WASHINGTON, D.C. Sept. 30 (DPI) – “Why not film everything and send it to Homeland Security?’
That was among the most popular reader comments today on NYTimes.com following news that the California legislature passed a somewhat vague “sexual consent policy” for all its state college campuses. The measure, which addresses the widely seen epidemic of sexual assaults on America’s college campuses, requires that two people must verbally or via signals consent to having sex.
The state law addresses what several private colleges have been grappling with for years: How to deal with growing evidence that actual sexual assaults take place amid college social activity that’s over the top – but, depending on the person, often acceptable activity. It’s a distinction that many readers said was already well defined: Sexual assault has always been a criminal act, and victims of it should go to the police, not the school, to prosecute it.
The basic problem with the legislation, many readers agreed, was that it still would depend on what “he said and she said” and thus the law would be almost impossible to enforce.
Among the comments:
Classic case of a governing body writing a law that “feels good”…while being vague, unquantifiable, and terribly difficult to enforce. Yeah, there’s a problem, but it’s always made worse when you Ready, Fire, and Aim, as California lawmakers did in this case.
Dumb Law. California.
Why are colleges policing sexual assault in the first place? Sexual assault/rape cases are complex. They often involve physical evidence and “he said she said” cases. Are college administrators (those pinnacles of competency) well positioned and trained to act as judges and prosecutors? Are their decisions subject to robust appeals? To whom, if anyone, are they accountable? Are the proceedings public record?
Criminal cases have numerous due-process safeguards for accused and victims lacking in these kangaroo courts. As we’ve seen, they’ve been lax on perpetrators. My advice to anyone who has been assaulted: Go to the police and get a prosecution going. Universities lack institutional competency to handle these cases. They may seem more “student friendly” or “easy to access” than the judicial system, but they lack the incentives or competency to handle these cases properly.
Am I the only one bothered by this? ““I think the disciplinary panels find it easier to find a student responsible” for sexual assault, said Pam Thomason…”“They can ask, ‘What happened that made you think consent was affirmative, unambiguous and conscious?’ ” I don’t know anyone who’s not in favor of reducing sexual assault on campus. But this seems to be aimed at “gotcha.” The goal seems to be to find it easier to charge young people, largely young men, and punish them. Is that the real goal here, because it seems to be. And there is something about that that bothers me, a lot.
As The Times reported today:
Under the California law, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on Sunday night, colleges must require “affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity,” which can be verbal or communicated through actions. Consent to one kind of contact cannot be taken to mean consent to another. So an encounter that progresses from kissing to intercourse would require not one go-ahead but several.
Some colleges and universities, including the University of Texas, Yale and many campuses of the State University of New York, already have affirmative consent policies, many of them adopted in the past year. While the strategy has rapidly gained traction, campus safety experts say it is too new, and too little studied, to measure its effectiveness.