TheVerge's reporting on the college rape form issue. The article is uninspiring but it's great to see the comments section be as reasoned as it is. Good work if any of them are you.

femdelusion · 2013-12-19T14:35:23+00:00

That's the way with outrage and drama. Once the initial outbust subsides, people actually start looking at the issue. Then people say, "Hmm... they actually kinda do have a point. I don't like how they went about it, but I'm not sure I'd like my son being hauled into the Dean of Students office and told that someone says he raped them. For all we know, it could just be someone who has a grudge against him for some reason. My son, because he's a fine young man who does respect women, would be pretty upset by that, and would probably go into a shell for weeks, confused and hurt by it all. It doesn't seem right for the College to put up a system in which that could happen so easily without the accuser ever facing any possibility of comeback. I'm sure they've got honourable intentions, but I don't think they've really thought it through."

I'm still decidedly uneasy about the trolling. It's not the sort of thing I'd recommend, but I understand why individuals choose to do what they did in spite of calmer voices advising against it. But there's no doubt in my mind that people were right to be concerned about this reporting system. It's the contacting them afterwards that's dodgy. If it were just anonymised reporting with no follow-up consequences, that would be OK. But it's not, and that's the problem.

PierceHarlan is nonetheless right when he says that there are bigger fish to fry. What we should be doing is getting behind FIRE and supporting the challenges to Title IX. The 'Dear Colleague' letters are an outrage, and represent a violation of constitutional protections (in my opinion). Hopefully, a positive will come out of this whole debacle in that people will start looking at that issue. After all, it is governmental pressure that is behind what Occidental College did. That is the real issue here, and we shouldn't lose sight of that.

Link_Demobilizer · 2013-12-19T14:04:11+00:00

Here is the non-mobile version of this site.

myalias1 · 2013-12-19T14:14:11+00:00

[permanently deleted]

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