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”

robertstacymccain
July 14th, 2014 @ 12:46 am

The administration is trying to Protect the Brand. The whole point of dealing with these accusations in a disciplinary forum, rather than calling the cops and treating sexual assault as a crime, is to prevent the school from public scrutiny. It’s basically a cover-up — a conspiracy to obstruct justice — so that the school doesn’t acquire a reputation as a place where rich kids spend four years getting drunk and fornicating every night.
laura r
July 14th, 2014 @ 12:57 am

yes i would. and what kind ofgirl gets drunk& grinds her body w/a strange boy. she wasnt forced into having sex. no violence. she learned a lesson. you pay your $ you take your chances. she behaved like a whore.
laura r
July 14th, 2014 @ 12:58 am

how many girls w/there besides her? there may be details i dont know. all i see is what this writer says.
laura r
July 14th, 2014 @ 1:01 am

there IS NOT RAPE CULTURE. just the situations these girls create for themselves.
laura r
July 14th, 2014 @ 1:05 am

100% correct. i have no compassion for the girl. free lap dance free sex then oh oh i didnt remember thelast 2- or i changed my mind after #3.
Julie Pascal
July 14th, 2014 @ 1:27 am

She can’t remember but they’ve got semen from three guys… they have physical evidence. (Unless I read that wrong from the story.) She doesn’t have to *remember* who put semen in her butt… that’s what rape kits are for.
Julie Pascal
July 14th, 2014 @ 1:33 am

And yet you *know* she consented and she deserved every bit of it.

I’m pretty much convinced that you’re only here to prove that “those people” really do blame rape victims who obviously deserve to be raped.
Julie Pascal
July 14th, 2014 @ 1:36 am

And whores deserve it.

Like when a good girl trusts the wrong guy and lets him buy her a drink and he drugs her, she behaved like a whore. Or if she goes someplace to kiss and grope a little, she’s a whore… deserves to be raped. How do you feel about short dresses, laura?
laura r
July 14th, 2014 @ 1:40 am

this is not the same as being jumped on the street. the artical was also unclear. when will a message be sent to girls that THAT THEIR BEHAVIOR is inviting this kind of thing? seems everyone there was drunk. they did take advantage thats for sure. maybe she will learn not to send mixed signals?
laura r
July 14th, 2014 @ 1:41 am

she didnt drink spiked punch. why cant you stay on topic? you are all over the place.
Julie Pascal
July 14th, 2014 @ 1:43 am

I know that neither women nor men have their primary sex nerves any place suited to reaching an orgasm that way. That’s what ‘reach arounds’ are for. Yes, some people like anal and find it arousing, but sorry, dude, unless you were also touching other parts, your accommodating girlfriends were lying to you.
Julie Pascal
July 14th, 2014 @ 1:45 am

There’s not a rape culture, but there is rape.
laura r
July 14th, 2014 @ 1:47 am

not prison but maybe sued.
Julie Pascal
July 14th, 2014 @ 1:52 am

Who says she didn’t drink spiked punch? Or at the least, punch that was far far more alcoholic than she expected?

Girls with any sense *should not get drunk* because it makes them vulnerable, unable to fight back and pretty much unable to resist. What it doesn’t do is mean they consented to sex.

Being dumb and getting drunk is not consent, no matter how much you want to argue that it is.
laura r
July 14th, 2014 @ 1:52 am

we were never raped or had attemped rape. pushy boys- yes but never anything like i read about now. if i was rubbing against someone i WOULD EXPECT that we would go home together. i didnt behave that not my style, but im makig a point.
Julie Pascal
July 14th, 2014 @ 1:54 am

I’m just trying to clarify where you draw the line of “behaved like a whore.” Goes off alone with a guy? Wears too much make up?
laura r
July 14th, 2014 @ 1:56 am

it is. its historical. drunk girls & trampy behavior.
laura r
July 14th, 2014 @ 1:58 am

keep up w/the plot reread the artical. stop deflecting. more ple like you more drunken girls. stop always blaming the boys.
Julie Pascal
July 14th, 2014 @ 2:00 am

And she may have expected to have sex WITH THAT GUY…

No one is saying that she didn’t make herself vulnerable.

And all I’m saying is that getting drunk isn’t consent to be passed around while you’re too plastered to resist. And I think it’s nasty that you seem to be arguing that it is.
K-Bob
July 14th, 2014 @ 2:00 am

From a purely crass, cold evaluation of those years, all I remember about the interactions between men & women at college was that drunk chicks were not nearly as satisfying as an actual relationship.
Arguments and all.
Julie Pascal
July 14th, 2014 @ 2:09 am

Did I say girls should drink?

You’re arguing that a drunk woman can be used for sex *because* she is drunk, and the guy is not then a rapist, *because* she was drunk.

Drinking is stupid, like walking in a bad part of town at night, but the person who goes…yay! drunk pussy, I’mma stick my thing in there, yee-hah!.. Is. A. Rapist. Every bit as much as the person who goes… hey… I’mma take that wallet, hand it over… is a criminal and can’t make the excuse that the dummy came to the wrong part of town and deserved to be mugged.
Ghost
July 14th, 2014 @ 3:55 am

Lol that’s genius, really. Lying to me about how much she thoroughly enjoyed it will surely dissuade me from ever trying that again. “I’ve never Cum so hard in my life” is usually what you want to tell your partner if you never want them to do something to you again.

And try looking up anatomy sometime. There are definitely erogenous zones back there.

So, to recap, you were simply talking out of your ass. Glad we cleared that up.
Quartermaster
July 14th, 2014 @ 6:42 am

True. But that does not negate David’s point.
Evi L. Bloggerlady
July 14th, 2014 @ 8:39 am

laura r, you are some troll (maybe Bill Schmalfeldt).
Evi L. Bloggerlady
July 14th, 2014 @ 8:41 am

Julie, laura r is a troll. Possibly Bill Schmalfeldt who enjoys playing this roll. Ignore him.
Evi L. Bloggerlady
July 14th, 2014 @ 8:44 am

Bill S. …I mean Ghost…stop masturbating furiously over this thread. It is disturbing. As soon as you got hot over “anal” I knew it was you.
Escher's House
July 14th, 2014 @ 11:02 am

The only surprising things about this story are:

(1) I’d never heard of Hobart & William Smith Colleges until reading this post. I’m wondering how elite this liberal arts college really is.

(2) Hobart & William Smith Colleges has a football team? And fraternities? How? Why?
Art Deco
July 14th, 2014 @ 11:11 am

Upstate New York native tuning in here.

The stock-in-trade of the Community College of the Finger Lakes (and any like institution in New York) is vocational training. They offer arts-and-sciences degrees to an odd minority, but I believe those are for those on a way station to baccalaureate granting institutions. Hobart and William Smith is unusual in that it’s business is strictly academic arts and sciences and fine arts. They had a public policy program at one time, but that’s as close as they got to any sort of professional certifications. Different clientele just on that axis. Also, as vocational institutions, the community colleges are open enrollment institutions that prepare people for skilled-wage earning occupations, not salaried employment. You go to a community college in that area to learn bookkeeping or the nursery business or veterinary technics, i.e. good things to know, but seldom on the agenda of people who can pony up $47,000 per annum.

The true cheap seats analogue to Hobart and William Smith would be the State College at Geneseo, which is fifty miles to the west. It has much more of an arts-and-sciences emphasis than the other state colleges (though it has professional certificates too) and functions as the informal honors college of the SUNY system, rather like St. Mary’s College in Maryland.
Evi L. Bloggerlady
July 14th, 2014 @ 12:13 pm

Bill Schmalfeldt is that you?
Evi L. Bloggerlady
July 14th, 2014 @ 12:14 pm

Bill, the though of your back end “erongeous zones,” could put me off my feed for a month.
Ghost
July 14th, 2014 @ 1:40 pm

You seem obsessed with this Bill guy. Accusing both me and Laura of being him says a lot more about you than either of us. It’s surprising coming from you, because I actually agree with you most of the time. I’m a long time lurker, and I usually appreciate your comments. I only commented because Julie’s generalization was off the mark. You piling on makes you seem more like the man hating feminist type that rsm blogs about.
Art Deco
July 14th, 2014 @ 1:53 pm

It’s a regional school with a certain amount of cachet. Most private colleges in New York do not. IIRC a generation ago, it was regarded as less selective than others in this category, so lower-end-of-the-upper-tier. Of course, selectivity and quality of instruction are two different quanta and haphazardly associated. I recall seeing around about 10 years ago a comparative assessment of a jumble of schools according to before and after assessments of their recent alumni on tests of general knowledge. The top scoring institution was Grove City College in Pennsylvania, a cheap-seats evangelical school. At the bottom of the pile was Johns Hopkins University.

(The private colleges with cachet in Upstate New York are Vasser, Bard, Union, Skidmore, St. Lawrence, Hamilton, Colgate, and Hobart; Downstate has Cooper Union but not much else).
Art Deco
July 14th, 2014 @ 1:57 pm

(2) Hobart & William Smith Colleges has a football team? And fraternities? How? Why?

Fraternities are bog standard at a school like Hobart, though some places the governing regime has changed drastically and the more recalcitrant federations have withdrawn (e.g. DKE). Hobart’s signature was at one time Lacrosse. IIRC, they were a very big fish in that little pond.
laura r
July 14th, 2014 @ 4:20 pm

drunk women are cheap & easy. you harp on this because you have no compassion for real victims & real crime. let it go she learned a lesson, maybe…..the girls in england get so drunk in clubs they pass out on the street. or in a strange bed. victims? pleeeaaaeesss, we have bigger fish to fry.
laura r
July 14th, 2014 @ 4:23 pm

its the war on men in full swing.
laura r
July 14th, 2014 @ 4:28 pm

went to many parties. i also ended up in foolish positions & guess what? the boys got aggressive. i never drank, so it was easy to just leave. they were pushy vulgar & obnoxious. guess what? they were angry as i led them on. i soon learned the rules of the game. there are still 2 kinds of women, end of case. this is a trampy one who just dosnt get the reality of boys in packs. i wonder if she had sex w/the first boy publically?
Evi L. Bloggerlady
July 14th, 2014 @ 7:17 pm

Ghost if you are not Bill (although if you were a long time lurker you would know who he is) I apologize.

As for you and your girlfriend getting it on, that is your business.

What Julie is saying is there is something generally wrong when a drunk co-ed is getting trained by a group of guys on a pool table. This is almost certainly not a consensual relationship.

And I think you knew that. But if not, well ask Julie and she will confirm it for you.
NJT
July 14th, 2014 @ 8:27 pm

Julie you had me until you claimed no girl likes anal. I know for a fact you are wrong about that.
RichFader
July 15th, 2014 @ 1:56 am

How to really get raped at college: Take out student loans.
Da Tech Guy On DaRadio Blog » Blog Archive » Avoiding the Proximate Occasions of Rape
July 15th, 2014 @ 7:41 am

[…] And with that we get to Stacy McCain’s insightful piece: How to get Raped at college. […]
1389AD
July 15th, 2014 @ 8:56 am

There should not even have been an investigation as far as rape is concerned.

Just shut down the Kappa Sig house for having held a drunken orgy.

And expel everybody who was found to be stinking drunk at said orgy.
Jeanette Victoria
July 15th, 2014 @ 9:36 am

Agreed
Ghost
July 15th, 2014 @ 11:11 am

I’ve read rsm’s blogs on Bill. Again, your reading comprehension is lacking. You accuse other posters of being Bill the way the left accuses us of racism. You’re obsession (or paranoia) with him still says more about you than me.

Second, read what Julie wrote, then read what I wrote. Yes, while Julie did mention that having a train run on her was wrong. No one argues that. But, Julie also falsely claimed that women don’t like anal. She used that as her proof to end all proof that this was in fact rape. Again, I know reading things fully and understanding the words isn’t exactly your strong point, but honestly, try to keep up.
Ghost
July 15th, 2014 @ 11:16 am

For example, if Julie said, “rape is bad and the sky is green,” and I say, “no, the sky is not green,” it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for you to jump in and say, “Bill! Rape is bad! Stop excusing rape you pig!”
Which is what you did.
1389AD
July 15th, 2014 @ 1:46 pm

The males were just as drunk as the females.

Not to mention the fact that a female grinding on a male is not dancing at all, but is a sex act in and of itself. And when whores do it in a strip club, it’s called a “private dance” even though it isn’t a dance.
1389AD
July 15th, 2014 @ 2:02 pm

She DID make the bad choice to get drunk in the first place.

She DID make the bad choice to go to the boy’s bedroom at the fraternity, even though her friends warned her not to.

If a female goes into a male’s bedroom in a hotel or at a party, it’s for one purpose only.
1389AD
July 15th, 2014 @ 2:05 pm

The story said she had been drinking some beer, as well as shots of rum mixed with Gatorade (yuk). No punch, spiked or otherwise.
Julie Pascal
July 15th, 2014 @ 6:02 pm

Young people are stupid… it’s quite possible for a girl to go off alone, even to a boy’s bedroom and think they’re going to cuddle and talk. I am *not* making that claim here! But young people are stupid and the statement that she’s got only one purpose isn’t necessarily true.

But as I said, I’m not claiming that’s the case. I think I rather explicitly said that she clearly made a number of bad decisions and a number of unwise choices. It seems overwhelmingly likely that she was willing to get sexy.

It’s also overwhelmingly likely that her decision to do so did not involve multiple guys taking turns while she was far too drunk to do anything about it, or even *participate*. I guess that’s what bugs me most about guys having sex with girls who are plastered. Isn’t that sort of gross? At that point you might as well get a blow-up doll or tip a patio table on it’s side and f*ck the hole in the middle of it. The guy is really *that* disgusting at that point. Why not catch a sheep or a dog and use that instead. It’s perverted and nasty.
GrandsonOGrumpus
July 15th, 2014 @ 10:54 pm

I respectfully disagree.
There’s an entire world of difference between saying “she deserved it” and “she contributed to her situation”!

Though I am of the school that says a self-respecting gentleman will refuse intimate knowledge of a female (I won’t presume to call her “a Lady”– she might object to the presumption of familiarity…) prior to marriage— even if that female’s nude and trying to test campfire-starting by vigorously rubbing her limbs on the gentleman’s.

But in the world as it actually is, the laws of physics apply… in this case the Causality Laws. Her inexperience kept her from seeing that the natural consequence of her behavior put what occurred into “the cone of consequences”. Think of the “Light Cone” from the Relativity equations, it’s a related concept.

That no one supplemented her inexperience w/teaching from more experienced people is a shame.

This teaching doesn’t occur, in part, b/c of the fear everyone will rush to the “blame the victim” label. These aforementioned cowards care less for the young lady’s welfare than their own discomfort at being a target of other’s venom.

I will say:
1.She knew she was drinking.
2. She knew that she was grinding herself on some Lunk-headed self-absorbed twerp who should, daily, have his butt jacked-up over his shoulders using steel-toed shoes.
3. She needs to recognize that the horror she endured is a natural consequence of her actions… which, was HER contribution to the situation. This doesn’t imply blame, which is a moral judgement, but does show that not only can she avoid a reoccurance but, ADDITIONALLY, she can help others by warning them and working to change the culture to encourage the production of Gentlemen, and not rutting animals.
Zimriel
July 16th, 2014 @ 11:23 pm

Or do something about alcohol culture, so that 18 year olds aren’t total lambs when they show up on the first day of college. Lowering the drinking age to 18 would help; parents would then introduce the kids to the chemical at 16-17 like mine did.

But ‘Murica! Land of the free!