How to Get Raped at College

Posted on | July 13, 2014 | 106 Comments

A long article in the New York Times describes the fate of “Anna,” who was a freshman last fall at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (tuition $46,852 a year). This elite liberal arts college in Geneva, N.Y., has an enrollment of 2,300 students and, apparently, a campus culture that turns a blind eye to illegal underage alcohol consumption. So when a girl shows up as an 18-year-old freshman . . .

She had entered what is commonly known as the Red Zone, a period of vulnerability for sexual assaults, beginning when freshmen first walk onto campus until Thanksgiving break.
“Students arrive and you have a new environment, new social circle and the fear that goes with new expectations,” said Robert S. Flowers, vice president for student affairs. That can lead to experimentation, including excessive drinking and attendant problems.
For that reason, the school held what students call rape seminars, the first in a program that, Mr. Flowers said, has made Hobart and William Smith a leader in preventing sexual violence.

Do these “rape seminars” warn freshmen girls against drinking rum and partying with football players at the Kappa Sig house? Two weeks after school started, that’s what Anna was doing:

Anna and a senior football player she had just met were grinding to the music, rubbing their bodies together. . . .
Anna said she had begun the evening drinking shots of rum mixed into Gatorade.

By the time police Sgt. Anthony Pluretti showed up at 2:10 a.m., Anna had reportedly had sexual intercourse — evidently including anal intercourse — twice with the football player, and had also performed oral sex on another player. Rather than this incident being investigated and prosecuted as a crime, however, it was handled as a school disciplinary matter by the college, and Anna was shocked by what she perceived as the unfairness of the proceedings:

The panel’s initial questioning was based mostly on the investigative work of campus officers who aggressively sought out witnesses, followed leads and conducted interviews. According to the federal Education Department, a sexual-assault investigation typically takes around 60 calendar days. Hobart and William Smith did it in a little more than a week.
The hearing followed almost immediately. . . .
Anna was questioned first. “It was one of the hardest things I have ever gone through,” she said later, adding, “I felt like I was talking to someone who knew nothing of any sort of social interaction; what happens at parties; what happens in sex.”
She had to relive that evening through questions that jumped around in time, interrupted her answers and misrepresented witness statements. . . .
Two of the three panel members did not examine the medical records showing blunt force trauma — it was the chairwoman’s prerogative not to share them. Instead, the panel asked what Anna had drunk, who she may have kissed and how she had danced. It was, Anna said, as if admitting you were grinding — a common way of dancing — “means you therefore consent to sex or should be raped.”

You can read the whole thing. One wonders how the world could be arranged so that 18-year-old girls can get drunk at parties and “grind” with football players without the players inferring from this behavior that the girls are interested in having sex.

One also wonders why colleges are treated like bubbles where normal rules do not apply. In the normal world, sexual assault is a felony, and is investigated and prosecuted as such. On college campuses, it seems, sexual assault is treated about as seriously as laws against providing alcohol to teenagers, i.e., not seriously at all: “Oopsie! You got drunk. Oopsie! Is that a football player’s penis in your butt?”

See, there is an unspoken agreement involved: If parents are paying $46,852 a year to send their daughter to college, the college isn’t going to kick the girl out (and forfeit $46,582) just because her idea of fun is chugging rum at the Kappa Sig house. If it weren’t for drunk freshman girls “grinding” on the dance floor, why would the guys at Kappa Sig — all of whom represent $46,852 in annual revenue to the college administration — bother throwing parties? And if the football players can’t take turns banging the drunk girl they picked up at the Kappa Sig house, what’s the point of playing football?

These are the implicit assumptions of 21st-century elite college life: Underage drinking and sexual promiscuity, for $46,852 a year.

If you don’t like that deal, go to community college. Full-time tuition at Fingers Lake Community College is only $4,022 a year, and it’s less than 14 miles from the campus of Hobart and William Smith Colleges. But you don’t get the social prestige of the elite liberal arts college experience by attending community college, and prestige is what these parents are paying $46,852 a year for, isn’t it?

Having your teenage daughter raped by football players at Hobart and William Smith Colleges is a luxury most people can’t afford.

UPDATE: Professor Donald Douglas at American Power:

I certainly don’t know what to believe, which brings me back to the notion of personal responsibility. Anna got herself into trouble. So many of these “rape” stories I read about are just like this. It always comes down to he said, she said, and alcohol is involved . . .

Alcohol is always involved in these stories, see? But colleges aren’t willing to discipline kids for underage drinking. If you want to stop “rape culture,” do something to stop “drunk culture.”

Category: Crime, Education, Feminism, Sex

Comments

106 Responses to “How to Get Raped at College”

DonaldDouglas
July 13th, 2014 @ 3:12 pm

Dude, I tweeted that to you last night lol!
Jeanette Victoria
July 13th, 2014 @ 3:27 pm

When I read the headline I figure it would be about some young feminists who got stinking drunk had consensual sex with a bunch of equally drunken men and is now crying rape.

Being a feminist means one is always a victim and men are always at fault
Robin H
July 13th, 2014 @ 4:40 pm

You have to wonder if the parents are even being informed by the school that there has been an investigation. Since they are over 18 there is no requirement to notify them. Why would any of the football players tell mom and dad, who might just cut off the money flow, what they are really doing in school.
robertstacymccain
July 13th, 2014 @ 4:54 pm

If you’ll read the whole story, yes, the parents were quickly informed of the investigation.
DonaldDouglas
July 13th, 2014 @ 5:31 pm

And a terrible investigation it was!
sarah wells
July 13th, 2014 @ 5:58 pm

Mike: You were extremely attractive, and as for distant and forbidding, on the contrary. But you also were a little the worse – or the better – for wine, and there are rules about that.

Tracy: Thank you, Mike. I think men are wonderful.
Matthew T. Mason
July 13th, 2014 @ 6:00 pm

Seems to me a real man would have distanced himself from a drunk female, as they cannot possibly be in a position to give a reasonable consent.

But then again…these are college kids.
laura r
July 13th, 2014 @ 6:15 pm

no one was raped. she went there drank & consented. boys are innocent.
laura r
July 13th, 2014 @ 6:16 pm

college kids & she was willing. no crime.
laura r
July 13th, 2014 @ 6:26 pm

tupac was jailed 1 1/2 yrs for rape. the girl even admitted she had oral sex w/him on the dance floor in a disco. she admits going to the hotel. she admits having sex w/him willingly. then the story derails. pac says he feel asleep for a while. woke up & she was upset, then she left. her story was that they had a group rape as 2 of his his friends were in the other room, after she consented to pac. this was a sue op, she may have been looking for a payoff. he was arrested the next day. for this crazy stuff he gets 1 1/2 yrs in jail. instead of rape they changed it to “inappropiate sexual contact” she wasnt hurt physically there was no proof. new trend? act like a whore & then press charges?
sarah wells
July 13th, 2014 @ 6:29 pm

Liz: The little dears.
Robin H
July 13th, 2014 @ 6:32 pm

I missed that in the article.
Coulter76
July 13th, 2014 @ 7:36 pm

This girl was not raped, she got drunk and started having random sex.

I think 90% of “rapes’ on campus are girls getting drunk and making bad choices they regret later, not men holding women unwilling women down while they’re screaming and having intercourse.

We are responsible for our bad decisions even when we’re intoxicated, otherwise drunk drivers would get a pass.
TheOtherAndrewB
July 13th, 2014 @ 7:58 pm

The common denominator in all of these stories is not “rape culture” but “dirtbag culture.” The women are stupid, cheap, sleazy drunks. The men are stupid, opportunistic, cheap, sleazy drunks. In other words, dirtbags. They meet, make a series of bad decisions, drink too much and someone ends up in legal trouble. Women, thanks to feminism, are voluntarily serving as unpaid exotic dancers and prostitutes (“grinding” is something that men pay a good deal for in strip clubs, where it is even legal to do so, but apparently it is free at college mixers.) Men, not being dumb enough to pass up such an opportunity, take advantage of their services for the price of some rum and Gatorade. Pathetic, the lot of them.
fourbten
July 13th, 2014 @ 8:05 pm

The real ass rape is $47,000 tuition at Hobart. Yeesh.
Julie Pascal
July 13th, 2014 @ 8:15 pm

Sorry… doesn’t sound like she started having random sex… it sounds like a bunch of guys started having random sex with her while she was really drunk. If the account is even somewhat accurate she never made any “bad decisions” to have group sex with the football team that she afterward regretted. She even called for help to the extent that a friend started looking for her. She didn’t decide, weeks later after deciding it wasn’t a great experience, that she was raped, she was crying and ill *and went to have a rape kit done* right away.

Yes, underage drinking to the point of drunkedness was a very bad decision. Making out with the cute guy who was paying attention to her was a really bad decision, and had she had sex with him it could be argued that it was also a bad decision. But on what planet is it even possible that she *made a bad decision to let the guys take turns while she was bent over a pool table?”

CLUE asshole… butt sex does NOT get girls off. She did not *decide* that it was a fun idea to do that and then regret it later. Are you insane?
RS
July 13th, 2014 @ 8:21 pm

It’s interesting that the football players were cleared, given the current witch-hunt environment that normally burns accused males at the stake with a minimum, if any, due process. I’m sure those who wish to advance the “rape culture”narrative will use this story to their advantage. Yet, the real issue seems to be that those who are well connected, i.e. in this case members of a successful sports team, seem to be able to avoid all the hassles ordinary schmucks have to endure. One wonders whether the result would have been different had the accused been three “nobodies” on campus. The evidence here seem more substantial than that in most such cases by several orders of magnitude.
Julie Pascal
July 13th, 2014 @ 8:22 pm

And the school told her not to trust the cops to treat her well, didn’t introduce the medical testimony, and didn’t wait for the results of the rape kit. The one guy claimed *he couldn’t get it up*… think about that one for a while. Did they attempt to match testimony to physical evidence?
Julie Pascal
July 13th, 2014 @ 8:26 pm

She was incapacitated. She called for help. She was anally raped in public over a pool table. I’m sure she was making aaaaalllll sorts of happy satisfied sexual noises. “Oh… that feels soooo gooood… do me again!”

Is this turned into total crazy town that you people can’t tell the difference between drunken sex with an ex boyfriend who you invite to sleep over and regret it the next morning, and being too drunk to fight back multiple members of the football team?
Julie Pascal
July 13th, 2014 @ 8:27 pm

The parents of the girl, or the parents of the football players?
Julie Pascal
July 13th, 2014 @ 8:36 pm

Just to be clear… BAD BAD BAD idea to get too drunk to defend yourself. Always. The whole rape culture thing that utterly refuses to tell girls how to defend themselves is EVIL. When you are incapacitated bad people can do bad things to you much more easily than if they had to fight you.

We’ve seen story after story about some girl who seems to have been convinced to confuse morning after regrets with rape. That’s wrong.

Not telling, explicitly *telling* girls that the best way to avoid rape, and avoid situations where they become victims is to not drink to drunkedness, is EVIL.

But having sex with a girl too drunk to say no is RAPE.

Because there is no way anyone can convince me that she had *even had* a drunk and happy conversation that went like this… “Butt sex withhh duhhwhooole football team… sounds groovy… *hic*… leshgo.”
Julie Pascal
July 13th, 2014 @ 8:38 pm

Exactly. Orders of magnitude.

Rape cases are criminal cases and should be investigated by real police and tried in real courts.

At the very least the police are less likely to be beholden to wealthy donors to the college.
RS
July 13th, 2014 @ 8:44 pm

At the very least the police are less likely to be beholden to wealthy donors to the college.

My thoughts exactly. One can imagine the disparate treatment between a male scion of, oh say, a wealthy family who resides in a compound on Cape Cod, which family has been engaged in politics since, like, forever versus a male from a Midwestern town who’s borrowing tens of thousands of dollars to attend the same college.
RS
July 13th, 2014 @ 8:45 pm

Everything in your comment is spot-on from “Just” to “leshgo.”
Ghost
July 13th, 2014 @ 9:02 pm

Every girl that has let me put it in her butt got off at least once every time. Lots of girls love anal.
laura_PH
July 13th, 2014 @ 9:25 pm

“Anna got herself into trouble.” Well, sorta. It’s a hard lesson for a young woman to learn that the good-looking, seemingly nice guy who keeps telling her how hot she is, isn’t actually her Prince Charming. As a responsible mother, I raised my daughter not to be a victim. Keep your head on a swivel when you’re out, don’t allow yourself to become impaired, never leave your drink unattended, and loads of other helpful safety advice because you CANNOT depend on the kindness of strangers. That’s important teaching for young women, and it’s not taking place because nobody wants to be accused of victim-blaming and slut shaming and whatever other feminist BS is being shoveled today.

But I don’t like to see what these young men did downplayed either. After reading the NYT account I don’t see how it can be described as anything but rape. She said no, she texted for help, etc. Pull a stunt like that with my daughter and I’d go after those bastards with a shotgun, whether she was drunk or not. Jail, schmail. It would be worth it.

Added: and colleges have no business doing rape investigation. Rape is a felony. Leave it to the cops.
Federale
July 13th, 2014 @ 9:56 pm

So, Anna was looking for girls who were not the Hobart type, and apparently found a lot of them quite quickly as they were joking together about rape statistics in the two weeks before she was raped. It appears she found quite a few non-Hobart types quickly and was able to joke about it. Then she waits six months to report a rape. Sorry, I just don’t believe her. It appears she got drunk and had sex, then wanted to get back at the college by going public. I expect a lawsuit and a settlement.
Julie Pascal
July 13th, 2014 @ 9:57 pm

It’s called faking it.
Federale
July 13th, 2014 @ 9:59 pm

Hey, Demoncrats never rape or kill anyone.
Federale
July 13th, 2014 @ 10:01 pm

The problem is that her good liberal parents told her that sex outside of marriage was ok. She was told she was mature enough to make adult decisions, but she was not mature enough, or moral enough.
SeanInNYC
July 13th, 2014 @ 10:01 pm

Given that college campuses, including this one, are run/administered by hardcore leftists with strong feminist leanings, I find it hard to believe these stories where rapists get off scot-free. I’m certainly open minded about it, but I am one to give the non-protected class of student the benefit of the doubt, because the colleges absolutely will not, college football player or not. Unless the players were black, in which case, the gal loses out on the protected-person lottery. If the college accuses black players of rape, then you’ve got all the Reverends comin’ in, evidence be damned, charging racism. Which, as we know, is far worse than sexism.
Evi L. Bloggerlady
July 13th, 2014 @ 10:04 pm

I am with Julie on this. If this was a member of any of your families there would be blood to pay (at least I hope so). This situation reminds me of this scene from the Godfather. Obviously you raise daughters not to get into these circumstance in the first place, but such things do happen (thank goodness rarely). And in the past such behavior would not be tolerated by most “gentlemen” but we are not raising “gentlemen” anymore at many of these universities.
Evi L. Bloggerlady
July 13th, 2014 @ 10:06 pm

Really laura r, you know that how? If it was your daughter would you blame her or the football team that teamed her on a pool table?
Julie Pascal
July 13th, 2014 @ 10:11 pm

She (or her friends at least) reported this immediately… police showed up that night… she got a rape kit that night.

She was told that she could *either* have the police investigate or let the school disciplinary apparatus take care of it. She chose the school. She should have chose the police.

Six months later she realizes that she really didn’t give up the right to have this go to the right place, but by then the prosecutors don’t think they have enough to get a conviction. It’s six months too late for eyewitness and other testimony to be assumed to be accurate.

We’ve read lots of accounts of supposed “rape victims” waiting for weeks or months to report the rape. Police showed up that night. She had a medical exam that night.
David R. Graham
July 13th, 2014 @ 10:13 pm

“… *made a bad decision to let the guys take turns while she was bent over a pool table?*”

Yes she did. She went to the party because she wanted to be liked and thought what would happen would accomplish that. When she experienced the reality, she panicked. She is not the problem, her mother is, and then her father.
Evi L. Bloggerlady
July 13th, 2014 @ 10:14 pm

A lot of these parties serve grain alcohol punch that after a couple of drinks might as well be a “roofie” Parents need to caution their daughters (and sons, who may not end up sexually assaulted but who fall of balconies or get DUI) of the dangers of binge drinking on college campuses. But with the exception of Belle Knox’s world, a drunk girl getting gang banged in public is the vast majority of times (like 95%) not consensual.
Evi L. Bloggerlady
July 13th, 2014 @ 10:16 pm

You are making Julie’s case for her. And if you ever went near a calf of mine you better hope that surgeon from Pamplona was near by.
Federale
July 13th, 2014 @ 10:18 pm

Also note the obsession by the NYT and the student newspaper on slut shaming. It appears they want women to be able to have sex with as many people as possible, but still to claim rape when they have regrets after sex.
Ghost
July 13th, 2014 @ 10:24 pm

How? She made a blanket statement about all women, then she goes on to claim that she knows more about my partners satisfaction than I do, and somehow I’m proving her point? I’m not saying this girl wanted it. I’m just saying that “PIB = rape” is not a valid argument.
SeanInNYC
July 13th, 2014 @ 10:26 pm

I just read the Times article, and the crux is “she was too drunk to remember details”. Including a huge multi-hour gap in time. While physical evidence indicates that a rape did occur, who knows when or by whom. She can’t remember, and there are no witnesses.

Sadly, this is a cautionary tale, a “teachable moment”. Don’t get drunk with people you don’t know, especially men you don’t know. Most men are going to do the right thing and treat you properly, but it only takes one (or in her case, two or three) in one hundred to ruin things for you.
SeanInNYC
July 13th, 2014 @ 10:29 pm

As a note, her friends called the campus police, she was too blind drunk puking over herself. There are strong odds that had her dorm-mates not been so “concerned”, this never would have been reported, since she doesn’t seem to remember much at all.
SeanInNYC
July 13th, 2014 @ 10:32 pm

If “player 1” had sex with her at 9PM, which she actually remembers, and continues to have sex with her at various periods during the evening, even when she becomes blind drunk, is the blind drunk sex “rape”, but the earlier sex ok?
Julie Pascal
July 13th, 2014 @ 10:37 pm

Sorry… I’ve been to parties. Not many mind you, but I have been to parties. I’m pretty sure that attending a party is not consent for sex with whoever happens to be there and who wants the next go.
Julie Pascal
July 13th, 2014 @ 10:45 pm

If she just had sex with “player 1” I think that there would be a reasonable case for “regrettable drunk sex”. Yes, it could probably be argued that she had consented earlier and while having sex with a blind drunk person is rape, he could quite reasonably argue that he didn’t know how drunk she was. It would be more of a he said, she said issue.

When she’s puking blind drunk and doesn’t remember “player 2” and “player 3” and is rescued by her friend and taken away while the football players are apparently taking turns… the notion of consent seems pretty clearly moronic.

And if we’re worried about the unfairness of all parties being drunk… she gets raped as punishment for her sins, and they ought to be in prison for theirs.
M. Thompson
July 13th, 2014 @ 10:47 pm

Part of the problem is the neo-prohabitionists won’t allow an appropriately healthy culture of responsible alcohol use to develop.

Also, it’s the assumption that a frequently sheltered (often to get into these colleges and universities) 18 year old is fully cognizant of the risks of the world is ridiculous.
Julie Pascal
July 13th, 2014 @ 10:49 pm

And then they encounter the message that it’s wrong for anyone to so much as suggest that they behave responsibly… or avoid ever ever ever drinking from a punch bowl!
Evi L. Bloggerlady
July 13th, 2014 @ 11:01 pm

Some girl at a frat party gets blind drunk and ends up getting trained on a pool table and you think that equals consensual sex? If you and your girlfriend are into that enough that, fair enough (what do I care), but you are also a pig for your comment (and I suspect don’t have a girlfriend anyway).
Evi L. Bloggerlady
July 13th, 2014 @ 11:04 pm

Mary Jo Kopechne is unavailable for comment.
Ghost
July 13th, 2014 @ 11:08 pm

No, evi, that’s not what happened. If you read Julie’s post to the end, her proof that this was in fact rape is that no girl wants to have anal sex. That’s the only point I was arguing. Try following the conversation next time, and you won’t look so foolish. I’m not the one arguing that every anal encounter is rape.
robertstacymccain
July 14th, 2014 @ 12:38 am

If only 1% of college boys are potentially rapists when drunk, girls who attend a party with 100 drunk college boys are playing a risky game.