Post script as an introduction:
Considering the idea of "victim blaming" makes me think it might be time for me to again reconsider the instances in which thinking about human events and life in terms of geometric figures leads away from clarity instead of to it.
The following is about why the currently allowable ways of discussing rape, with even the most relevant issues banned from the discussion, won't get us any closer to finding practical means of preventing rape in the real world we live in, even as the people setting those limits demand something be done.
The issue centers around "victim-blaming" as a demand that the things that victims of crimes do that make them vulnerable to victimization are off-limits for discussion. The motive for that silencing seems to be the misconception that a rape is representable by a pie-chart and that any mention of what a victim did that made them the target of a rapist, somehow, takes a slice out of the guilt of the rapist or rapists (the outrageous crime reported at The University of Virginia is foremost in my mind as I write this). But looking at it that way is both unrealistic and will lead away from realistic ways to deal with the crime of rape. That is true for the ideal universal prevention of rape as it is the right of every person, to avoid their being the victim of attack.
The fact is that rapists look for vulnerable victims and that in venues such as frat parties or pick-up bars, drunks are less likely to put up an effective defense and will be more vulnerable to being convinced into risk-taking. Even if they aren't raped, they can be talked into doing what they would, sober, not do and to generally being convinced to make a fool of themselves, with consent.
Being drunk makes you stupid, physically incapable and less inhibited. That is, currently, an unmentionable fact, something which the children of college age are too innocent and fragile to tolerate. The result is what we see on campuses, all over the place. But the idea of "victim-blaming" as an excuse for not saying it is illogical, wrong and counterproductive.
The rapist is responsible for 100% of their crime but the victim who has made him or herself vulnerable should understand that they are volunteering to be in the most desirable pool from which a rapist will choose who to rape. I have little to no doubt that the people who were raped while being drunk would probably not have been raped if they had been sober. I would certainly rather risk being wrong in telling a kid I knew that they are putting themselves at a high risk of any number of dangers by getting drunk than to pretend to not know that is a fact.
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The incredibly shallow, opportunistic and childish thinking in this response by the budding journalists at The Current, the student newspaper at Eckerd College may be a good warning of what some of us suspected, the quality journalism can decline even farther from where it is now. I will only deal with the part of the thing that deals with the contribution getting drunk makes to sexual assaults and rapes on college campuses because how the students deal with that is truly astounding in its illogic and childish slogan twisting.
The Current’s editorial board is addressing this letter because we feel that it is not inclusive and, both through language and important data omissions, runs the risk of victim-blaming. The complexities and consequences of sexual assault cannot be fully understood or mitigated in the 300 words of Eastman’s email. Eckerd claims to be an inclusive, progressive liberal arts college, yet the president’s letter seems to pair a modern-day problem with archaic and ineffective solutions.
The first of these solutions is “limiting your own consumption of alcohol, and encouraging your friends to do the same.” Though both sexual assault and excessive alcohol consumption are important discussions, they should occur separately.
Why? Why discuss them separately?
Tying sexual assault to alcohol consumption runs the risk of victim-blaming, regardless of intentions.
Oh, yes, the all encompassing slogan, "victim-blaming" MUST keep us from fully and realistically addressing a fact that even these students include in their letter. And while the profligate flinging of that phrase is common enough to make it unremarkable, the use of it in this context shows how it can be used to insist that the problem of rape on campus not be addressed.
What the president may be referencing is research from numerous sources, such as the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), which estimates that alcohol was involved in 30 to 75 percent of sexual assault cases (exact numbers are difficult for researchers to obtain). Researchers and news sources alike, such as the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and USA Today, have devoted attention to the concept of limiting alcohol consumption as a precautionary measure.
Read USA Today’s full article about alcohol and sexual assault:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/28/alcohol-most-common-drug-in-sexual-assaults/3285139/
And here I'll break in again because THE STUDENT'S OWN CITATION HERE CONTAINS THIS PASSAGE:
Date rape drugs. Roofies. Liquid ecstasy. Special K.
Odorless, colorless, tasteless predators that leave prey weak, confused and vulnerable.
They are part of the standard plotline in many television thrillers, and a mythology has built around their pervasiveness.
But the drugs most frequently associated with drug-facilitated sexual assault — known chemically as Rohypnol, gamma hydroxybutyric (GHB) and ketamine — may not be the most common assailant.
"Quite honestly, alcohol is the No. 1 date rape drug," said Mike Lyttle, regional supervisor for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation's Nashville crime lab. "… Roofies are very rarely — if ever — seen in real life."
Let me point this passage these cub opinion journalists seem to have missed in their own citation.
"alcohol is the No. 1 date rape drug"
Apparently it's not only columnists for Salon who don't bother reading their own citations before making them. Do they teach that in journalism courses these days?
Going on.
Read the National Institute of Justice’s “Campus Sexual Assault Case Study”:
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/221153.pdf
Though precautions are beneficial, we must remember that sober victims also exist. Correlation and causation differ greatly; this correlation between the two factors — alcohol consumption and sexual assault — does not mean that one causes the other.
Anyone who can look at an estimate that, on the high end, alcohol is involved in up to 75% of sexual assaults WITH CITATIONS SUPPORTING THAT and then dismiss it as an important consideration when discussing sexual assault is guilty of insisting on an entirely superficial discussion and a willful refusal to give a very serious problem a complete discussion. INSISTING ON SOLUTIONS THAT WOULD ALMOST CERTAINLY NOT ADDRESS THE EPIDEMIC OF RAPE ON CAMPUSES.
Addressing it alongside sexual misconduct without explicitly underscoring this distinction runs the risk of victim-blaming by insinuating that these atrocities would not have happened had they been sober.
To which I say, do you want to find a way of lessening the incidence of rape or do you want to look for excuses to pretend that getting drunk doesn't play a huge role in rapes happening? Obviously, these student journalists take the later alternative.
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This phrase "victim-blaming" may well have had its origin in the fact of what constitutes a sex crime. Sexual intercourse is one of the most desired activities that human beings engage in, the fact is that most sexual intercourse is consensual, desired by both of the people involved. The crime of rape is defined by the lack of consent by one of the people involved*. It's certain that someone accused of rape will try to either convince authorities or jurors that consent was given, if, perhaps forgotten under the influence of alcohol, or that any reasonable person would understand their confusion through the behavior of the person making the accusation. The extent to which the, mostly, men who have made the decisions of whether or not to pursue a prosecution may have been influenced or more sympathetic to the man who was accused would give him more of a benefit of the doubt than was owed them is worth considering.
But that's, in fact, a different issue. A person who gets drunk at a frat party or at a pick-up bar is not guilty of someone else raping them, they are guilty of making themselves vulnerable to being raped and if they can't stand being told that they are too immature to be drinking or going to parties and bars unsupervised by responsible adults. I know that "journalists" wont' tell them that because journalism has devolved into telling people any stupid thing they want to hear instead of telling them the truth.
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It's high time to admit something else, fraternities, sororities, sports teams, are all IN FACT gangs, gangs which are open to and which attract many upper class, white boys and girls and which are based in excluding people who the members look down on. The dynamics of snobbery and self-reinforcement within gangs will always lead to their members acting, singly and in concert to attack and victimize other people. Of course, when the gang members are male, most of them straight, then women will be targeted for use and abuse by the gangsters. That fraternities, sororities and sports teams are a parasite on higher education in the United States is one of the greatest irrationalities in our collective life of the mind. The front of benefits that frats and sports teams bring doesn't change the essential nature of them.
Since those won't be banned from universities and colleges, it's only responsible for us to suspect the members of those things as being potential criminals and that even members of other gangs are at increased danger from them. Going to a frat party and getting drunk while being a woman is about as stupid as going to a biker bar while being a woman. I will risk hurting someone's feelings by saying that because I'm not going to lie about it to spare their tender feelings. I'd rather spare them being violently raped or otherwise attacked.
* That we are to accept even rough or violent sex as swell and good and OK does nothing to lessen the problem of identifying when someone is a victim of rape and when they are not. Fashionable, transgressive violent, degrading, belittiling sex using the most awful of gender roles, sex which moderny people are supposed to support out of some lame brained idea of fairness, has certainly provided more of a shield for rapists. Perhaps we can thank the sexologyand psych industries for that.
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