An article by Robin Wilson in the Chronicle of Higher Education appeared just after my last blog post, about the gray areas surrounding the matter of consent to a sexual encounter. Wilson’s article speaks to very much the same topic. Even the article’s original title has been at issue: it was first listed as “When Does Unwanted Sex Become Rape?” but, at the actual site, the article’s title has been revised to “Colleges Wrestle with How to Define Rape.” The controversy over the title distills two ways of thinking about sexual assault. Some people, most of them supportive of an affirmative consent policy, would say that, without question, rape is ANY unwanted sex. Other people acknowledge the possibility of ambiguity, for men and women alike, about whether sex is wanted; for those people, unwanted sex isn’t necessarily rape. [Read more…]

In a recent piece for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Susan Dominus writes clearly and movingly about being at a loss for words when, years earlier, she wanted to interrupt an undesirable sexual encounter at a college fraternity party. She didn’t use “no,” she says, because of its “mundane familiarity.” For other women, she asserts, “no” seems too “confrontational.” Dominus calls for another way of signaling ambivalence about an impending sexual experience—something of a safe word, like “red zone,” that both parties would understand. The difference between “red zone” and “no” or “stop” is that it conveys not outright repugnance, but something much closer to the truth—uncertainty and sensitivity to potential emotional danger. [Read more…]

A friend of mine tells me that once, in the seventies, when a conference of school administrators drew to a close somewhere in Iowa, he had the responsibility of driving Bill Cosby to the airport in his beat-up Toyota Carolla. During the drive Cosby said nothing. Nothing. Not hello. Not thank you. Not good bye. In some recent interviews, when asked about allegations of his sexual abuse, Cosby has clammed up again. One filmed interview shows an Associated Press correspondent asking Cosby about the barrage of accusations piling up on his doorstep, to which Cosby says, “There’s no response. . . . There is no comment about that.” Then he tries to bully the reporter into excising even the question he hasn’t answered from the record. [Read more…]

Here is a spine-chilling statistic, lately published in an op-ed piece for the New York Times by Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld: “only 5 percent or less” of college women who have been sexually assaulted report the incident to police.  That’s in contrast to the approximately 35 per cent of sexual assaults and rapes reported to the police nationwide, a statistic that’s nevertheless disturbingly low. Rubenfeld, who has come under attack for his analysis of “consent” and of the role alcohol plays in sexual assaults on campus, cites “low arrest and conviction rates, lack of confidentiality, and fear they won’t be believed” as the main reasons women choose not to pursue criminal charges. These deterrents to reporting recall Davidson College Police Chief Todd Sigler’s analysis, cited in the first of the four posts on this blog about this question (9 Nov. 2014). Very probably, instances in which students have been harassed or assaulted by professors and college staff are even less frequently reported. Another reason for such low reporting and complaint rates is campus culture, both student culture and faculty culture. [Read more…]