Rape cases: "Innocent until proven guilty" is now considered misogyny

[LJ_Reloaded]

but

WAIT FOR IT

And at least one feminist with instutitional power is taking a stand against this nutjobbery.

CIVIL LIBERTIES FRAMED AS INDIFFERENCE TO ABUSED WOMEN

http://harvardlawreview.org/2015/02/trading-the-megaphone-for-the-gavel-in-title-ix-enforcement-2/

Consider the case of Anna, a freshman at Hobart and William Smith Colleges who reported being raped at a party in the first weeks of her freshman year. The New York Times’s bombshell article exposing this case — Reporting Rape, and Wishing She Hadn’t: How One College Handled a Sexual Assault Complaint. A reasonable conclusion from the Times article is that at least some institutions of higher education systematically undervalue victims, protect wrongdoers, and expose their women students — whether through misogyny and patriarchal bias, callous indifference, or sheer incompetence — to a male-dominant hostile environment.

But read more carefully, Anna’s case is more ambiguous. To my mind, there is no question that she was raped, almost certainly by more than one man. Her injuries as reported by emergency-room personnel could not be explained any other way. The problem was figuring out how many people were involved, whether the encounters were consensual, and, if one or more sexual assaults occurred, who was responsible for them.

The prosecutor and the Colleges’ Board collected different evidence in Anna’s case, and the published record provides only glimpses of what they gathered. But it seems clear that Anna was alleging sexual assault in two settings: first at a fraternity-house party, and later at a campus-wide party at a facility known as the Barn. Anna identified her alleged assailant at the fraternity party, but the prosecutor had testimony, some of which he disclosed publicly, that led him to believe that her sexual contacts there were consensual. The Board also could have heard that or similar evidence. The Board could have decided, even on a preponderance standard, that the contacts at the fraternity were not supported by enough evidence to hold the identified student responsible for wrongdoing.

In my own assessment of the published record, the Barn is almost certainly where Anna sustained the injuries discovered later at the hospital. Through alcohol-induced memory loss, however, Anna was unable to remember what happened at the Barn; according to the Times, she could not remember being there at all. Thus, for the contacts for which evidence of sexual assault was clear, the problem of identification looms large. Three students were suspected and questioned by the Board. The identity of one of them was supported by disclosures to Anna by a bystander who was present both at the fraternity house and at the Barn. He also told the prosecutor what he saw. But he refused to testify before the Colleges’ Board. Anna testified to the bystander’s identification, but, had the Board relied solely on that, it would have imposed a finding of responsibility on a student on the basis of Anna’s report of the bystander’s report — that is, on hearsay. The publicly available information provides not even that level of certainty about the other two students who were suspected. To be sure, some of the suspected students changed their stories as the police and Colleges’ investigations proceeded, calling the credibility of their denials into question. But there was no direct evidence identifying them, or any other students present at the Barn, as Anna’s assailant there. The Board could have decided, even on a preponderance standard, that it could not hold any particular student responsible. And that does not seem to me like shoddy or biased work: it seems like a reasonable call that college and university boards should make in cases where the identity of the wrongdoer cannot be established, lest they hold students responsible for expellable offenses on a guess.

Advocacy that blazons Anna’s story as an open-and-shut case of rape makes complete sense: what happened to Anna was brutal victimization, pure and simple. A student culture in which a rape like this one can happen is seriously broken. But the story does not appear to be in fact what it stands for today in the debate over campus sexual assault: a paradigm instance of institutional failure to sanction wrongdoing. The firestorm of blame heaped on Hobart and William Smith bore an unacknowledged but alarming message: that the Colleges had to assign blame to one or more of their students despite their complete lack of direct evidence about which of them actually deserved it.

The furor over Anna’s case amounts to pressure on schools to hold students responsible for serious harm even when — precisely when — there can be no certainty about who is to blame for it. Such calls are core to every witch hunt. Speaking as a feminist governor to other feminist governors, I have this simple message: we have to pull back from this brink.

We need more feminism like this, folks.