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Drunk Sex Is Rape? Barnard College Promotes Alcohol-Related Accusations

Posted on | January 19, 2016 | 41 Comments

 

“Alcohol [does not equal] Consent” — flyers bearing this bold headline have been posted in dormitories at Barnard College, according to Toni Airaksinen, a student at the elite all-women’s sister school of Columbia University. The flyers paraphrase a policy issued last year by Barnard’s Department of Public Safety, which states (p. 35):

The use of alcohol and other drugs can have unintended consequences. Alcohol and other drugs can lower inhibitions and create an atmosphere of confusion over whether consent is freely and affirmatively given. The perspective of a reasonable person will be the basis for determining whether one should have known about the impact of alcohol and other drugs on another person’s ability to give consent. Providing alcohol or other substances to another person without their knowledge or for the purpose of incapacitation to coerce sexual activity is a violation of the Policy. Consent is required regardless of whether the person initiating the act is under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs. The personal use of alcohol and other drugs never makes someone at fault for being sexually assaulted.

The Barnard policy states that accusers “will not be subject to the College’s Code of Conduct action for violations of alcohol and/or drug use policies” related to the alleged sexual assault. This preemptive amnesty for sexual assault accusers involved in incidents of underage drinking was required under a New York state law past last year, the Columbia Spectator reported in September:

As mandated by “Enough is Enough”—the state law passed in July—Columbia changed its language around the definition of affirmative consent, added a statewide student’s bill of rights, and changed its policy regarding drug and alcohol amnesty so that those who report sexual assault under the influence of alcohol and drugs will not be penalized. . . .
Though the policy now fully complies with Enough is Enough, Goldberg said that changes in the policy were not exclusively the result of the New York state law. “Most of the changes required by the New York law were also reflective of suggestions from students or other participants in the process,” she said.
In drafting the new policy, Goldberg said that she met with both students and lawyers who have participated in the process, in addition to some activist groups like No Red Tape and CASV.
“The updates reflect extensive comments from students throughout the University — including students who participated in the process, either as parties or as witnesses, but many students beyond that,” Goldberg said.
“Everyone’s interest is to have the policy work well and to have students feel comfortable accessing all of the resources on- and off-campus that provide support for experiences of gender-based misconduct,” Goldberg said.

The Spectator article was accompanied by a photo of two feminist protesters at Columbia, one of whom displayed a poster with the slogan: “If they aren’t sober they can’t consent.”

 

Research indicates that alcohol use is involved in at least 47% of all reported sexual assault incidents at colleges and universities.

Columbia was the scene of a high-profile protest by Emma Sulkowicz, who carried a mattress around campus to publicize her claim that she was raped by fellow student Paul Nungesser. Cleared of the charge in multiple investigations, Nungesser filed a lawsuit against Columbia. His lawsuit accuses the university of violating his rights by giving Sulkowicz academic credit for her protest, and quotes text messages from Sulkowicz that indicate she consented to sex with Nungesser.

While the administration at Columbia has vastly increased its efforts to deal with sexual assault, student activists are demanding more, the Columbia Spectator reported Monday:

A year has passed since Columbia expanded the size, staffing, and hours of the Sexual Violence Response offices after continued student activism.
But No Red Tape is pushing the Rape Crisis/Anti-Sexual Violence Center to expand the resources it offers again, demanding that the center’s three locations remain open 24 hours and employ professional staff trained in trauma response and cultural sensitivity.
The RC/ASVC is a confidential on-campus emergency resource center that immediately connects survivors to trained advocates who provide them with crisis relief and information about medical resources and reporting, and who will connect students to other trauma-related resources. SVR recently expanded the center to include three locations: Lerner Hall, Barnard Hall, and Columbia University Medical Center. . . .
The activist group [No Red Tape] is directing its request at the Office of University Life as part of an ongoing Demand a SAAFE Columbia campaign, which advocates for increased support, accessibility, accountability, funding, and enforcement of sexual violence policies by the University. Members of No Red Tape met with Executive Vice President for University Life Suzanne Goldberg as well as Interim Executive Director of Sexual Violence Response Suraiya Baluch in December to discuss their demands. . . .
While all Ivy League institutions, including Columbia, provide students with a 24/7 emergency hotline, Columbia would be the first to offer a 24-hour confidential on-campus sexual violence support center. . . .
Currently, Columbia’s RC/ASVC is the only university rape crisis center certified by the New York State Department of Health. In order for SVR to maintain its certification, all advocates must repeat 40 hours of trauma response training and be recertified every year. Representatives from SVR said that the training curriculum is informed by a social justice perspective, and that it recognizes the intersections of identity, oppression, and violence against women.




 

Comments

41 Responses to “Drunk Sex Is Rape? Barnard College Promotes Alcohol-Related Accusations”

  1. Steve Skubinna
    January 19th, 2016 @ 12:20 pm

    So if a woman has a drink and then sex, she’s been raped.

    If a man has a drink and then sex, he’s a rapist?

    And that’s equality, right?

  2. Zhytamyr
    January 19th, 2016 @ 12:53 pm

    I predict that more young men will go to trade school/apprenticeships & be better off for it.

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  4. RS
    January 19th, 2016 @ 1:06 pm

    There’s no question that this sort of hysteria is sucking all the air from the room, but I wonder whether we’re merely seeing the results of agitation by a very small, but disproportionately vocal, minority. For every narcissist like Emma Sulkowicz and every damaged victim wannabe like UVA’s “Jackie,” there are probably twenty young women who are not buying into the mania and are merely trying to graduate and perhaps meet a nice boy to take home to Mom and Dad.

  5. concern00
    January 19th, 2016 @ 1:22 pm

    Equality applies to privileges, not responsibilities.

  6. AwD
    January 19th, 2016 @ 1:29 pm

    Yes, but the twenty young women who are minding their own business going about their lives have exactly zero influence on the institutional policies that govern everyone’s behavior. Which is why the crazy ones rule campus. It doesn’t matter how small and dysfunctional your team is in comparison to the competition if the competition never shows up to play the game.

  7. Valerie Stewart
    January 19th, 2016 @ 1:37 pm

    Even if the woman initiated the sex, she’s still “been raped” because the man should’ve known better.

    And, you know, not the woman. Because reasons.

    I wonder how this would apply to gay men.

  8. RS
    January 19th, 2016 @ 1:44 pm

    That’s my point. There is a lot of noise, but in reality the majority of students continue to exist as they have without getting sucked into the hysteria. Certainly the hysteria gets all the press, because those with the agenda prey upon the weak-minded that they can use for their own purposes.

    I should also note that these stories invariably emanate from either snooty liberal arts colleges or large universities with large liberal arts departments and schools of social work and the like. This stuff does not rear its head at my son’s STEM university.

  9. Dana
    January 19th, 2016 @ 2:09 pm

    So, if two homosexual men males are drinking, and wind up copulating, is the “top” guilty of rape while the “bottom” is the victim?

  10. Dana
    January 19th, 2016 @ 2:10 pm

    Yeah, because there are no women at your son’s STEM university.

  11. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    January 19th, 2016 @ 2:16 pm

    The Irish people could not procreate with out alcohol!

    They will go the way of pandas if this stands!

  12. PeterP
    January 19th, 2016 @ 2:19 pm

    If you saw some of the gals I hooked up with in college, you would know I was a victim of rape. No sober man would have partaken. Has the statute of limitations passed?

  13. CrustyB
    January 19th, 2016 @ 2:27 pm

    I can’t believe those people just walked on the sidewalk right in front of me while I was driving drunk. So irresponsible of them.

  14. Valerie Stewart
    January 19th, 2016 @ 2:36 pm

    I think that that situation (in proglibs’ eyes) doesn’t count, because any scrutiny of homosexual relationships that contradicts The Narrative must be suppressed at all costs.

  15. Dianna Deeley
    January 19th, 2016 @ 2:44 pm

    Well, you know, there used to be chaperones, and curfews, and no men in women’s dorms and vice-versa. The feminists were part of disposing of those institutions. Now they want to reinstitute the “no drinking, no sex” part, without the institutions that made it even sort-of work?

    That’s not going to end well.

  16. Dianna Deeley
    January 19th, 2016 @ 2:45 pm

    Give it time. *Gloomy tone.*

  17. RS
    January 19th, 2016 @ 2:53 pm

    It’s a 60/40 split actually.

  18. Dana
    January 19th, 2016 @ 2:54 pm

    The world needs more redheaded green-eyed Irish girls!

  19. Fail Burton
    January 19th, 2016 @ 3:15 pm

    Third Wave Feminism does not equal “equal protection”… or “due process” or “free speech.” Setting up an extra-legal kangaroo court where a man and woman involved in a mutually drunken head-on automobile collision results in only prosecuting the man is a transparent scam. Gender studies classes in principle are no different than the KKK having white studies classes. Feminist classes propagate female, gay and non-white supremacist ideologies which are no different than blood libels and as historically accurate as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The difference is it is asserted men have historically stunned “normal” non-gender binary humans with a suffocating compulsion to be heterosexuals and added in the supremacy of “whiteness” and “masculinity” as moral exclamation points. This is the paranoid explanation why no one has ever driven a car across a bridge built by women, why cis-lunar space literally is “cis,” and why non-whites have been excluded from building countries everyone wants to live in.

    For those of you paying attention, “No Red Tape” means “no due process.” When you throw in the fact “No Red Tape” is actually a single sexually and mentally deranged individual it points up how influential setting one’s self up as the CEO of one’s apartment is on social media. See: Randi Harper.

  20. RS
    January 19th, 2016 @ 5:10 pm

    Also, I think it has to do with the quality of women in STEM and the nature of STEM itself. By definition there’s less emphasis on the Humanities where the Feminist virus thrives. Feminism has yet to figure out how to blame the Patriarchy for bridge design.

  21. Joe Joe
    January 19th, 2016 @ 5:31 pm

    YES!

  22. Joe Joe
    January 19th, 2016 @ 5:31 pm

    Or online universities.

  23. Joe Joe
    January 19th, 2016 @ 5:32 pm

    Why don’t these universities just have alcohol awareness campaigns and really enforce state law?

  24. Steve Skubinna
    January 19th, 2016 @ 5:34 pm

    Third Wave Feminism, like every other aspect of the progressive cult, is about one thing only: power.

    Gain power, hold power, and then punish those you hate, which is everybody not marching slavishly alongside you at cult rallies.

    Fortunately for those of us outside academia, the mass media and corporate management (that is to say, people who do things where such creatures fear to tread), progressives are moral and physical cowards. Hardly any of them will put on the Gruppenfuhrer hat and prod us into the cattle cars. There’s this disconnect between where we are and their totalitarian utopia, the whole “get there from here” part that so far eludes them.

    They, I believe, hope that the Gramscian Long March will eventually force society to fall into their pattern, and somehow you and I will find ourselves transposed to the Gulag without any of that nasty pounding on doors at midnight. The correct combination of prohibitions and social conditioning, and the entire vile Patriarchy collapses into dust. Humanity freed from millennia of, uh… The Male Gaze, I think.

    As we see, however, they are not used to people looking them in the face and calmly saying “No.” The word “No” affects them the same way it does a willful two year old. Thing is, most willful two year olds eventually learn that the world is filled with “No” and many times it is impervious to tantrums.

  25. Valerie Stewart
    January 19th, 2016 @ 5:48 pm

    Probably because it directly aligned with common sense, decency, and conservative values, which is the proglibs’ Unholy Trinity.

  26. Valerie Stewart
    January 19th, 2016 @ 5:55 pm

    Of course it won’t. They refuse to admit that their progressively libertine philosophy was and is a cornucopia of bad ideas, but they still want to maintain the image (illusion) of an “enlightened” and “modern” culture that battles the Vague, Evil Enemy/The Patriarchy … And avoid potential lawsuits (in the laziest way possible) as well.

  27. Valerie Stewart
    January 19th, 2016 @ 6:02 pm

    What about redheaded blue-eyed girls? The men I know think that blue eyes are more attractive.

    You know, not that I have blue eyes or anything. I do.

    😉

  28. Joe Joe
    January 20th, 2016 @ 1:51 am

    Well, that makes sense.

  29. Dana
    January 20th, 2016 @ 6:32 am

    Blue eyes are cool, too, but I prefer green.

    P’raps you could get green contacts? 🙂

  30. Dana
    January 20th, 2016 @ 6:35 am

    Actually, I know one young — OK, maybe not-so-young — lady, a dental technician, around 5’10’, a real redhead, porcelain complexion, just a slight dusting of freckles, with one blue eye and one hazel eye.

    If I weren’t already married . . . .

  31. Dana
    January 20th, 2016 @ 6:37 am

    I got so lucky in college, found a good girlfriend who was pretty cute, so I missed out on getting raped by the double-baggers.

  32. Dana
    January 20th, 2016 @ 6:39 am

    Some (few) have tried, and Amanda Marcotte and her ilk screamed that it was sexist and anti-feminist to tell women that they shouldn’t get stinking drunk, because that was “blaming the victim.”

    Should we not tell people to wear their seat belts, because that’s blaming the victim if they get hurt in an automobile accident?

  33. PeterP
    January 20th, 2016 @ 8:19 am

    I should have done that. I thought having a girlfriend was sissified.

  34. Quartermaster
    January 20th, 2016 @ 11:39 am

    Bigot!

  35. Dana
    January 20th, 2016 @ 1:14 pm

    No, if you had had a boyfriend in college, that would have been sissified!

  36. PeterP
    January 20th, 2016 @ 1:15 pm

    True dat.

  37. JohnnyL53
    January 20th, 2016 @ 3:17 pm

    “there are probably twenty young women who are not buying into the mania and are merely trying to graduate and…”

    pursue their lifelong dream of having sex while hammered in as many different locations and positions as possible.

  38. JohnnyL53
    January 20th, 2016 @ 3:19 pm

    This doesn’t count as they view gays having sex while under the influence of drink or drugs as just part of their culture. As long as it’s cultural then anything goes as far as libs and progs are concerned.

  39. Robert What?
    January 20th, 2016 @ 8:03 pm

    Its really not hard to understand: regardless of the circumstances, it’s the man’s fault. There, now isn’t that simple?

  40. Joe Joe
    January 20th, 2016 @ 9:04 pm

    Amanda Marcotte needs to be dropped in Somalia.

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