study, and the sample characteristics, etc., and can figure out how representational the sample is. Yoffe is either disingenuous or displaying her ignorance of standard scientific writing.
She’s on a mission, as Roxanne Gay said. She did find some problems with one of the central stories in the documentary, but I would need to know more in order to trust her findings. She’s far too biased to be trusted, IMHO.
It’s impossible to understand how Yoffe can over simplify the problem of men raping women by blaming it on alcohol. If the rapist drugs his victim, she could be drinking a milkshake at a soda fountain and she’d still be raped.
Personally, I don’t understand why colleges and universities are even in the business of prosecuting rape. I’m not saying that law enforcement’s record on that is perfect, but the criminal justice system is probably much better equipped than the university administrators to handle criminal matters.
That’s what I think. Every rape case should be reported to the police immediately. Part of the problem is that Title IX mandates that colleges take certain actions. But I think the main reason college administrators try to keep things internal is to protect the reputation of the institution and protect their sources of income–athletics programs primarily.
They don’t need to prosecute it. They don’t even need to judge the crime according to the standards required in the courtroom. All they need to do is set some minimum standards according to what they deem to be a reasonable suspicion of guilt and kick the guy out if the crime meets those standards. Then they can turn all of their evidence over to law enforcement and let them prosecute.
I just don’t think anyone has to prove guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt” just to expel the student. They’re not sending anyone to prison, they’re just kicking him out of their institution.
I am going to start with Kate Wheeling’s article. She hit exactly what I had been thinking when I read the earlier articles on the documentary by Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick. As well as the
Dear Emily Yoffe article. Let me get underway, you know who I am, and I’ve wondered myself, why me?
Here’s Kate hitting home for me, You have to understand the problem. Going in to report it in person is HARD. Not feeling believed is HARD. Not feeling connected to the right resources was HARD. Telling my story to different people was HARD. Being asked evidence I didn’t know I needed was HARD.
Why didn’t Dear Emily give us the data she collected on Willingham since birth? Seems she collected it for Winston, born here, mother was math teacher, dad was Marine, lived here, got scholarship from such and such. He was tall, and good looking, and so Willingham, tall and good looking, what else? She went to see her mother in Kenya, because she worked at the United Nations. Anything else?
How about that Cocaine? Where did that come from? Seems like Winston had some money in his account, withdrawing from ATM, paying a $160 bar bill. What about the Cambridge Police Department why did they decline to comment, aren’t the records public information, since a crime was committed. Yet they did not do DNA on Winston, why the hell not? His lawyer had better ideals. Then Dear Emily went to see Charles Ogletree, so she could scratch like chicken shit, and dig up dirt on Anita Hill? Finally after his indictment, and 2 1/2 years later, Winston went to trial. I am still confused, as to who was grabbing, groping, and groaning, who pulled hair? Oh, whose finger, did what? Whose panties came off and whose condom was thrown in the air? Whose arms and legs, and boos were kissed? I kiss you, you kiss me, ten times, no twenty. Oh, tomorrow we see all the ugliness put out for everybody to see. HARVARD, I just don’t know if they see students as experiments, or if they are the investigational body which includes all the evidence, the dose of cocaine snorted or shot up, or the barbiturates, or the alcohol. Where are the towels, the sheets, and clothing, blouse, shirt? Where is all the data from that evidence? They are authorized to be helpful, instead they are nothing but harmful to victims of rape.
So everybody did there duty? He walks, even though he had another rap sheet, and changed his plea in regards to his two felonies, yet he was not guilty. It was all racked up, the rape, the documentary, the investigations, the police report. She broke the rules, it’s her fault. Harvard read her the infractions, like a wooden mechanical toy. She was a poor actor. These are formalities, these are the preordained conclusions.
There are lots of people who don’t comprehend the unspoken ritual of the games played on campuses, played on homes, played at the workplace, and freakin’ played around the damn world when it comes to rape. The futility of his words over her words. As is often, the decision of not guilty was already made. Not guilty has eroded structure of our society, and our world. You see anyone could have raped Willingham, but it was NOT Winston.
There is nothing new here. Nothing more to question, nothing to understand. You ladies best learn your lines, if you don’t you could get that HARD look from someone.
Rape is all about totalitarian control, it is a reflection of the rest of world, it is de-humanizing as it is a product of society. It been nurtured and cultivated, and it’s been allowed to flourish to monster proportions. We are the faceless, the statistic to be faded, and to be forgotten.
It’s not right, and skydancers here, have said, time and time again, no this isn’t right, and it got to change, and a good place to begin to stop it is on the college campuses.
I would like to come up with an acronym for the word H.A.R.D…………………..
One other thing, the article College Rape Overcorrection, I couldn’t believe how they set the stage up for rape: the bedding is all white sheets, white bedspread, window without curtains (beautiful day outside), and that Red light, oh my, and music to go with. How about a fucking coconut knife, pistol, and some boots to stomp the shit out of rapist. Where’s the steel baseball bat? Where’s the telephone? Give me a break, what he hell are they selling?
All great questions. I especially like your point that Yoffe didn’t look into Willingham’s background as she did Winston’s. She is clearly sympathetic to the men involved in these cases–maybe because they are in the same economic-social class as she is? I wish I knew.
Thanks for a brilliant comment, Fannie.
You raise some excellent points coming from a much more thorough analysis than Yoffe bothered to perform. Thank you Fannie.
You said it Fannie…xoxoxo
Yes, rapists are the dregs of humanity.
We need to teach men to control themselves and act in a civil and compassionate way.
I do think, too, that college women must know that they cannot consume the same amount of alcohol as their frat boy predators and there should be a sister/buddy system at play at all times.
But Sweet Sue, what does that mean? “College women must know that they cannot consume the same amount of alcohol as their frat boy predators…” What does that mean? What if they don’t intend to, but it happens? Then they are partially responsible? I don’t accept that. If through our own actions or through mere happenstance we find ourselves in a vulnerable position, nobody deserves or shares responsibility for victimization by a predator. The focus must be on the rapists. They are the ones responsible. Any implication that the victim in any way contributed to being raped absolves the rapist of some of the responsibility and that is wrong.
By the way, I hope you know that I’m posting this disagreement with your comment because I respect your take on things and enjoy your comments. No offense intended.
I think I told you the story during my college days when we caught the rapist who raped our friend. It happened about 2/3 pm. She walked from the campus in the lower park nearby. And this guy, had a rope, and tied her up, and raped her one spring afternoon. When she came home and told us, we took her to the ER. It was reported to the police. We decided we would try to lure him out. And it worked. How did we do it? We wore shorts, tank tops, tennis shoes, we had whistles, and we each had a knife. We didn’t have cell phones back then.
Everyday, we spread out in the same location, but a distance apart, and knew the roads, knew where to run, and to give the sign that he was in the park. Carla was with us, but disguised with a blond wig, not her dark hair. We emptied beer cans to make it look like we had a few. Sure enough, he approached, and we let him get in fairly close. The whistle was blown, and all of us girls jump up and started running to surround him, and we ran to the roads for more help, and to get the park blocked off so he couldn’t get out. Several men who were riding bikes, where a big help, and we started screaming rapist, get the rapist. We were in flames, throwing sticks, and stones, and beer. Finally the police did get him, and we went to court with Carla. Two things, the first female judge in the county has just been appointed, and we became friends later on. Two, several other students came forward and said he had raped them. I’ll never forget we sat behind his wife, was had been crying and couldn’t believe that her husband was a serial rapist. He was sent to Vacaville Prison. Carla, it was doubly HARD for her, she was gay, of which the rapist never knew, and was never brought up during the trail.
Wow, what a story! Good for you and your friends.
Just wanted to thank you for linking to my article (A Rebuttal to Emily Yoffe…) and point out that I’m the author, and not Michael Matti (the picture is his). Thanks!