Yes, can we please get the message out to young women that they are rapable? What is with the society-wide taboo on delivering the message to young women that they need to be a bit more responsible here?
So 6% of men are sociopaths?
I'm having a hard time deciding whether that figure seems too high or too low.
Okay, I'm clearly the ideal audience to be trolled on this one, but I don't understand what's surprising you about the 6% stat. You thought there were more rapists or fewer rapists? And I also don't understand what's surprising you about thinking that rapists are actually bad people rather than merely confused. Could you rewrite the post but longer, and then I can foam at the mouth about it productively?
"if we're not going to allow people to publicly make the case that women shouldn't get shitfaced around guys they don't trust" -- that may be what we'd like to advocate, but the current reality is already a massive pilot study of telling women all the things they should do to avoid getting raped. So don't you worry your pretty little head about that.
Things like the anti-rape nail polish (like many other things) seem to divide feminists right down the middle. All over Facebook I see people being like "Great! Makes soooo much sense! Defend yourself!" and all over Twitter I see people being like "Fuck off, stop telling women what to do, how about telling men what to do once in a while".
The goal of the present study was to determine the proportion of self-reported rapists who
commit multiple acts of rape undetected by the criminal justice system and to examine
whether some proportion of rapists also admit to other forms of interpersonal violence.
Further, we sought to study whether repeat rapists were responsible for a disproportionate
share of this undetected interpersonal violence.
The Slate article is misusing the research. That study wasn't designed to determine the proportion of men that are rapists -- it was to find men that admitted to having raped and find out if they tended to rape frequently, and also performed other violent acts.
I guess the 6% stat is what makes the "don't get shitfaced around guys you don't trust" advice ineffective. The problem is that sociopaths (or some of them, at least) are very good at hiding the fact that they are sociopaths. So they may seem trustworthy up to the point where they decide to rape you.
6% seems about right to me. There were a number of people on the infamous Reddit rapist thread who confessed to committing dozens of rapes. Also 6% is close to the proportion of the population that are sociopaths (4% according to Martha Stout).
I thought when I read it that this was about this story - http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/28/culture-rape-victim-blame-too-far
(Retiring UK judge makes speech saying that it's difficult to get a conviction for rape when the victim was very drunk because it makes her testimony less reliable; judge gets pilloried.)
5: While we're talking about campus rape, am I right in having gotten the impression that roofies etc. are basically an urban legend? Not that they don't exist, but that there's not a lot of reliable evidence showing that their use is anything other than vanishingly rare?
11: there was a study in a British A&E department a few years back looking at cases of people who self-reported having had their drinks spiked. A full 0% of them were found to have anything in their bloodstream more suspicious than lots of alcohol.
According to the Slate article, that 6% figure is coming from self-reports. I'm not going to read the therein linked original summary of the study, but I would guess there is a larger percentage of men doing things that meet the legal definition of rape who aren't able (or are unwilling) to understand it as such--like, they literally can't/won't see their behavior for what it is.
The problem with this statistic is that whereas it may well be that most sexual assaults are perpetrated by 6% of men (or 4% or 8% - it doesn't matter), there must be at least as many, almost certainly more, who are aware of what is going on and are not turning in their sociopathic bros.
Most isn't all. My understanding is that there's two rather different scenarios for sexual assault: one is repeat offending predators and the other is one-time offenders. The former scenario is more common than the latter, but the latter is still common and education is helpful for that group.
I don't have the links handy, but I think the OP is drawing the wrong conclusion.
The point of the 6% research is:
1. Men who rape are constantly testing the waters in their social group to see what they can get away with. OTHER MEN who refuse to laugh at their rape "jokes" or other boundary-testing behavior can send an important signal that they themselves aren't rapists and don't support the malefactors. It is a kind of productive ostracization.
2. The fact that a number of rapes are committed by serial offenders works AGAINST the common "wisdom" that the goal should be awareness-raising for victims. Pretending that this is about people who don't understand "No" is a way of deflecting the responsibility away from the offender. Affirming that serial offenders PURPOSELY LOOK for supposedly ambiguous situations or vulnerability empowers peers to recognize and intervene in situations where they otherwise might want to give a potential offender the benefit of the doubt.
7: The point is that the researchers are assuming that the admitted rapists are telling the truth. But it would be silly to assume that all the men that claim never to have raped are telling the truth.
14: must there? Why? Do you think the same would be true of murder? And murders are much more likely to be committed with other people around.
To the question in the post: IMO depends who you are and who you're trying to tell privately. I don't think the 6% statistic is relevant at all (nor do I have any reason to believe it's accurate).
Is it OK to give a few words of caution to your daughter before she goes off to college? Sure. Is it OK to tell your best friend that you're worried something will happen to her if she keeps blacking out every night? Also sure, especially if you're a girl yourself. How about if you're an R.A. thinking about giving a speech to your entire hall? Eh, not the worst to bring it up once, but they've probably gotten the same speech many times from people with more connection to them than you, so it's probably best to limit yourself to general advisements to not get incapacitatingly drunk without going into specifics. What if you're a columnist for a newspaper, or a president of a university? It ain't private anymore, sorry.
Somewhat OT: This has me enraged:
In other words, 1 gets it right, so unless you believe your audience is significantly more likely to take you seriously on the subject than all the other people they've heard the same speech from, you should shut up.
18: Alcohol-facilitated rapes tend to be initiated (I say off the top of my head, without data) in social settings -- the typical story isn't two sober people in a private place, they get drunk together, and he rapes her, it's fairly sober man at a party or bar manages to get very drunk woman alone and then he rapes her. So, likely no witnesses to the rape itself, but for a repeat offender of this pattern, the people he socializes with are probably aware on some level that he makes a practice of disappearing with women who are staggering drunk, and they should also be aware that this kind of pattern is not good clean fun.
I found the link. Meet the Predators blog post. Scroll down to "Conclusions" and then "Recommendations."
Relevant excerpts (bolding is mine):
Here's what we need to do. We need to spot the rapists, and we need to shut down the social structures that give them a license to operate. They are in the population, among us. They have an average of six victims, women that they know, and therefore likely some women you know. They use force sometimes, but mostly they use intoxicants. They don't accidentally end up in a room with a woman too drunk or high to consent or resist; they plan on getting there and that's where they end up.
Listen. The women you know will tell you when the men they thought they could trust assaulted them; if and only if they know you won't stonewall, deny, blame or judge. Let them tell you that they got drunk, and woke up with your buddy on top of them. Listen. Don't defend that guy. That guy is more likely than not a recidivist. He has probably done it before. He will probably do it again.
Change the culture. To rape again and again, these men need silence. They need to know that the right combination of factors -- alcohol and sex shame, mostly -- will keep their victims quiet. Otherwise, they would be identified earlier and have a harder time finding victims. The women in your life need to be able to talk frankly about sexual assault. They need to be able to tell you, and they need to know that they can tell you, and not be stonewalled, denied, blamed or judged.
Listen. The men in your lives will tell you what they do. As long as the R word doesn't get attached, rapists do self-report. The guy who says he sees a woman too drunk to know where she is as an opportunity is not joking. He's telling you how he sees it. The guy who says, "bros before hos", is asking you to make a pact.
20: The whole situation is utterly fucked. I sat down and watched most of her latest video yesterday; anyone who's offended by it is totally fucked in the head. (Not to mention the absurd "rebuttal" video going around.)
To me a lot of the takeaway from this pattern is that the should be strategies aimed specifically at repeat offenders. For example, working to increase the level of reporting specifically so that the next time the person rapes there's evidence of a pattern. Finding ways to creatively target people who have a pattern even if the individual instances can't be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt (e.g. finding lesser charges you can make stick, or I dunno going after their frat through RICO or something). Etc.
Related: it's worth noting (and ISTR doing so last time it came up) that the conviction rate for rape isn't actually that low, if you mean the fraction of charges that lead to convictions (68%). It's the offence-to-conviction rate that's low - about 9%, more or less the same as other violent crimes though quite a bit less than murder.
25: I particularly like the "escrow" idea, but I don't know if anyone has implemented it. The idea is that you make a complaint and it sits in escrow until two other people have made a complaint about the same offender. It's a way of dealing with cases that aren't perfectly airtight or have the "perfect" victim.
25 makes a lot of sense. And maybe also taking the same approach to, say, less serious assaults that safety managers take to near-miss incidents, i.e. just because no one was injured that time doesn't mean you ignore it, it means you log it and treat it as part of a pattern. Safety pyramid, right - for every 100,000 rule breaches you will get 1,000 near misses and 200 injuries and one death, and the only way to reduce the top of the pyramid is to reduce the bottom.
Ads aimed at predators are apparently effective:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/greta/2013/01/08/rape-prevention-aimed-at-rapists-does-work/
Lots of rapists are in denial about being rapists. Like Witt said, making social norms explicit helps.
On the bright side, The number of rapes has dropped significantly from the 1974 peak.
The study said that 80% of the men who admitted to rape had victimized women who were incapacitated due to drugs or alcohol. 20% used threats or force.
It would be better for society in general if people (women and men) didn't drink or do drugs to the point of being unable to make good decisions, much less to the point of incapacity.
(I say that as someone who is personally quite fond of alcoholic beverages.)
Contrary to what the idiot on Diane Rehm said, my experience (as a survivor advocate, not survivor) is that fraternity culture is a huge impediment to holding rapists accountable. I knew a young woman whose relationship was always overshadowed by her boyfriend's insistence that she couldn't talk to him about her rape because her rapist was his fraternity brother mentor. That's more explicit about the stupidity than most people tend to be, but there's a whole lot of willful blindness involved.
O.K. The boyfriend is more wrong than 32.2. But I don't understand how people are supposed to function without occasional spurts of being too drunk to make decisions.
It would be better for society in general if people (women and men) didn't drink or do drugs to the point of being unable to make good decisions, much less to the point of incapacity.
It will be interesting to see whether states that have legalized recreational marijuana see a decrease in the number of rapes involving alcohol. I mean, unless you're an NYT columnist, pot use doesn't usually result in you being incapacitated in the same way that alcohol use can.
I wish social consumption of LSD would replace alcohol, for feminism.
The nail polish thing irritates me so much, with its utter arrogance and "all we needed was a fresh young mind unfettered by social constraints to innovate a solution to all laydee problemz!"
Yeah, I think targeting frats that harbor repeat offenders is a key part of any serious strategy to address campus rape.
33. Why?
You can feel quite pleasant without being "staggeringly drunk," as LB put it.
By the way, I agree with what LB says in 22, with one caveat, which is that rapes also happen a lot with someone getting a bit high, going off for further drinking with someone who seems superficially nice, and ends up dead drunk and raped. I suppose that since the discussion is about campus rapes, social binge drinking is more common, so going off already staggering also more common.
I agree about the not drinking to incapacity part, but not drinking past point of "being able to make good decisions" is an absurd standard for most common uses of the word "good".
11/12: two female friends have credibly reported being roofied to me (in both cases in enlightened Europe, not on a college campus; make of that what you will). In neither case was I particularly inclined to ask, "but maybe you were just really trashed?".
38: This isn't the nail polish thing, but I kinda wonder whether a "report sketchy guys" app is going to come along that has a big effect through technology.
I'm trying to reconcile 8 and 16.
8 reminds me of the piece Gladwell did about rapist sociopaths after PSU, which left me with the impression such people are so very cunning that's it's ridiculously hard to catch them, without doing vast social damage that will also still be ineffective.
16 seems a very sensible procedure, worth trying for sure.
For 16 to work, there must be numerous "lesser sociopaths," criminal indeed but more likely to be deter-able and also less clever, and that they are a substantial part of the problem, not the occasional bozo.
39. Remember the thread about frat rapes a month or two ago? (I think that was here...)
There is clearly an intersection of underage drinking, binge drinking culture, disinclination or inability to police underage drinking by colleges, fraternities, and rape. (Not to mention falling out of windows, alcohol poisoning, and other bad outcomes.)
Perhaps we need to lower the drinking age back to 18. That would at least remove the fraternities' lock on places to drink on campus.
But yes, burn all fraternities with nuclear fire.
I think it's obvious that we've got multiple vectors of sexual assault, and we need multi-pronged solutions to deal with the overall issue. For the actual jumping-out-of-the-bushes stranger rape sociopath, I'm very dubious about any education campaign ever (for perpetrators OR victims) making much of a difference. Think of all the time and money and intellectual energy expended to keep people from being burglarized -- it helps a bit, but if a professional burglar wants to get into a house, he or she is going to. Then too, there are intrafamily/household rapes, which generally don't have a lot to do with the victim being intoxicated, just less powerful by virtue of age or size or social position. And then in terms of acquaintance rape where alcohol is involved, I think there's some differences between the campus rapist and the guy who trolls downtown bars looking for women who seem extra-drunk or whatever. I think with that last category, there may very well be some education/solidarity actions that could take on a major portion of the problem.
In terms of numbers, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of sexual assaults are committed by a certain small percentage of people. But I think the percentage of one-off assaults is definitely something that might be amenable to various forms of social action.
Presidential because my campus has been in national media for this stuff recently, so I'm a bit paranoid even though I am not a frequent poster.
On the OP: this research has, in fact, made an impact on rape-prevention efforts on campus. I just got the study summarized to me as part of my involvement in a new orientation program for first-years. It's the reason why people are now emphasizing bystander training. Witt and LB are right about the dynamics of this. Rapists do self-report to "forcing a partner to have sex when she didn't want to", just not to rape (the same study got a 0% response rate for the question "have you ever committed rape?"). It's relatively conscious predatory behavior, and the thing to do is to work on not having a campus culture (or other microculture) that facilitates or enables it.
On the role of fraternities, we are moving not to kick frats off campus entirely (which the faculty generally want, but the alumni office will never agree to), but to make it much more difficult for them to hold parties while finding places for other groups to hold parties. Perhaps surprisingly, the frats are down with this. They've been through some unpleasant scrutiny recently (see: national media attention) and are ready to think about something else, even if that means having fewer parties.
am I right in having gotten the impression that roofies etc. are basically an urban legend?
See, here was my response to the online feminists who were unhappy about the roofie-detection nail polish: I never took the whole roofie thing very seriously, but I swear that I've been told many times by internet feminists that one of the shitty things about being a woman is that you have to zealously guard your drink against roofies. I mean, presumably the answer here is that these are non-congruent groups of internet feminists, but I've never (before) seen an intrafeminist argument about this issue.
I'm happy to revert to dismissing roofie fear, but I'd like a clear position statement from the feminists of the internet.
Affirming that serial offenders PURPOSELY LOOK for supposedly ambiguous situations or vulnerability empowers peers to recognize and intervene in situations where they otherwise might want to give a potential offender the benefit of the doubt.
This.
Oh, and on the "are these just sociopaths" question - yes, basically. The study found that this subset of men were much more likely to have committed other forms of violence. "This portrait is more consistent with the data on recidivism among sex offenders than with the still-prevalent image of a male college student who, under the influence of alcohol, mistakenly crosses the line between sexual pressure and rape."
41.
Well, if you can't make good decisions, you are more likely to get in sketchy situations. The BA level at which you get beyond that varies from person to person, obviously; it's something we all learn from experience.
The main case in the frat rape article involved a first-year student who probably hadn't learned that yet, and who had no situational awareness, having just arrived on campus. Her case is a prime example of why fraternity culture is bad.
To return to a point I've made here once or twice before, I think there is a lot that bar owners could be asked to do. I've seen particularly aware bar staff going out of their way to make sure that intoxicated people were getting home safely, not getting raped, etc. That ought to be part of the general alcohol server training everywhere, and something that gets discussed and supported within each licensed business.
Trigger warning: this post might be indistinguishable from trolling.
Ogged's Law: Any sufficiently advanced Unfogged post is indistinguishable from trolling.
Here's the thing. Let's assume there's no problems with the self-reported 6% figure. It's not the case that these guys are obvious sociopaths, and I'd be willing to bet that they're pretty successful at exploiting situations in part by seeming trustworthy.
Doubling down on focusing on telling women not to get drunk around guys they don't trust seems to make it easier on the sociopaths. Getting the non-rapist guys to be allies strikes me as the better course.
I've been hearing radio ads aimed at recruiting friends and bystanders to intervene.
On the value of education for witnesses, an anecdote in which I was not actually raped, witness intervention was not required, and I may have been misinterpreting the whole thing and am unfairly maligning the poor man involved (let alone how I reacted at the time), but luckily I've forgotten his name and the story isn't identifiable to anyone who wasn't there:
College party, at which I was drinking more heavily that was compatible with perfect safety. Throughout the party, an acquaintance had been kind of hitting on me -- not terribly overtly, just sort of always there and being (not unreasonably or offensively, but in the normal range for flirtatious party behavior) touchy. Lacking any interest in the guy, I had been responding by defending my personal space, rearranging conversational groups so there was someone between the two of us, basically, not responding to the flirting. But nothing particularly offensive or worrisome was going on, the guy wasn't being inappropriate. A little unreasonably persistent, but well this side of harassment.
The party went on, and I grew drunker -- well past the point where I was exercising particularly good judgment. And at some point, the guy, who I had been rebuffing all night, apparently (warning, interpretation of his motives follows, maybe I was wrong) decided I was drunk enough to be pliable/acquiescent, put an arm firmly around me and tried to usher me out of the public area of the party into a private space. As it happened, he was wrong about the pliable/acquiescent bit, and I broke away from him, threw a glass of ice I happened to be holding in his face, and explained that I was not interested in going anywhere with him in clear, carrying tones, after which he left the party, apparently embarrassed. Subsequently, I had a couple of people who knew him well tell me that hitting on very drunk women was a standard practice of his.
No harm done in my case (and, assuming I interpreted things correctly, I just got lucky that, while I certainly have bad judgment while drunk, the kind of bad judgment I have is mostly about actively and intentionally doing idiotic things, rather than pliably responding to suggestion). But anyone who knows someone for whom that kind of behavior is a standard practice should be actively disapproving of them, and should be interfering where practical. And educational campaigns really do seem as if they might help with encouraging people to disapprove and interfere.
Also, wrt this society's fucked up relationship to alcohol, couldn't there be some less punitive alternative to detox? Obviously, this would probably be more of a big city thing, but why not have an all night chill room, with coffee and soft drinks and trained staff who could call the paramedics or police if necessary, but otherwise people could just hang out until they were sober enough to get a cab home or whatever. Make it a cab stand, and convenient to public transit too. Fund it with a small tax on drinks. I bet you could cut down on DWIs, serious alcohol poisoning, rape, assault and homicide significantly with something like that.
42: An ex was raped under circumstances which are hard to reconcile with anything but being slipped a powerful depressant. Nearly passing out after a single drink, for example. Anecdata.
46 seems sound, and I think 47.2 illuminates a useful distinction between serial (nonviolent) rapist and sociopath. Upthread there are a couple comments suggesting that sociopaths would be unreachable, but I think that that sort of sociopath would be willing to admit (at least some of them would) to rape, as opposed to drawing some false distinction between "forcing a partner to have sex when she didn't want to" and "rape".
That is, what we seem to have here are a bunch of guys who've convinced themselves that what they're doing is distinct from rape, which is partly motivated reasoning, but also a result of social norms (insert reference to Trapper John, Animal House, etc.). Some of these guys are, in fact, sociopathic enough to rape regardless, but I strongly suspect that, in the presence of different social norms, many or most would not.
On a larger scale, I think this bit of research could be very effectively deployed as part of the argument against trying to distinguish between rape and "rape rape": "We know that most rapes are committed by a very small subset of men, and we also know that, while these men will admit to having sex with women against their wills, they won't admit to "rape"; every time you draw a line between nonconsensual sex and rape, you're telling these predatory criminals that what they're doing is OK." I think it's pretty useful to frame it as a rhetorical choice between supporting rapists in their self delusion and supporting victims plus, well, civil society. Because right now, I think (some) people tend to view it as a feminist litmus test, not as a criminal issue.
Ah, 50 preëmpts/cancels 59.1. Or maybe all of 59. Oh well.
11: Next you'll tell me teenage girls don't solve mysteries in their spare time.
The bit about educating bystanders is right in the post, peeps. I'm not actually trolling here.
The mystery of how the dog's private parts work? About a quarter of them.
Obviously, this would probably be more of a big city thing, but why not have an all night chill room, with coffee and soft drinks and trained staff who could call the paramedics or police if necessary, but otherwise people could just hang out until they were sober enough to get a cab home or whatever.
This exists in at least one place I know, largely intended for the homeless though.
but why not have an all night chill room, with coffee and soft drinks and trained staff who could call the paramedics or police if necessary, but otherwise people could just hang out until they were sober enough to get a cab home or whatever
You mean a diner?
A couple local ladies roofied an expat down here one time. But they did it to rob him, not to rape him.
65.2: or a coffeehouse for curled urban darlings.
66: Canonically, they're supposed to take a kidney or two.
62: But you have to be a little trolling to think that the problem with rape awareness isn't that women haven't heard a zillion times that they shouldn't drink.
Ah, 50 preëmpts/cancels 59.1
Well, there's a related question of whether there are guys--beyond the 6%--who are self-deluded with respect to whether they are "forcing" women to have sex against their will or picking out women who are too drunk to provide meaningful consent (that's what my 13 was aimed at).
The bit about educating bystanders is right in the post, peeps. I'm not actually trolling here.
The trolling, or at least egregiously wrong, bit, is the claim that you can't make the case publicly that women should be careful. That case gets made constantly, everywhere. What gets pushback is people bringing it up as if maybe the real problem is that it hasn't been made intensely enough already, and there are serious gains to be made in rape prevention by women generally being even more careful than they are now. In any individual case, sure, the woman involved could have raised her level of care, up to and including remaining perfectly sober at all times and in her parents' house. But generally, rape isn't going to be solved by convincing women to raise their level of care, and anyone who thinks it will be is in essence just saying that there's nothing else effective to be done at all.
Fine, Cala, be concise. See if I care.
(Also, to the OP, I still don't understand how the 6% stat changed your thinking.)
70: I'd be surprised if there's a clear line, rather than a spectrum of amoral behavior.
women haven't heard a zillion times
No no, I know they have. But right now, if someone says that, the "correct" response is "you miserable victim-blaming misogynist." I'm suggesting it's actually not horrible advice, but should be given in private.
I still don't understand how the 6% stat changed your thinking
It makes it more of a sociopath problem, less of a fucked-up-culture-and-opportunity problem. (It's still a cultural problem insofar as friends and bystanders need to learn to play "spot/stop the sociopath.")
But right now, if someone says that, the "correct" response is "you miserable victim-blaming misogynist."
Really, it's not. Someone who gets that kind of pushback is someone who's saying something that can be interpreted as "If women were careful enough, rape wouldn't be such a problem" not someone giving the perfectly anodyne and inoffensive advice that generally being reasonably careful is a good idea and can keep you safer.
But, seriously, you thought the percentage of men who had committed rape was a lot higher than 6%? Geez. That'd be terrifying if I'd thought that. 6% is already a really very large percentage, if you're talking about people committing a serious crime.
I got 94 problems, and a sociopath ain't one.
In South Africa 1/4 men admitted to rape in one study.
When the American Motorcyclist Association said that 99% of bikers were law abiding citizens, the outlaw bikers started wearing 1% patches. Maybe someone could convince sociopaths that it would be cool to imitate the bikers and start wearing 6% patches.
The 6% stat seems shockingly high to me, and feels way more like a cultural problem than a sociopath problem. At a party where there are 30 guys, you should expect ~2 of them to be serial rapists? Christ.
If rape is outlawed, only outlaws will rape.
The link said that 6% of college men committed actual or attempted rape. Not just "might be capable of rape in some circumstance" but actually went for it. That seems stunningly, shockingly, gut-punchingly high to me and the conclusion I'd draw is that if you're a woman you should either never venture outside of your college single room and/or go everywhere armed with a switchblade.
I wonder what percent of men would take a bike that was lying around the quad, unlocked.
73: Honestly, I would be. That is, there might be a fuzzy line between men who commit rapes for which they could easily be prosecuted and men who merely deliberately engage in nonconsensual sex under circumstances where it would be hard to prosecute it, but I think there's a pretty clear, bright line between having sex only with partners who you are certain are consenting and raping definitely or possibly nonconsenting people. Not saying there are no confusing situations at all, but it's not a smooth spectrum -- there's a clear point of discontinuity at being certain of one's partner's consent.
The 1/5 college women are sexually assaulted statistic also is fucking insane, if it's true. Is there any other crime that we'd allow anything like those numbers for without having complete societal breakdown? "Hey, move to this neighborhood, you have a 1/5 chance of a home invasion robbery in the next 4 years." "Don't worry about dying, you only have a 1 in 5 chance of being murdered over the next four years, and probably only 1 or 2 of the thirty guys in this classroom are murderers."
79: I think it's both a sociopath problem and a cultural problem. At certain parties, I'm sure the percentage is much higher than 6%. (Birds of a feather . . . )
And given the oft-quoted statistic that "[o]ne in four college women report surviving rape or attempted rape at some point in their lifetime", 6% doesn't seem that high at all.
I mean, I know I use the "burn colleges to the ground, especially the University of Chicago, and salt the earth where they stood" line too much, but honestly an environment where 1/5 of women are routinely being raped or sexually assaulted isn't just a "cultural" problem, it's an environment that needs to be destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up.
Is there any other crime that we'd allow anything like those numbers for without having complete societal breakdown?
If the crime tended to target a marginalized group? No problem.
86.2: Well, yeah, as Halford says the 20%-of-college-women-get-raped thing is obviously the primary outrage here. But people present the 6% stat in a #notallmen kind of way, suggesting that it's just a very small number of awful people doing awful things, not really a systemic issue for everyone. My point is that 6% is not a very small number of people at all.
Is there any evidence that rape is higher in college than in the non-college same age group? My guess is that college isn't particularly the problem, it's just an easy category to collect data about.
And 81 also seems right to me. Not the switchblade bit, but that 6% isn't a low number, it's a very high number. It's not implausible to me, but it's a number that means most days, you're at some point in a room with someone who has committed rape.
88 -- I dunno, it implies a crime rate against women on college campuses (and not just "crime" but rape or assault, very serious felonies) roughly 20x the size of the overall crime rate for the city of Detroit, a completely marginalized place and the highest crime city in the US (there are crime reporting problems here obviously, but still).
Yeah, but your denominator is women on college campuses. Take the denominator of men in prison, or young black teenage men, etc, and there are plenty of equally upsetting data. Or young black teenage prisoners in Detroit; I bet that yields some awful stats.
Is there any evidence that rape is higher in college than in the non-college same age group?
I'd like to know the answer to that, but I'd bet without knowing that colleges are substantially worse. If what everyone says above about rapists playing on opportunities is correct, the college environment seems to offer more opportunities.
92 -- OK, but look at the environments you're comparing college (a very expensive good that people, including women, pay a shit-ton of money for) to.
I was thinking about rape-as-war-crime, recently, maybe via a post-Rwanda story? I was trying to get inside the head of someone who is on a soldier-ish-killing-spree, maybe going door to door, and trying to understand how rape fits into that, and I just concluded that aggression-adrenaline and sex drive are incredibly intertwined. I couldn't come up with anything more coherent than that.
(Oh, I remember the story - on how phenomenally underreported male-on-male wartime rape is. The story alleged that maybe 25% of all wartime rape is male on male, IIRC.)
If the number of perpetrators is that high, it also partly explains the such low charging rates. Society can't put every rapist in prison, and so like drug use, there will always have to be unofficial ways to distinguish between rape we care about, and rape we don't, one expects this to breakdown along classic race/class lines. Also i guess as a practical matter it's likely that one of the police/lawyers/judge involved is also a rapist
94: So women are marginalized independent of class structure.
If the number of perpetrators is that high, it also partly explains the such low charging rates.
Huh?
And colleges aren't just expensive goods that the rape victims are paying for, they're controlled, regulated residential environments that often have their own police forces. If they're producing results like that, time to rethink the whole system.
6% is surprisingly low if you think that rape happens because otherwise perfectly nice guys have too much to drink and then oops!
When the OP suggests the same thing as Emily Yoffe (aka Dear Prudence) in Slate, I'm not sure there's much else to be said.
I sort of hate these conversations in general, because I think anecdotes are really useful here, but I'd feel really wrong telling friends' stories to the internet.
Here's a creepy but not first-person rapey one. In college, a male acquaintance told me his frat had been lucky enough to get a bunch of E for a party. He invited me; I had other plans. Fraternity was later found to have had a bunch of GHB or something. Nice. Same frat as in this article, if I'm remembering correctly. I was looking for the actual article, but Googling frat+school doesn't find it readily.
Here's what I don't understand: Why don't people warn young black men about the dangers posed by cops?
97: 94: So women are marginalized independent of class structure.
You don't think that being both a women and lower class, both a women and black, all three, etc., compounds the problems? I mean, I was under the impression it was a pretty standard line that they are not independent.
I am, however, not sure how this interacts with Halford's argument.
Fraternity was later found to have had a bunch of GHB or something.
Like, definitely for use as a roofie-type-thing? Because GHB is pretty fun when you're coming down from ecstasy.
98: it rape had the same conviction rate as murder (around 50%) it would mean putting at least 3% more of the male population in prison that presumably would be basically evenly distributed across race/class lines. This would basically double the prison population, and there wouldn't be any political will for it. The best we can probably do, if we cannot get the number of perpetrators down, is a war on some rape.
103: oh sure. I just meant being of college-bound class doesn't solve this problem.
102. My understanding is that they do, where "they" is their parents.
Report https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/221153.pdf
Breakdown of 19% p14
Women raped at college ~10%
Feel horrible now like whole world is sick, haven't got a stat for that.
105: you don't think a high arrest and conviction rate would reduce offenses? Or at least be indicative of a culture that feels more strongly about reducing rape than we do, and that would cut down?
107: Well, yeah, but obviously they're not taking it to heart. Otherwise, we wouldn't have all these stop-and-frisks, arrests, shootings and whatnot.
a high arrest and conviction rate
Good luck with that.
109. Maybe. I'm on team, lets just change the laws so these things are easier to prosecute. But I think it's obvious that when you are dealing with such a large class of serial perpetrators many of whom are powerful men, any real attempt to crack down on the problem is going to face massive stonewalling and resistance. As it has for example in both the military and on college campuses. Organisations that both have really strong reasons to not want serial sex-criminals around, and yet they keep going out of their way to protect them.
102, 110: Right, just like you can tell that nobody's warning women about getting raped, since it keeps happening.
113: Also, no one warns people about trolls on the internet.
111: I was just asserting that we're not actually looking at imprisoning 3% of all men.
Otherwise, we wouldn't have all these stop-and-frisks, arrests, shootings and whatnot.
...if we're not going to allow people to publicly make the case that womenAfrican Americans shouldn't get shitfaced around guys they don't trustwalk down the street in a straight line, minding their own business (and I understand why--inevitably that becomes the basis for victim-blaming) can we at least tell them that privately?
106: 103: oh sure. I just meant being of college-bound class doesn't solve this problem.
Ah, sorry, I misunderstood.
But right now, if someone says that, the "correct" response is "you miserable victim-blaming misogynist." I'm suggesting it's actually not horrible advice, but should be given in private.
Okay... you first. Let us know what the woman says (best if you can get her consent for that, natch). I'm particularly curious to know if she finds it surprising and life-changing to hear.
I don't have much to add here, but regarding colleges, I do think it's more important to encourage women to offer solidarity and support for other female students who get assaulted than just to focus on how they can get a gold star for winning at defensive modesty. Young men too. I'm sure it's not trivial to would-be rapists to know that victims tend to be isolated and mistrusted after the fact, and that there's a pretty significant taboo against discussing an assault you experience, because it's so common for people to freak out and assume that either a) it was so horrible that you'll easily press charges and get a conviction or b) if the police can't take care of it, then it's a private problem and they don't have the moral authority to give a shit about it.
Good luck with that.
Is that supposed to be a comment on political will or evidential standards?
lets just change the laws so these things are easier to prosecute
Changes such as what? The reality is that on a hell of a lot of these cases have no independent witness or evidence and involve victims under the influence of a substance known to screw with memory.
under the influence of a substance known to screw with memory.
Yeah, that's a really intractable problem with a culture where alcohol is the intoxicant of choice.
This is where the cock-cams come in.
Are there intoxicants that don't screw with memory?
104: If I remember correctly, there was no ecstasy found at all, just something date-rapey. I was kind of hand-waving because I don't remember exactly what the police found, just the party invitation and unease later. Here, college freshman, try this new mind-opening experience!
I sometimes wonder whether recordings are going to become even more ubiquitous at some point, like how everyone has a camera on them all the time but for say a watch that records audio and/or video.
124: I think most do so less than alcohol. The classic alcohol blackout -- walking around conscious and doing stuff but not retaining memories -- isn't characteristic of most other popular intoxicants I'm familiar with. Halcion or other sleeping pills, but not pot, or coke, and not even I think a lot of other downers, which might put you to sleep but don't mostly create blackouts.
125: ah. That is creepy! And god knows GHB (especially combined with alcohol) would make an effective (and very dangerous) date rape drug. But taken responsibility it can be great fun, kids!
"responsibly" not "responsibility" sheesh.
Someone who knows more about drugs than I do say something about 127, Sifu?
Literal blackouts may be somewhat specific to alcohol, but given two conflicting eyewitnesses at differing levels of sobriety, I'd believe the sober one over the one who'd used any of the substances you mention.
127. I believe cannabis has been shown to fuck your long term memory quite badly, but not short term, as in remembering what you did last night. Likewise acid, IME, and opium. I can't speak for cocaine, which I avoided because I disliked it.
Though I freely admit to never having read any research on the subject.
I also sort of wonder what percentage of self-reported blackouts are "real" (ie the blacked-out person genuinely wants to remember what happened, but can't). Just speculating as someone who's been puking drunk several times but never blacked out. Are some of them really... blockouts?
131: I wouldn't, or not terribly strongly. That is, I'd bet on someone stoned to have missed something happening because they weren't paying attention, but as between a sober person and a stoned person who both claim to have witnessed something and have conflicting stories, I'd be resolving that on the basis of who I thought was lying, not automatically in favor of the sober person. I don't really know coke users enough to have an opinion about coke.
But the general point is that alcohol has unusually severe memory effects in comparison to how much it incapacitates you, which really sucks for a crime that mostly needs to be proven by witness testimony.
130: I mean, except for anecdotally I don't really know. It certainly seems like a blackout drunk is one of the more powerful memory obliterators.
Lots of things (benzos, G, ambien, narcotics, etc.) have synergistic effects with alcohol that can get you to a blackout drunk stage a lot more quickly.
Actually maybe narcotics plus booze just makes you pukey?
131 is true for trivial events, I'm less convinced about important things. You'd remember being raped even if you'd smoked a ton of shit.
133: I can testify that they're real. I've lost memory on nights where I was drunk, but not remarkably so to the people I was with, and where nothing at all interesting happened (based on the accounts of people I'm willing to rely on). Not recently, but it has certainly happened. Can't say that no one's ever faked a blackout, but I can say that they do happen under circumstances where there was no emotional weight to the events of the evening.
65, 67: Well, I was going to say that part of my enthusiasm for this idea probably stems from the dearth of all-night/late-night diners & coffeeshops around here. I would venture to say that the one almost-all-night anarchist collective coffeehouse here has probably prevented more than a few rapes and innumerable deaths-by-exposure.
132: Really, you'd trust your short-term memories the exact same the next morning even if you'd been on LSD? Our experiences differ, let's put it that way. Maybe not about larger-scale events like what places were visited/which people were there, but definitely about smaller things.
I've certainly had the experience of smoking (moderate amounts of) cannabis and drinking alcohol and getting a very pronounced synergistic effect. Not so much blacking out as being physically/mentally incapacitated for long enough that lots of bad things could have been done to me without much of a response on my part.
I left a comment here that I was too drunk to remember leaving. I spelled everything correctly. People with me said I was pretty drunk and asking if anybody wanted to start a fight. Still, I wasn't drunk enough that anybody worried about letting me walk off to bed by myself.
135.2 Is probably the key to it. I've been high with and without alcohol, and if you get drunk while high you can pass out with the best of them. Also, you're not paying attention to how much you drink.
144 reminds me, was there any resolution to the questions about libertarian hair and all that?
I've certainly done things while dressed as Santa that I had no memory of later.
Maybe we should tell college kids to stick to three-two beer until they are older. It's really hard to hit blackout before nausea on that.
147: You mean like going down chimneys and giving presents to kids all over the world?
Possibly there's individual variation on this.
I don't think I've ever lost memory from alcohol, even on the rare occasions where motor skills were noticeably impaired (I couldn't roll a smoke, probably would have had trouble walking a straight line). Acid on the other hand-- I remember huge flying cities much more clearly than where I was or who I was with.
148: That shit is the worst. "Gets me fat without getting me drunk" is basically the exact opposite of what I want in a beverage.
Obviously you'd remember a huge flying city more than who you were with. How often do you see a flying city?
Is seeing weird things flying a common dream motif? I often have hyperrealistic dreams where I see delivery vans flying, on their normal rounds. Way up high in the air. And it's just totally mundane within the logic of the dream. Weird.
I often have hyperrealistic dreams where I see delivery vans flying, on their normal rounds. Way up high in the air.
You're Jeff Bezos?
153. Yes, it indicates that you're worried about your finances. I can help you with that, as I have a client (very close to The royal Family) who needs to deposit 7$US Millions into an account for tax purposes.
I think there's a really substantial variation when it comes to losing memory from alcohol. I've never really lost any memory from drinking. I've had somewhat hazy recollections of what happened the next day, but only ones where the haziness in recall was consistent with the haziness at the time.
On the other hand one of my friends in college was infamously easy to tip over into the blackout stage. Easy in that a level of intoxication that would significant but not dangerous for other people would put him in a state where, despite being capable of walking around, holding conversations, and so on, would clearly not be forming memories in the normal way anymore. (On at least one occasion I'm pretty sure he lost a full day - as in, the day for him went sun is rising/sun is setting without anything in between.)
That's sort of on the line between "amusing story" and "why we staged an intervention".
The early morning part makes it seem that way, but it was during a (very) traditional 'drink through the day' event* so starting out was less 'potential problem' and more 'moderately enthusiastic participation.'
(And the effect often ended up back dated for him, so he probably hit that point around noon but lost a bunch of the memories prior to that.)
*College!
I once, long ago, blacked out and was apparently lying naked and injured in the hallway of my apartment building for hours (I only remember waking up in bed the next morning, with mysterious scratches all over one side of my body). As far as I know I wasn't sexually assaulted by anyone except myself, however.
Social dosing with LSD would probably not help with the reliable witness problem, but it might reduce the expression of aggressive behavior by sociopaths.
On the memory problem: my impression is that rape kits aren't properly and regularly used, when women go to a counselor or take some first tentative step after an incident. I know the kits can't fully describe whether or not there was consent, but getting a professional to poke around can help answer questions about whether or not she's banged up down there. And if you get statements from all parties involved before telling them the results of the rape kit testing, then you can better catch people in blatant lies?
Media often portrays rape as though there are an awful lot of quick fixes that would improve prosecution and conviction rates, and that it's a problem of buy-in by the forces that be.
An intoxicant that improved your memory would probably be even less popular than weak beer.
162: All of that is probably true, *and* my understanding is that rape kits can be pretty darn invasive all by themselves.
I counted once and came up with 9/12 of my closest female friends/relatives having been sexually assaulted. 0 of them were reported to authorities. I think two were reported to a crisis hotline/counselor type person. It was super depressing.
Then I realized that 2/3 of my (male) romantic partners had been sexually assaulted. Also depressing.
On the more positive note, my sense is that social media is playing a really powerful and affirming role for survivors (and by extension their wider audience of readers) of assault and/or harassment. It's pretty cool. Now it would be nice if Twitter would publicly adopt Block Together so people can more easily share lists of known Twitter harassing accounts with each other.
I definitely support increased criminal prosecutions and the gathering of evidence that makes that possible. But if we're truly in a world where you have a 1/5 chance of being raped/assaulted in college as a woman and 1/17 or so of the guys around you is an actual rapist/assaulter, then I just don't think that criminal law is the main part of the answer.
Somehow the entire social space that's set up to allow these things to happen needs to change. Whether that's through shaming individual guys, changing norms around talking about the issue, increasing awareness at parties, or just changing the location and format of parties, I dunno. But at these rates it's a way way way bigger issue than increased criminal prosecution can handle.
I meant to say pretty much all of 162.1. I don't really know about 162.2
And also I agree with Halford (copyright notwithstanding) in basically every post in this thread. Comity!
Given 159, Witt, that means that you also blacked out from drinking and woke up naked in an apartment hallway covered with mysterious scratches.
Well, yeah. Unfoggedycon was a hot mess.
You know how Facebook recently started plastering everyone's news feed with a bunch of "recommended articles" that are basically ads? It's telling me to try ayahuasca.
That's what you get for posting about cutting off the last joint of your little finger.
170 You should. It's pretty great.
167: Trust a lawyer to twist a simple word like "agree" into a completely different meaning. When I said I loved the lawyers the other day, I did specify public interest ones, you know.
Listen. The men in your lives will tell you what they do. As long as the R word doesn't get attached, rapists do self-report. The guy who says he sees a woman too drunk to know where she is as an opportunity is not joking. He's telling you how he sees it. The guy who says, "bros before hos", is asking you to make a pact.
This seems very plausible to me, but I have to confess I've never overheard or heard anything like it.
Listen. The women you know will tell you when the men they thought they could trust assaulted them; if and only if they know you won't stonewall, deny, blame or judge. Let them tell you that they got drunk, and woke up with your buddy on top of them. Listen. Don't defend that guy. That guy is more likely than not a recidivist. He has probably done it before. He will probably do it again.
Again, I haven't heard it. And this is more problematic, because the suggestion would be that I haven't because of a "stonewall, deny, blame or judge" expectation I'm creating.
But I don't think I am. I belong to what I think must be a very large class of people who just don't belong to groups where these confidential conversations, and the events they refer to occur. I never experienced dorm life as an undergrad, which I think must be the most likely place. I've never belonged to groups of single friends, or roommates, or any of those arrangements which seem to be taken for granted in these examples.
I wouldn't dream of suggesting that the lone, isolated woman or man never experiences sexual assault; I know they do, often from complete strangers--more of the world to them anyway. But the dynamic is just different.
31: I wish that were true (that "don't rape people" ads are effective), but the link is looking at a dataset where n=2, AND it's a time series. (There's a slightly more serious treatment of the data here.)
Media often portrays rape as though there are an awful lot of quick fixes that would improve prosecution and conviction rates, and that it's a problem of buy-in by the forces that be.
Largely those media accounts don't know what they're talking about. Shocking, I know.
See, for instance, the pearl clutching around the small percentage of rape kits that are processed for DNA. Two big reasons for this are 1. Uncooperative victims. I don't blame any victim for not wanting to go through the gauntlet that is a criminal legal proceeding but if a victim is unwilling to even call a detective back then there's no point in processing a kit on a case where the victim is clearly not going to go to court. 2. As has been pointed out, only a small percentage of cases are actual stranger by force type cases. It's common that the conflict arises in these cases from the question of whether the encounter was consensual, not whether it occurred. Why on earth would we process that kit? DNA will establish a fact that is already not in dispute.
Did you read the first paragraph of 162? Not that I'm well-informed but I hazarded a guess for the stuff you're talking about.
177: I'm trying to resist teasing you a bit for those.
There's no teasing a feminist.
Re: prevalence of drug-facilitated rape since ajay's 12 is still bugging me, this report from 2005 published by forensic researchers says 23.5% of victims studied said they believed they'd been drugged, and 4.5% showed either rohypnol or GHB in urine tests. Pages 98-9 show breakdown by age - younger women were more likely to believe they had been drugged (so more likely to be unsupported by forensic findings). However, their 4.5% is likely underestimating, because GHB has a detection time of 10-12 h, and median time interval from assault to clinic was 13-14 h.
12 wasn't meant to imply THIS NEVER HAPPENS; just that it happens a lot less than people think. Especially as not everyone who thinks they've been drugged will go to A&E and report it. But, as the conversation above makes clear, "I was drugged" is a good way of avoiding what would otherwise happen, viz. being blamed for drinking too much.
I also sort of wonder what percentage of self-reported blackouts are "real" (ie the blacked-out person genuinely wants to remember what happened, but can't).
I went through a stage in which I blacked out disturbingly easily, and would go on in that stage for hours, it not being apparent to anyone else that I was more than drunk. In one of these instances I slept with a guy I'd been half in love with and had wanted to sleep with for years. Woke up in bed with him and with no memory of the night before. I can't even begin to describe how upset I was.
No traumatic events have, as far as I know, occurred, but I occasionally have lapses in memory when drunk. Not even that drunk. I've had it happen after a couple of mid-week pints with a friend, not a heavy drinking session. Not total blanks, but really, not much there at all. I don't know if I'd be unaware of any major event that happened, but it's certainly much blanker than I'd like. Ironically, I didn't get those when younger and I drank much much more.
I sometimes wonder if it's sleep-deprivation related, post-baby and all that.
182: He wasn't dead or anything, was he?
183.2: I'm barely able to remember anything from that period and I basically didn't drink then.
I have no good solution to this problem. I only want to say that I find it really depressing that a good, but not great, student who graduates from Barnard and isn't a good networker may have trouble getting a job as an administrative assistant--never mind some kind of career job.
Also, I've had some job situations where the people who were able to think for themselves got themselves into trouble.
186.2: clearly we need to spend more time advising women not to think so heavily.
188: Sometimes it feels like it. Unless you're close to the top.
188: Because they might blank when they bang a hot guy and be totes distraught about losing the memory.
See, for instance, the pearl clutching around the small percentage of rape kits that are processed for DNA.
See this pearl clutching!
After Detroit finally processed its backlog, 100 serial rapists were detected and 14 prosecutions were filled. One of these offenders, whose original victim had filed a rape kit more than ten years ago, went on to rape three other women.
You may not be able to detect consent, but you can determine if someone's leaving a trail of women who claim that he raped them.