While speaking at the Network of Enlightened Women’s conference in Washington, D.C., on Friday, I was asked a question about how to tell someone they’re not a victim when the evidence shows they aren’t one.
I didn’t have an answer, but it did force me to think about the issue, as I think it’s a discussion we really need to have.
Too often on college campuses, we see sexual assault accusations that stem from ambiguous “he said/she said” situations where the evidence isn’t clear one way or the other. Other times, there’s evidence that the sexual encounter was consensual at the time but may have been regretted — or reinterpreted, thanks to the intervention of feminist professors or victim’s advocacy groups – later. It is the latter category that causes problems.
The woman at the conference who asked the question was not the first to consider this issue. Last year, Brett Sokolow, one of the leading advisers to colleges on campus sexual assault adjudication, wrote a letter raising the same point.
“We see complainants who genuinely believe they have been assaulted, despite overwhelming proof that it did not happen,” Sokolow wrote.
These kinds of accusations would be different from a false accusation, defined by Sokolow as “a malicious or false complaint made by someone knowing it to be untrue.”
Sokolow asked: “How do campus and community mental health resources help someone who is suffering from real trauma resulting from an unreal episode?”
One would think there would be an easy answer, as no one should want to be a victim of sexual assault. But the attention and protection that accusers get — from advocacy groups, universities and the media — might be too hard to give up for some.
As activists expand the definition of sexual assault and push debunked statistics to claim that it is rampant on college campuses, more and more might come to see regretted or misinterpreted encounters as something more sinister. We need to figure out how to gently tell them that they are not actually victims. But that would require finding another explanation for their negative feelings.
So many accusers, especially those who say the encounter happened while they were freshmen, say they become depressed and withdrawn. They see those feelings as the result of a sexual assault. Maybe, just maybe, some of those feelings come from being away from home for the first time or feeling overwhelmed in college, and have nothing to do with the first hook up of a college career.
I know that I haven’t figured out a way to properly articulate this idea, but I’m hoping someone else figures out a way to do so.
