Sunday, July 22, 2018

You May Not Like It, But Here's the Answer to (At Least Greatly Reducing) College Rape and Sexual Assault

As we had noted in a previous post four years ago, rape and sexual assault is a persistent epidemic in the USA, including (but not limited to) college campuses nationwide.  Lately, the chattering classes have been endlessly wringing their hands about it for years, but little real progress has been made in recent years, and since the Trump administration began we seem to have even regressed a bit in that regard, the #MeToo movement notwithstanding.

Most rapes and sexual assaults, especially those involving college students on or near campus, are committed by people known to the victim, and many if not most of those involve alcohol to one degree or another, whether by the perpetrator, the victim, or both.  We should first and foremost note that the only thing that actually causes rape is the rapists themselves, period.   While alcohol (among other substances) can indeed fuel it and is often used as a weapon to incapacitate victims, rape would simply not happen without rapists, period.  And the onus should always fall on men not to rape in the first place, instead of falling on women not to "get themselves raped".  The fact that so many people still deny such an obvious truth in 2018 shows just how far we have yet to go towards eliminating or even reducing this epidemic, and those who blame or otherwise put the onus on potential or actual victims are in fact part of the problem.

We seriously need to drain the proverbial swamp of rape culture, yesterday, and thus revoke the rapists' social license to operate.  Culturally, we need to tackle the root causes of sexual violence by rejecting the highly toxic "commodity model" of sexuality and replacing it with the "performance model" (while also avoiding the negative connotations and pitfalls of the word "performance"), and more generally rejecting the "dominator model" of society and replacing it with the "partnership model".  And for alcohol, we need to recognize that while adopting a "Prohibition-Lite" approach of any sort is most likely to backfire and would throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, its link with sexual violence still needs to be dealt with in the meantime as cultural changes can take much time to occur.

So what measures can be taken in the very near term to quickly reduce or at least take the dangerous edge off of this seemingly intractable epidemic?  The reader may or may not like the answer, but here goes:
  1. Lower the legal drinking age to 18, yesterday, full stop.  The 21 drinking age makes drinking that much more dangerous than it has to be by forcing it underground, which can put young drinkers in more dangerous situations that increase the risk of sexual assault, and the law itself can be used as a cudgel to silence victims.
  2. Raise the tax on alcoholic beverages, both federally as well as at the state and local level (especially in college towns), with extra levies on bulk alcohol such as kegs, cases, and handles. Studies have shown a significant inverse correlation between alcohol prices and rape in general.
  3. Legalize cannabis for everyone 18 and older, yesterday.  Cannabis is clearly the safer choice in that regard, as it is highly unlikely to fuel violence or be used as a date-rape drug the way that alcohol all too often is.
  4. Pass "Yes Means Yes" laws (aka affirmative consent laws) similar to California's.  If properly written, these laws will essentially eliminate the concept of so-called "gray area rape" by putting the onus on the initiator of sexual activity to be sure that they actually have consent before proceeding further.
  5. Last but not least, hold the perpetrators accountable for a change, no matter how powerful or privileged they happen to be.  That includes enforcing both criminal laws as well as campus conduct policies to the fullest extent of the law.  No more Brock Turners.
As for the idea of colleges trying to influence upward the prices of cheap alcohol at parties (particularly Greek parties) that are typically $5 or so at the door for all-you-can-drink, that would be rather difficult to enforce in practice.  But if the drinking age was lowered to 18, most frats would likely end up having a "going out of business party" since their modern-day speakeasy services would no longer be necessary.  And those that remain would, in practice, throw less frequent parties and/or  ones with less beer (or liquor) to go around if the tax on such beverages is also hiked as well.

Doing these things will go a long way towards reducing the rape and sexual assault epidemic in the near term.  Anything less would be uncivilized. So what are we waiting for?

9 comments:

  1. I oppose Yes Means Yes laws. Those types of laws have no place in a free society. It's tolitharianism. The best approach in reducing rapes on universities is to always prosecute the perpetrators. Lowering the drinking age to 18 and increasing taxes on alcoholic beverages would also greatly reduce rapes on universities. Universities would then become safe. Victims of rape on universities should always call their local police department because university police departments have sometimes colluded with university faculty in hiding rape cases. The #metoo movement should not be used as a model because at the heart of that movement is misandry and not actually, interest in securing justice.

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  2. How exactly are Yes Means Yes laws totalitarian? And how is misandry at the heart of the #MeToo movement (as opposed to a few outliers). Please do elaborate.

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  3. Some women who report rape were not actually raped. Those women, many times, had consensual sex which they later regretted. Then those women report it as rape. In New York City, there was a young women in university who carried around a mattress with her everywhere she went to call attention to rape culture. There actually is no rape culture; Milo dispels that myth correctly. The young woman was not raped, she had consensual sex with a young man in university. It was a lie with misandry at its heart. The #metoo is also a movement with misandry at its heart. Some of the cases the movement considers to be sexual abuse actually are not. The movement is also vindictive before all the cases are heard out. Yes Means Yes laws shouldn't be instituted because the government shouldn't be involved in people's personal life, which is why its tolitharianism.

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  4. First of all, if by "Milo" you mean Milo Yiannopoulous, well, he is simply a trolling troll who trolls. Not exactly the most credible source. AFAIK Emma Skulkowicz (the now-graduated Columbia student who carried that mattress) was NOT actually shown to be a liar, since it is entirely possible to have consensual sex with a person on one occasion and still be raped by that same person on a different occasion.. Second of all, the "morning after regret" or "cry rape" narrative that MRAs and follow travelers like Milo lurrrve to shill is mostly bullshit. Not that it never happens, but according to Amanda Marcotte, cases of any guys being actually criminally convicted over such regret-inspired false allegations are in the too-rare-to-find category. Only about 2 to 8% of rape allegations are unfounded, and most of those are whole-cloth fabrications or mistaken identity, or perhaps confabulations, as opposed to consensual sex that was later regretted. Meanwhile, though about one in four women will be raped or at least sexually assaulted at some point in their lives, only a tiny fraction of actual rapes (about one sixth actually get reported), most of those don't result on conviction, and thus only about 3% of actual rapists spend any time in prison at all. Gee, I wonder why? Rape is an epidemic, while false accusations (especially the regret-inspired variety) are more akin to a very rare and bizarre disease.

    As for the #MeToo movement, a somewhat separate issue, there are some questionable cases that may very well not be true, but the bulk of the cases are mostly true so far AFAIK. While it is possible for the movement to be abused, at the same time we should still not let the fear of possible neo-McCarthyism chill and silence actual survivors.

    If simply requiring sex to be consensual (which is what a properly-written Yes Means Yes law like California's actually does) is "government interfering in one's personal life", well then...

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  5. https://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2014/09/30/californias-affirmative-consent-law-beyond-the-bullshit/

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/14/adults-hate-affirmative-consent-laws-the-college-students-i-meet-love-them/

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  6. Remember that the precursor to the #metoo movement was the Twitter hashtag #YesAllMen. This was right after the murders by a young man in California in 2014. The #YesAllMen hashtag was meant to implicate all men of violence against women, which is not true. It was later changed to #YesAllWomen but the point stands clear that misandry was the reasoning behind the precursor to #metoo. Rape cases should be heard with consideration from both the man and the woman because rule of law should require that both sides be heard with consideration. It shouldn't be questioned that I'm against abuse and violence against women but at the same time, I'm against regressive liberalism. Yes means Yes laws go against human nature, it's frankly dumb.

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    1. It was not "misandry" that was behind it, but rather as a rebuttal to the straw-man stock response #NotALLMen. True, #NotALLMen are rapists or otherwise engage in violence against women, and no sane person is arguing that. But #YesAllMen still have a role to play in fighting against such violence, deconstructing toxic masculinity, and dismantling the evil system of patriarchy that perpetuates it.

      Also, please elaborate on how affirmative consent laws "go against human nature."

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  8. I was recently thinking about this article again. To reiterate the difference between different types of rape laws, the following is a good summary:

    Force standard (archaic): No Means Yes
    Consent standard (current): No Means No
    Affirmative consent standard: Yes Means Yes
    MacDworkinist standard: Yes Means No

    The third item on the list, the affirmative consent standard, is the one that I support. The archaic force standard is problematic for obvious reasons, while "No Means No" is necessary and important but NOT sufficient. And the MacDworkinist standard is, to put it mildly, a logistical nightmare at best and a dystopian kettle of fish at worst.

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