What Is it With College Men and Unconscious Women?
Posted on January 28th, 2015 in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
A 19-year-old Stanford (now ex-Stanford, actually) student has been charged with “rape of an unconscious woman” and “sexual assault with a foreign object,” according to the Los Angeles Times. The student was a swimmer who’d been, apparently, heavily recruited by the university, but not a fraternity member. He was a freshman, and freshmen at Stanford can’t join frats.
Early on the morning on Jan. 18, prosecutors say, two men riding bikes on campus spotted a man later identified as Turner on top of an unconscious woman. Turner ran away, but the pair tackled him. A third person called police.
Of course, this kid is innocent until proven guilty. But it’s good to read that, unlike at Vanderbilt, people who saw this happening actually did something about it. (Though we shouldn’t have to welcome that; it should be taken for granted.)
I still believe that rape on campus is an relatively rare phenomenon, and the statistics back me up. But one incident of sexual assault is too many, and in the interest of fairness, I think it’s important to point them out when they do happen. These stories are depressing—and reprehensible.
4 Responses
1/28/2015 11:49 am
Generally there is nothing about “college men and unconscious women”.
But the contrast between the available data and amount of press sexually assaulted college women attract indicates that going to college somehow places college women in a class which entitles them to greater concern than their counterparts who do not go to college.
If their is a scandal it is that the press - who almost assuredly went to college themselves - apparently does not care about the experiences of the women who did not.
1/28/2015 1:40 pm
Everything about the criminal justice system is altered in an ‘Alice-In-Wonderland’ way in ‘higher education, beginning with the fact that a lot of higher ed institutions have their own police department. Supposedly students at these schools need, or are entitled to, special treatment when they commit a crime.
Compare two people committing the same crime with all other circumstances being identical, aside from their race and the fact that one is a student and one isn’t… a poor black non-student and a white student (of any financial circumstance):
The poor black eighteen year-old male who is not a student gets run through the criminal justice system and ends up with a record which will tilt the already terrible odds of his succeeding even more against him, while the white eighteen year-old male will almost certainly escape any criminal prosecution and therefor any consequences affecting the rest of his life. Would someone please explain to me why that is fair?
The presumption is that students aren’t yet fully mature, so therefore they shouldn’t be penalized for immature actions, even if they are crimes. It’s this treating differing groups differently under otherwise identical circumstances that is at the root of many of society’s problems. Think about it: At 26 you are still a child for ObamaCare purposes; at 21 you are old enough to drink; at 18 you are an adult in terms of being allowed to vote and join the military; at 16 you may or may not be treated as an adult depending on the crime you commit; and a 14 year old girl is in many, if not most, or even all states considered mature enough to have an abortion without her parent’s consent or even their knowledge. Can someone please tell me when you really become an adult? Note that this is a non-exclusive list, and I may have gotten something wrong, but you get the picture. And we have similar inconsistencies for other situations…
For the record, I am a conservative male of pallor… right is always right, and wrong is always wrong, whether you are black or white, male or female, young or old, of one religion or another (or none at all) or anything else.
1/30/2015 7:50 am
Not only are cases like those at Stanford and Vanderbilt depressing and reprehensible, they are serious felonies that should be reported immediately to proper law enforcement agencies.
The state of Virginia may now be headed toward mandatory reporting. According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch (1/26), a Senate subcommittee on higher education has “approved legislation making the reporting of sexual assaults to police mandatory for public colleges and universities…. Lawmakers supporting the legislation said they do not want sex crimes adjudicated by campus administrators and student judicial proceedings.”
My impression (though I don’t have any supporting data) is that many if not most of the recent highly publicized and much-discussed Title IX campus sexual assault cases were not reported to the police in a timely manner.
1/30/2015 6:41 pm
RCane -
We have mandated reporters for all sorts of other things… the big question is why are higher ed officials exempt from being mandated reporters for alleged sex crimes?
How long is it before some guy who is disciplined (Google William Patterson University and rape) by a school when he has been given a clean bill of health by the legal system sues the school for violating his constitutional rights? They are effectively administering extra-judicial punishment without the benefit of due process. Perhaps that is why Duke settled with the lacrosse players, not that we are likely to ever know.