I really liked this anti-rape PSA from New Zealand. It shows the lead-up to a rape, but then rewinds time and shows several different outcomes in which bystanders of one kind or another (a friend, a bartender, etc) step up in plausible ways and the rape never happens.
Several thoughts:
1) Although the scene shown has a female victim, I do appreciate that the narrator referred to male and female victims.
2) I came across this via Slacktivist, which also included this very well-done video focusing on bullying, but without the aspect of the time rewind and showing plausible ways bystanders could have changed the outcome. I missed that; the bullying video left me feeling rather sad and hopeless, while the “time rewind” video left me feeling as if there are actually ways to help that would matter.
3) For me, the scene depicted in the time-rewind video shows why the frequently-asked “if two people have sex while both are drunk, are they both rapists” question misses the point. In this video both the man and the woman have been drinking heavily, but there’s different kinds of drunk; he is engaged and goal-driven, while she is too drunk to do much but be led and respond to direct questions. If one person is so drunk that he or she is unable to meaningfully consent or understand what’s going on, as the woman in this video is, then what happens is rape – even if the other person is drunk.
If BOTH of them are so drunk that neither one of them is able to take the lead or make an active decision to have sex – in other words, if both of them were in the state of the woman in the video – then no sex is going to happen. They’ll pretty much just find someplace to sit down and that will be it until someone sobers up.
If one of them is, despite being legally drunk, sober enough to do what the man in this video does – take the lead, guide the encounter, and make sure that sex happens – then yes, that person has committed rape. (It doesn’t matter what sex the person is.)
On the other hand, if both people understand what’s happening, and enthusiastically consent to the sex, then it’s not rape at all. Even if both of them are drunk.
The problem with the self-protection rhetoric that is usually directed at women, aside from those that I pointed out in my comment above, is that it all-too-often veers off—intentionally or not—into a rhetoric of morality, one that judges women morally for the degree to which they do or do not take the preventive steps that whomever is speaking imagines they should have taken.
Maybe the worst example I’ve seen: I once got a many-times-forwarded email of rape prevention tips for women, that included the line “If you don’t have a cell phone, shame on you”. Let’s see if I can find it–yup, here it is. (You can tell I’ve just been waiting to bring this up. No, I didn’t have a cell phone at the time. It didn’t seem worth the cost, in large part because in most of my house, and about half of the areas I would be driving through, there was not enough cell phone reception to make a phone call.)
It also includes such helpful gems as, ” If you are walking alone in the dark (which you shouldn’t be) “, “Do not get on an elevator if there is a weirdo already on there. (of course bad men don’t always look bad)”, and “If you get on the elevator on the 25th floor, and the Boogie Man gets on at the 22nd, get off when he gets on”.
Various “helpful” relatives forward that stuff to all the young women in the family all the time. I think my favorite was the one saying that there are rapists who get elderly women to work as their accomplices. So if you see an elderly woman in a Target parking lot, and she asks for your help because her car won’t start, you should run! Because there’s a rapist hiding in the car, just waiting to jump you.
I also just remembered: in high school, we were required to take a self-defense course in gym. The teacher told me that, since I was “quiet,” I was more likely to be targeted as a victim. (Yes, I was already aware that I was likely to be targeted as a victim by the other kids in the school, but apparently that didn’t matter, since no one ever did anything about that.) She told me that I should vary the route I took to walk home from school each day, so that no one could stalk me. I asked how, exactly, I was supposed to do that, since my house was on the same street as the school. I don’t remember what she answered.
To use Yoffe as an example (not that I’m especially a fan)
Her column talked a lot about the relationship between binge drinking and victimization.
The response: victim blaming, rape apologia, and so on.
Why: She gave insufficient attention to rapists. And her comments about drinking (which, by the way, don’t seem to be under a lot of factual dispute) were “victim blaming.” And the fact that she didn’t spend half (60%? 70%?) of her post, focusing on what people want to write in their posts, is also a problem.
Never mind that there are (as there should be) plenty of threads that only attend to rapists. Never mind that she tried to qualify it a bit. No: apparently the insufficiently “comprehensive” discussion meant she was a rape apologist. Which is frankly insane: can anyone rationally read Yoffe’s and think she’s in favor of rape? That she is against punishing rapists? That she thinks it’s hunky-dory?
Can she talk about this for a minute, in one thread, without talking about what we need to do w/r/t men and society? At a level which will satisfy all folks? Apparently not. Must not be “comprehensive” enough. But of course the reverse isn’t true: we have about a gazillion threads in which Yoffe’s point of view is notably absent and unwelcome. Which is as it should be!! But requiring every speech to be sufficiently “comprehensive” is bollocks.
What she’s attacked for, at heart, is a tendency to try to work within the existing system, rather than to change it. IOW: kids drink. Colleges let them. Men are dicks. Women are targets. What’s the appropriate thing to do if you think that is reality?
So much of the antipathy towards Yoffe was more political than practical. It’s not that she’s wrong; it’s that her argument doesn’t work to support the larger goals of the feminist movement. She talked about what TO do; they want to talk about what we COULD do. Yes! Change society! Eliminate alcohol at colleges! Train men so that they don’t get pushy about sex! Eliminate the patriarchy entirely! All those are good things…. but must they be included in every single comment? How much introduction can smart people really need?
What’s wrong with advocating morality? Aside from rape, do you think it is objectionable to condemn drunks.
From the comments in the link closetpuritan cites:
Not a bad idea, but it doesn’t cover all the basis. If the targeting behavior is “they drop something in your drink when you’re not looking”, then trying to observe them directly is not going to help. If they don’t do anything until you’ve had half a dozen shots in 2 hours, all that helpful advice is going to go out the window because you no longer remember it or care.
From another comment:
Ha. Having dealt with the breed for a number of years now, both my own and others, I can tell you that subtlety is wasted on teenagers. Trusting them to “work out for themselves” is basing your kids’ safety on hope. Hope is not a strategy. Telling them plainly what happens when they do ‘x’ is.
Yoffe is doing nothing of the sort. What she is doing is telling kids that they need to take responsibility for their own actions so they’ll be less likely to be victimized by someone else’s. There are bad people in the world and your actions have got to be circumscribed – within reasonable limits – on that basis. That’s not “finger-wagging, shame-based anti-alcohol advocacy”, it’s sound, fact-based, non-judgemental and practical advice.
RJN:
I don’t see what’s wrong with my framing. People think we shouldn’t judge a rape victim on the basis of the morality of their behavior. I certainly agree. So do many other people, as the advice given these days to young women is more mechanical (e.g., “don’t drink until you’re blotto”, “hold your car keys so you can use them as a weapon”, “walk in groups”, etc.) than it is moral (“don’t stay out late and wear short skirts”). The advice given to young men to advise them not to be rapists tends to be moral – “You have no right to sex just because you paid for dinner”, “have respect for women”, etc. What’s wrong with that?
Perhaps. But that is not how Yoffe wrote her column, which is the topic at hand. She’s getting attacked for writing something entirely sensible on the basis of things that she in fact didn’t write. Because apparently telling young women the biological fact that they can’t drink as much as the boys can and the social fact that if they do they stand a higher risk of being sexually assaulted is “blaming the victim” and anti-feminist.
gin-and-whiskey @104:
If virtually any speech on this topic was sufficiently comprehensive, I’d agree with you. Instead, what we have is a giant corpus of people going “Women, if you just changed your behavior, the rapists wouldn’t get you!” and almost nobody talking about other ways to reduce rape. And–as others have said–it doesn’t help that the author of this piece has gotten heat in the past for bona fide victim-blaming. But speaking of a focus on rape victims vs a focus on everyone else…
That happens all the time–as lots of people on this thread have been telling you. What we can’t do, apparently, is talk about what people other than rape victims can do to prevent rape without talking about how women aren’t behaving correctly to avoid rape. For example: this thread was originally about bystander interventions, but it was bystander interventions on the behalf of a drunk woman. Now we’re talking about women’s drinking and its risk factors. (Obviously I’m engaging in the conversation, so I’m not saying it’s just the not-feminists who do this. But there is definitely a popularity differential between those topics.)
Re: Telling them plainly what happens when they do ‘x’ is.
Most girls who get drunk at parties don’t get raped, Ron.
Some of us are distinguishing between these two things, and some of us are not:
1) Ms. Victim, I think you should have done things differently and perhaps you would not have been raped.
2) Ms. Potential (Hopefully Never) Victim, I think you should do things differently to reduce the chances of being raped.
IMO, the first one is victim blaming.
IMO, the second one is not. Or if it is, the benefits of prevention outweigh the costs in most cases. (Not to mention that it is so incredibly common in other areas.)
But I don’t think that some folks here would even see those as different; am I correct?
An interesting thread on Feministe. note the post title (emphasis added.)
Stop telling women not to get drunk. It gives cover to rapists.
As I was saying…. We can disagree about whether or not the post is RIGHT, but why are we seriously disagreeing that there’s a large contingent of feminists who feel that the matter shouldn’t even be discussed?
Hector, at that point I was speaking generically on advising teenagers, not just on this particular topic. But in that case, ‘x’ would = “you stand an increased chance of being a victim of sexual assault”, not “you will get raped”.
This is not about telling women not to get drunk, but it’s interesting that people are having a similar conversation to the one that’s been happening here. From CNN: South African doctor invents female condoms with ‘teeth’ to fight rape:
The response from critics is remarkably similar to the responses G&W, along with a whole slew of others, objects to when people criticize the tell-women-not-to-get-drunk response:
The article does cite Kajja as acknowledging one benefit of the device. It does allow “justice to be served,” she said.
Alex:
What’s wrong with advocating morality? Aside from rape, do you think it is objectionable to condemn drunks.
I haven’t seen any rape prevention advice that I think is also relevant to morality. Even in the case of binge drinking, I would categorize it as enlightened self-interest–binge-drinking may seem fun at the time, but it’s not good for you (whether you’re a man or a woman, whether there’s any risk of being raped in that particular situation or not). And I certainly don’t think it’s immoral to wear short skirts, to take the stairs instead of the elevator, to not have a cell phone, or to walk alone after dark.
Just some thoughts. Not entirely certain where I’m going with this. Pretty much everything I know about teaching and educational psychology says that you shouldn’t tell people what NOT to do. No one really responds well to “Don’t,” and phrasing it that way make it seem like the assumption is that everyone is going to do it unless they’re told not to. So, “Just Say No” rather than “Don’t do drugs.” “Be a designated driver” and “Take your drunk friends’ keys” rather than “Don’t drink and drive. Is there a way of framing this without a “Don’t”? Everything I can think of, like the “Know your limits” advice that my parents gave me, assumes that most people will be drinking at least a little, once in a while, and that doesn’t seem like anything that could fly as a campaign aimed at the under-21 set.
(My parents let me drink at home starting when I was about 12. If they were having wine with dinner, then I was allowed a glass. If they were having beer, then I could usually have one if I asked, but I never liked the taste of beer. And I learned how different amounts of alcohol made me feel, in the safety of my home. They never let me get really drunk or anything, but I knew that, after one drink, I’d feel kind of sleepy, and after two drinks, I’d start saying things without really thinking about them first. Once I got to college, I never had more that three drinks in a night, while some of my friends would really have no idea where their limits were, and they’d have five or six drinks pretty quickly and then start feeling them all at once.)
Re: Everything I can think of, like the “Know your limits” advice that my parents gave me, assumes that most people will be drinking at least a little, once in a while, and that doesn’t seem like anything that could fly as a campaign aimed at the under-21 set.
I think the vast majority of 18-21 year olds do drink, and we should recognize it. The 21-year old legal drinking age is pretty much farcical anyway, and it’s past time we lowered the age back to 18, like most other countries seem to do.
The problem with ‘knowing your limits’ is that people who drink, generally drink *because* they want to ‘push their limits’. They *want* to overcome inhibitions, say things they wouldn’t normally say, do things they wouldn’t normally do, flirt with people they normally wouldn’t have the courage to flirt with, etc.. Most people who have a bunch of drinks on an evening out or at a party probably know exactly what state of mind they’re going to be in, and they deliberately want to get there. Which is fine. What they don’t want (and what they have a right to expect not to happen) is to be assaulted or otherwise taken advantage of.
So, yea, I don’t think ‘know your limits’ or any of this Emily Yoffee stupidity is is particularly helpful.
It would be helpful advice, in the alternative universe where nobody ever give that advice and the message is forbidden from the airwaves and logic does not function adequately to let anyone work out that “stumbling drunk = increased vulnerability to crime” on their own hook.
In this universe, everyone knows it. Ron, it may be that there are young people who didn’t hear it from their parents, or their teachers, or their school counselors, or the colorfully-clad rainbow mascots at the school assembly, or the PSAs on TV, or their peers, or just from seeing people get fucked up and then fucked over. Far more likely is that they did hear it, possibly with enough repetition to lead to deafness, and either chose to disregard it or assumed it didn’t apply to their immortal selves. Neither of those is correctable with another repetition.
So why not engage in the extra repetition just to be on the safe side?
Because a) the repetition takes time and energy away from messages that the young people might NOT have heard yet, and tends to deafen the listener towards the speaker because they’re reiterating something already heard, reducing future effectiveness of Sound Advice From The Elders, and b) because the repetition plays into the cultural assumption that it’s women to blame for women being attacked. Even a totally sincere person who does not mean that AT ALL is going to be heard as saying that on some level.
That’s a cost that might be worth bearing, if it was going to reduce rape. But it seems very unlikely to do so, and instead serves mainly to make women who have been raped feel guilty or worthless or deserving of what happened to them. The only people that makes better off are prospective rapists, and those people get enough breaks as it is.
Eh.
they hear it as an aside.
they see it in their peripheral vision.
But they don’t sit down and REALLY hear it. Nor do they all know it.
That’s why it is useful to take a bunch of kids (who all know what a condom is) and actually have them put one in a banana, and talk about STDs, and do everything possible to deal with a subject which is actually much more widely “known.” That is why it is useful to take a bunch of kids who all “know” about drunk driving, but who don’t really know until they walk through an accident, or try a tester to see their reflexes, and hear about the Safe Ride program, and so on. That is why it is useful to take someone who “knows” how dangerous cold water can be, and have them experience it in a safe situation, so that they are properly scared shitless.
And that is why it is useful to take someone whose only experience of college is what they hear through the high school rumor mill, and talk specifically about what does and does not happen, and what risks can and cannot be reduced, and how one might specifically act to reduce them.
If folks are against sex ed and driver’s ed and any other kind of public education which covers that sort of thing, then at least they’re being consistent. But rape is not some sort of exception to every single rule of thumb, though you’d think so if you read the feminist threads: apparently rapists act differently from all other criminals, and deterrence works differently from all other crimes, and talking about it produces different effects than for all other victims, and education has different effects than for all other issues, and so on.
G&W, I have never known a person to differentially alter their behavior by going from the ‘but this is SERIOUS guys!!!’ walk-through rather than from the pro forma lecture.
There are three categories of learner.
Category one is the person who, having heard a dispassionate and sober presentation of the facts, is capable of abstractly reasoning to the conclusion that the warned-against behavior is, in fact, genuinely dangerous, and – if their risk tolerance does not permit enjoyment of that danger – change their behavior to avoid the risk.
Category two is the person who will not learn from propaganda, but must directly and personally experience the consequence to learn. Take them on a thousand accident-scene walkthroughs; they will *learn* drunk driving = death when they bury someone they love, and not before.
Category three is the person who can’t or won’t learn at all regardless of the experiential load they take on.
Better/more thorough/more persuasive/more repeated classes or information sessions or propaganda beatdowns may impart greater grasp of factual data; they may fill in, at the margin, the edges of the young person’s knowledge base. They won’t do anything to modify behavior substantially. People do as they please and always will.
The earnestness, sincerity, and altruism of teachers does not usually translate into students deciding to change their behavior in the direction of greater safety, less fun.
The problem with ‘knowing your limits’ is that people who drink, generally drink *because* they want to ‘push their limits’.
And even if they don’t want to push their limits, they may not have a very good sense of what their limits are. Alcohol isn’t a precision drug whose effects can always be predicted, such that a college student is going to know exactly how drunk she’s going to be after consuming a given drink.
As to the “what if they’re both drunk” issue and a fascinating (highly unusual) scenario of bystanders, I recommend that y’all read up on the Athens, Ohio stuff.
Here’s the ultra-feminist side:
Why People Don’t Intervene When They Witness A Sexual Assault, And How We Can Change That
Here’s the “there does not seem to have been a rape” side:
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/11/is_this_a_campus_rape_well_no.html
here’s a local paper with a reasonably concise factual summary:
http://thepost.ohiou.edu/content/no-charges-filed-alleged-uptown-rape
Amp: what do you think?
Was the (apparently drunk) guy a rapist? Acting wrongly?
Does it bother you that there were hordes of people–feminists, mostly–who were apparently ready to conclude he was at fault:? Do you think you would have joined them, if you knew?
Are you OK with him being set free based on the testimony?
Ignore the third party testimony: if they had set him free WITHOUT the video and witnesses, would you think that this was justice gone wrong, or would you still be standing there saying “well, we don’t know if he did it?”
Absent the bystander videos, would you have been OK with hm being convicted, kicked out of college, or other similar consequences?
I find it compelling that there were so many folks who were apparently ready to jump on the bus but that a grand jury didn’t even find probable cause.
This is going to be yet another case of G&W trying to get me to answer questions in a simple yes-or-no style, and I’m going to annoy him by answering with “it depends” and “it’s nuanced.” Ah well.
G&W:
Was he a rapist? Legally, no. Morally, I don’t know. It’s actually not possible to say with absolute certainty one way or the other.
Should he have had sex with this woman, that night? With hindsight, obviously not. He either had sex with a woman who genuinely believes she was raped, or he had sex with a woman who is deliberately making a false accusation. In either case, it would be better if they hadn’t had sex at all.
I can say that, if all the descriptions are accurate, then she appeared to be consenting – i.e., she wasn’t struggling, she stroked his hair.
But is it possible that something that is actually a rape could appear to be consensual to onlookers? Absolutely.
Yes and no?
I mean, obviously I think it would be better if people were willing to withhold judgement or admit when they simply don’t know what happened. And I’d prefer for feminists as a massive group to be completely without fault. But I guess I’m used to the idea that people are imperfect and act in ways I disagree with. Although I disagree with the way that some campus feminists acted, I’m not “bothered” by this more than I’m bothered by a thousand other things.
Nope. I don’t think I would have joined them even before the Duke case, and I’ve grown more cautious since then.
Yes.
I can’t possibly say, since the first-party testimony is not available to the public (afaik). Based on the current evidence, I would say “well, we don’t know,” because the information available aside from the video and witnesses is nonexistent, at least to the public.
(Obviously, in cases where we don’t know if a crime happened or not, I think the correct outcome is for the accused to go free. )
You mean if there had been a trial, and at that trial a judge or jury had heard first-person testimony (as I have not), and decided he was guilty based on finding her testimony credible and not his? I would probably have been okay with that. I think juries are entitled to decide matters of witness credibility. But I also would have been okay with it if the hypothetical jury had found “not guilty.”
I have no idea what this college’s procedures for expulsion are. But I’m okay with colleges choosing to expel students they believe have raped another student, as long as the procedures are a reasonable search for truth and not just a railroad. And I think it’s okay if colleges, like civil lawsuits, use a lower standard than “beyond any reasonable doubt.”
Just as a side note –
The administrative procedures for expulsion from many different schools, public and private, primary, secondary, and college-level differ, near-universally, from what is considered criminal.
This is true in cases where I agree with the change (academic dishonesty codes), cases where I disagree with the change (zero-tolerance drug policies), and in cases where I might be conflicted one way or the other.
It’s not that I don’t see situations in which these administrative procedures could be oppressive … I certainly do. It’s just that I think it’s weird to say, “he could be kicked out of school despite being convicted of no crime!” Yeah … it’s not illegal to copy off a friend’s test, and it’s not illegal for a Jr High kid to give her friend a ‘Midol’.
—Myca
\
Not this time: this is an unusual (to put it mildly) situation. I’m not cross examining you, just listing a set of questions in advance for efficiency.
What makes you say “legally, no?” Do you mean “no, because the grand jury sez so,” “no, because what happened isn’t/shouldn’t be legally classified as rape,” or something else?
I agree that we can’t say with certainty one way or the other, but frankly we NEVER can do that on either side.
This is an important point, I think.
We can use hindsight to judge how we should change laws. But when it comes to judging the actual behavior of individuals it’s not reasonable to use it. You have to try to figure out what to tell people for a NON-hindsight decision matrix.
Or, he had sex with someone who didn’t think (at the time) that they were raped, and who at some point changed her mind and decided that she was raped. (I think that’s the most likely option.)
I mean, anything is POSSIBLE, right? It’s possible that people who verbally consent to sex and who actively appear to participate in it, while in public, are actually terrified and are just doing an incredibly good job of faking it.
But if you apply your usual “anything is possible but some things are damn likely” standard it seems odd not to think that this was a consensual act.
I am surprised.
After all, this isn’t the Duke case, where you had no underlying facts. The fact that they were wrong doesn’t mean that people were nutso for believing that some lax fratboys raped someone. This case has immediate evidence and witness statements which were public. The fact that so many folks appear to have entirely disregarded those facts (and I’m talking about things like “video,” not things like “testimony of the accused”) should be strong evidence that their perspective simply is untrustworthy.
I think that should be discussed. I think that feminists generally should be appalled at this, because it represents (to me) serious evidence of the desire for a narrative eclipsing the desire for truth.
Not surprised. Goad to have it confirmed though ;)
that was a poorly written question on my part.
Let me put it differently: The feminist groups who (in complete contradiction to the evidence) concluded that he was “obviously” a rapist. WITHOUT that evidence, it’s quite possible that those groups would have managed to prevail: he’d be punished.
The problem is that the agenda of those (factually-disinterested) folks is the underlying motivation behind things that I complain about like, say, Title 9 changes. You don’t seem to think those are a problem: I say “well, any policies which are enacted by folks who think like this are a scary thing.”
Let’s apply hindsight for a moment–not as a means of judging decisions, but as a means of evaluating process. We know that in this case, the jury (who saw all of the evidence) didn’t even find probable cause. We can strongly suspect that the evidence was a bit part of the jury’s decision.
What concerns me–and what should concern you–is the question of “what happens absent those videos?”
gtg. more later.