{"id":2191,"date":"2020-02-25T07:35:58","date_gmt":"2020-02-25T13:35:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/?p=2191"},"modified":"2020-02-24T10:41:38","modified_gmt":"2020-02-24T16:41:38","slug":"no-easy-answers-can-colleges-define-consent-and-reduce-unwanted-sex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/2020\/02\/25\/no-easy-answers-can-colleges-define-consent-and-reduce-unwanted-sex\/","title":{"rendered":"No Easy Answers: Can Colleges Define Consent and Reduce Unwanted Sex?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Defining Consent Online Symposium<\/em><\/a> (.pdf) was convened for the Council on Contemporary Families by Stephanie Coontz and Paula England, who prepared this overview of the seven-part series. Their takeaway: Let\u2019s reject simplistic answers and deal with the complicated realities of sex on campus.<\/em><\/p>\n

The articles in the CCF Defining Consent online symposium address two complex and emotionally-charged issues: How college communities can most effectively reduce the incidence of non-consensual sex; and how to define consent (or determine lack of consent). The contributors offer no easy solutions. Indeed, in different ways they all demonstrate that there are<\/em> no easy solutions. But their research can help people reject seemingly<\/em> easy answers based on flawed data or on misunderstanding of the context in which campus sexual interactions take place.<\/p>\n

Our contributors point out that far from being over-reported, incidents of sexual assault on campus are seriously under-reported<\/em>. There is no evidence that false accusations are a significant problem, but our researchers explain the gender myths and sexual fallacies that lead some perpetrators of sexual harm — and even some victims — to rationalize, or fail to recognize, the extent of the wrong-doing that has occurred. That is why all the reports emphasize the importance of defining consent and educating students about what symposium contributors Hirsch and Kahn term \u201csexual citizenship<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The #MeToo movement revealed that rates of nonconsensual sex of nonconsensual sex\u2014whether or not they meet a legal definition or rape and sexual assault\u2014are much higher across all sectors of American society than many people realized. Some observers claim they have reached epidemic proportions. But \u201cepidemic\u201d implies an intensifying and growing problem. Sexual coercion may be endemic<\/em> in America, but most evidence suggests it was far more common — and generally far more tolerated — in the past than it is today.<\/p>\n

Rape and nonconsensual sex have a long history<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

For 300 years, the rape or sexual coercion of enslaved people, servants, working-class women, poor women, Native Americans, African-Americans, Hispanics, and children was largely ignored. Until the late 19th century, the legal age of consent for girls was only 10 to 12 in most states. In 1871 Delaware lowered its age of consent<\/a> to just seven <\/em>years.<\/p>\n

As University of Delaware historian Rebecca Davis explains in her essay<\/a>, 19th-century cultural arbiters promoted a new ideology of (white middle-class) female sexual purity. Although repressive in many ways, this ideal offered some protection to women who were able to signal by their clothes, manners, and abstention from work or unchaperoned social interactions beyond the home that they were asexual \u201cladies.\u201d Once married, no group of women had protection against sexual assault by their husbands: Until the 1970s, the legal definition of rape was forcible sex by a man with a woman who was not his wife. This not only closed off legal recognition of the possibility that a man could be raped but meant that a husband could not be charged with raping his wife, no matter how \u201clady-like\u201d she was. Still, during the years before marriage, middle-class men were encouraged to direct their sexual overtures to women who could not or would not live up to the tenets of \u201ctrue womanhood.\u201d<\/p>\n

All this changed in the 20th<\/sup> century, with increasing acceptance of practices such as men and women going out on dates, meeting up to dance and drink together, and even kissing or \u201cpetting.\u201d But as Davis shows, the new acceptance of eroticized courting did not eliminate the gendered double standard. It gave men new permission to be pushy about sex while intensifying the pressure on women to \u201ccontain\u201d<\/a> erotic interactions and set boundaries. Davis challenges the myth that middle-class Americans of the past had better sexual mores. It\u2019s not that there are newly bad sexual behaviors and values, but that we have newly recognized many long-tolerated behaviors and mores as bad. In fact, forcible rapes and sexual assault, as well as sexual violence within marriage, have all declined significantly<\/a> since the 1970s, when feminist activists began a concerted campaign against these crimes.<\/p>\n

Counting — and discounting — rape <\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

Still, as prior research shows, rape remains seriously under-reported. One study<\/a> of the U.S. Department of Justice National Crime Victimization Survey found that only 45 percent of those who told survey takers they had been raped, 39 percent of those who described attempted rape, and 30 percent of those who had experienced other sexual assaults in 2004 or 2005 had reported the assault to the police.<\/p>\n

Even anonymous surveys such as the NCVS undercount assault cases. Tolerance for male sexual aggression and notions about women\u2019s responsibility for \u201cleading men on\u201d are so widespread that many women do not even recognize when an unwanted sexual experience constitutes what would meet a legal definition of rape in many states. An analysis of 28 studies<\/a>, covering a total 5,917 women who at some point in their lives had submitted to a sexual experience as a result of force or the threat of force, or who were subjected to sex while incapacitated, found that 60 percent of these women didn\u2019t describe this as rape. They used terms such as a \u201cserious miscommunication\u201d or a \u201cbad experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Campus rape and assault patterns differ in some ways from those in the larger population, but non-consensual sex is clearly widespread. According to a number of estimates, 15 to 25 percent of college women have experienced rape or sexual assault on campus. In a 2015 analysis<\/a> that excluded<\/em> coercive grabbing or fondling, Elizabeth Armstrong and Jamie Budick estimated that between 7 and 10 percent of college women experienced forcible rape and 14 to 26 percent experienced sexual assault.<\/p>\n

An important piece of background information for this symposium is that college women are even less likely<\/a> to report sexual assault\u00a0to the police than other groups of women. This may be because intoxication is a factor in a disproportionate number of cases. When drinking renders women (or men) incapacitated, they are seen in many state laws as incapable of giving consent, so someone initiating sex with an incapacitated partner may be legally guilty of rape or sexual assault. However, the informal culture often views women as responsible for sex if they were drunk and men who were drunk as not<\/em> responsible. This may be why rates of reporting assault are especially low among college women. Campus victims, men as well as women, are also more likely to experience assault by someone they know, sometimes a member of a mutual friendship network, or at least someone they cannot easily avoid encountering afterwards in shared classes, living spaces, or eating areas; this may also discourage reporting. These factors put extra pressure on college administrators to deal with issues of nonconsensual sex outside the criminal justice system.<\/p>\n

Complications of consent in law and everyday campus life<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

Our second contribution, by Stanford legal scholar Deborah Rhode, discusses<\/a> how hard it has been to come up with a definition of consent that is fair both to survivors of assault and to people unjustly accused of sexual assault. She points out that any policy to reduce nonconsensual sex needs to take into account the university context, where one or both parties are highly intoxicated in many casual sexual encounters. Rhode argues that it may not be drinking itself that increases the likelihood of rape but drinking in party subcultures where sexual aggression is normalized.<\/p>\n

Other studies show that for some men, alcohol tends to activate implicit rape-supportive attitudes<\/a> that otherwise lie dormant, leading them when they are drunk to misperceive a woman\u2019s willingness to have sex in ways they do not when sober. A further complication is that, because the new freedom to act on one\u2019s sexual urges is still colored by old notions that sex is shameful or dirty, students often use alcohol to lower their inhibitions or assuage anxieties about not having had the amount of sexual experience they think everyone else has.<\/p>\n

Some universities have responded to the association between drinking and sexual assault by outlawing drinking on campus, but this may just drive it off campus to even more dangerous locations. It can also mean that a person who brings a rape charge after having consumed alcohol on campus may be subject to discipline just for reporting the circumstances of the rape.<\/p>\n

Rhode is skeptical of many rape prevention and reduction initiatives, which have not been shown to be especially effective. She does, however, see promise in emphasizing the need for consent while developing risk-reduction\/self-defense and bystander intervention programs. Several studies of bystander interventions have shown participants to subsequently have significant increases in intent to intervene, compared to people who had not taken the training, and in\u00a0one study\u00a0<\/a>of two college campuses, participants’ increased intent to intervene and confidence about doing so remained significantly higher than the control group’s a year later.<\/p>\n

Myths and realities about university consent policies<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

University of Michigan sociologist Elizabeth Armstrong and her colleagues address widespread misconceptions about the content of university consent policies<\/a>. In 1992 Antioch College issued an elaborate formula<\/a> for establishing consent to sex.<\/p>\n