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.
Monday Reads
Posted: June 1, 2015 Filed under: just because | Tags: closet case Republicans, Denny Hastert, Lindsey Graham, Rick Santorum 14 Comments
Okay, this is Monday. I’m sure because I watched a really creepy new Game of Thrones last night after I got back from gigging. It’s funny how white walkers and their armies of the dead remind me of Republicans and their voters. So, here we go …
Did y’all see that little bit on Twitter over the weekend? It seems some one has forgotten to google his name recently. Given the historical proclivities of Republican politicians these days I would say that’s about right.
So with that, I give you the rundown of all the news we keeping hearing about the Republican Bottoms. Long may their fat little asses wave in the air with well deserved publicity.
Lady Lindsey–the Senate’s best unkept secret closet case–announced the official presidential campaign thingie today to not a lot of fan fare. As true with all campaigns, it starts with the candidate defining himself by his early life. Lindsey did not sing “This boy is a bottom” who votes against nearly everything that represents being authentically gay. The only thing authentic about Lady Lindsey is that he–along with co-conspirator John McCain—has never met a war he hasn’t want to send other people’s kids to fight. Keep clutching those pearls Senator Bottom!
But as he announced his presidential bid Monday here in the tiny town where he grew up, Lindsey Graham sought to knock down the idea that he’s a creature of Washington and instead told a personal story that’s largely been overlooked over the course of his two decades in the House and Senate.
It’s the tale of a son of pool-hall owners, who grew up near-impoverished in the back room of his parents’ bar. As a college student, he raised, and eventually adopted, his little sister after their parents died, before going on to have a career as an Air Force lawyer and then rising to become South Carolina’s senior senator.“Those of you who’ve known me a long time know I had some ups and downs as a young man,” he said. “I lost my parents, and had to struggle financially and emotionally … There are a lot of so-called ‘self-made’ people in this world. I’m not one of them. My family, friends, neighbors and my faith picked me up when I was down, believed in me when I had doubts. You made me the man I am today.”
Larry Flynt continues to offer $1 million dollars to anyone with a legitimate “I fucked this politician” story. I’m 
sure we’ll eventually find the men that made him the man Lady Lindsey is today. I say that all these damn fool Republican closet cases be outed and outed with a big ol’ vengeance. I’m tired of hearing them grab that evangelical carousel ring while fucking who they want to and the rest of us too.
The Supreme Court is releasing its decisions for the October 2014 year and started with one sure to make the thumpers few brain cells go thumpa thumpa thumpa. Yes, religion expressions other than the endless crass consumerism season we all endure each year are protected activities. So Long Dong Silver was the sole hold out on this one. Not a bottom but certainly some one who is no stranger to whatever goes on in the world of anything goes porn.
The Supreme Court ruled Monday for a Muslim woman who did not get hired after she showed up to a job interview with clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch wearing a black headscarf.
The justices said that employers generally have to accommodate job applicants and employees with religious needs if the employer at least has an idea that such accommodation is necessary.
Job applicant Samantha Elauf did not tell her interviewer she was Muslim. But Justice Antonin Scalia said for the court that Abercrombie “at least suspected” that Elauf wore a headscarf for religious reasons. “That is enough,” Scalia said in an opinion for seven justices.
The headscarf, or hijab, violated the company’s strict dress code for employees who work in its retail stores.
Elauf was 17 when she interviewed for a “model” position, as the company calls its sales staff, at an Abercrombie Kids store in a shopping mall in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 2008. She impressed the assistant store manager with whom she met. But her application faltered over her headscarf because it conflicted with the company’s Look Policy, a code derived from Abercrombie’s focus on what it calls East Coast collegiate or preppy style.
Abercrombie has since changed its policy on headscarves and has settled similar lawsuits elsewhere.
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed suit on Elauf’s behalf, and a jury eventually awarded her $20,000.
But the federal appeals court in Denver threw out the award and concluded that Abercrombie & Fitch could not be held liable because Elauf never asked the company to relax its policy against headscarves.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote separately to agree with the outcome, but not with Scalia’s reasoning. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.
Here’s the finding that was decided 8-1.
Back to closet cases for a moment. So, I’m not not in to quoting the National Review but this is a good question: How Did Denny Hastert Get Rich Enough to Pay Millions to an Accuser?
By the sketchy standards of Illinois politics, that might well have been true. But his fall from grace should prompt other questions about how a former high-school teacher who held elective office from 1981 to 2007 could leave Congress with a fortune estimated at $4 million to $17 million. When he entered Congress in 1987, he was worth at most $275,000. Hastert was the beneficiary of very lucky land deals while in Congress; and since leaving office, he has earned more than $2 million a year as a lobbyist. That helps explain how he could agree to pay $3.5 million to a former student to cover up an ancient sex-abuse scandal.
You can go read the details at the link. The land deal is characterized as “honest graft”. Hmmmmmm ….
Among other bottom in the news is that Republicans are once again eating their own. (Again, with the Santorm reference for good measure!) Down with Tyranny writes that: Crooked Republican Closet Case Aaron Schock Draws a Primary Challenge. I think of him every time I hear some one call some one else a butt munch.
Maybe Aaron Schock’s congressional seat isn’t as safe as we’ve been saying it is. The seat was redrawn in 2010 by the Democratic Illinois legislature to concentrate Republicans in one district in order to make IL-13 and IL-17 safe for Democrats. The Democrats have still be unable to capture the 13th (Rodney Davis’ district) and the reactionary Blue Dog Democrat who won in the 17th, Cheri Bustos, wasn’t worth the effort.
Shock wound up with an R+11 district, won by McCain with 54% and by Romney with 61%– and won by Schock in 2012 with 74% and last November, despite mounting ethics charges, with 75%. Ostensibly, IL-18 loves Aaron Schock. He’s been very popular in the district where his excuses for being a dashing young bachelor– “I still just haven’t had time to find the right gal”– are accepted at face value. Inside the Beltway, everyone knows Aaron Schock is a gay party boy. In the suburbs around Springfield and Peoria and the farming villages that run east from Iowa Schock’s lifestyle doesn’t compute as “gay.” And nothing would get these people to vote for a Democrat anyway.
But this week it’s looking likely that they will have an opportunity to replace Schock with a more conservative Republican… if they want to. As the financial scandals pile up and get more and more press back home, Bloomington attorney Mark Zalcman has been putting together the beginning of a primary challenge against Schock. He declared his candidacy on Monday and said his platform will be centered on his Christian faith and values. His campaign slogan: “Because Washington needs the Gospel.” Presumably his allies will get more specific about Schock’s non-Gospel lifestyle as the campaign heats up.
I’m thinking that some of these folks outta spend some time around some good Buddhists and learn about Karma. Karma appears to be a top.
Here’s another one from North Dakota: “North Dakota Rep. with anti-gay voting record comes out of closet after lewd pictures on dating site Grindr surface.” You would think he could stop thinking with his little head long enough to not post to a Gay hook up site, wouldn’t ya?
A conservative North Dakota lawmaker has come out of the closet after lewd texts he sent on a gay dating site were made public this week.
The randy red-state Republican, Rep. Randy Boehning, was outed Monday, more than a month after the Roughrider State legislator sent an unsolicited picture of his penis and several other messages to 21-year-old Bismarck resident Dustin Smith back on March 12 on the gay dating site Grindr, according to multiple reports.
Boehning, a 12-year veteran of North Dakota’s state assembly who has routinely voted against gay rights legislation, charged that the leaked messages were sent to media outlets in retaliation for his vote against Senate Bill 2279, which would have added sexual orientation to the state’s anti-discrimination law. For the third time since 2009, the bill was voted down by conservative North Dakota lawmakers, including Boehning.
But Smith, who first leaked the Grindr messages to The Forum, claims he simply wanted to reveal Boehning’s hypocrisy.
“How can you discriminate against the person you’re trying to pick up?” Smith told the local Bismark-area newspaper on Monday.
Boehning, 52 and unmarried, has been an active member of the site and conducted his affairs under the profile name “Top Man!,” Smith said.
“Seems I haven’t found mister right yet, so need to keep looking for and having fun on the way! Hit me up boys,” Boehning’s Grindr bio reads.
Boehning, a staunch conservative, insistently refused to comment on the allegations for two weeks, but this week finally came forward to admit that he had been using the platform to chat with other men and that he was gay,according to The Forum.
Well, guess that dude was look for Mr. Good Bottom. Maybe Denny Hastert needs a new room mate. Oh, wait, he’s going to jail so he’ll have plenty of tops looking for him now!!!
Absolutely nothing drives me nuttier than a candy bar than the utter hypocrisy of these guys. Again, my biggest hope is that we have a rush on Larry Flint’s email and that each and every one of these hypocritical dudes gets outted in a spectacular way.
I not only want the closet cases outted. I want the serial adulterers with the smirkier holier than thou attitudes out in the open too. That would include all the hookers that did my Senator Vitter before he becomes my damned governor. Larry already netted Vitter but some how we still can’t get rid of him. There has to be a few more hookers in need of a million out there with some pictures. C’mon ladies!!!
I’ll get to race handicapping in a few paragraphs, but first let’s deal with the only thing most people know about David Vitter (who has not, by the way, distinguished himself in the Senate in any way). I’ve always wondered: How in the world did he survive that hooker business? Not only did he admit he was a client of Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s escort service. She then went and hanged herself. Not over him personally. Over the whole mess, and staring at serious jail time. But still. Extramarital relations are one thing, with a staffer or a woman of accomplishment; politicians almost always slog their way through that. But here we had the guy calling on hookers, and the dead body of the madam. And Vitter skated through it and sailed to reelection two years later. How?
“He hid for a year and a half,” says my operative. At first, when his name was revealed by Hustler in connection to the case, Vitter acknowledged it. He said he’d asked for and received his wife’s and (somewhat presumptuously) God’s forgiveness. After that he would say no more—“out of respect for my family.” Nice touch.
By the time 2010 came around, Palfrey was less important to the state’s voters than the fact that Charlie Melancon, the Democrat who challenged Vitter, had “voted with Barack Obama 98 percent of the time” in Congress. That’s all Vitter said. That, and the forgiveness thing, and the “fact” that illegal immigrations were cutting holes through chain-link fences and being welcomed by bleeding-heart Melanconistas with a brass band and a waiting limousine, as this really vile and racist TV ad of his had it. Vile and racist works down there, so what had seemed at first like a close-ish race became a 19-point whupping.
Ever since, Vitter has been fine, with his approval rating up in the high 50s. I guess all it takes to do that is to be right wing and anti-Obama. And so, he’s the favorite to be the state’s next governor.
Maybe the evangelicals were just happy that found a compound adulterer who wasn’t gay for a change. Who knows? All I know is that if I were any where near their clown car, I would be sure to wear a human size condom.
Take note reporters.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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mablue2
Mama Lopez
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Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
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