In yet more evidence that students accused of campus sexual assault face an uphill battle in defending themselves, one New England university’s student newspaper wrote that it would rather see false accusations than accusers not come forward.
Editors for the student newspaper of Boston University, the Daily Free Press, in an editorial about educating students on “affirmative consent,” or “yes means yes,” consent policies, suggested false accusations are acceptable.
“We would rather see someone falsely accused than see someone avoid coming forward for fear of retribution for wrongly accusing someone,” the editors wrote.
The editors went on to suggest that bias against accused students might not be real.
“There may be a bias against the accused in some situations, but the bias against the accuser is often much more prominent and real,” the editors wrote.
The evidence for bias against accusers, the editors wrote, was that often those found responsible for sexual assault are allowed to return to campus and aren’t expelled. What’s missing from this critique is that being found responsible for sexual assault, or sexual misconduct, on college campuses might involve a very wide range of sexual activity that doesn’t include rape.
Because the definition of sexual assault has been expanded to include everything from a stolen kiss to forcible rape, punishments for offenses should include a range. Should someone who steals a kiss be expelled as a rapist the same as an actual rapist?
Further, these cases are being adjudicated on a preponderance of evidence standard, meaning administrators just have to be 50.01 percent sure some form of misconduct occurred. This also means they can be 49.99 percent sure the misconduct didn’t occur.
Expelling a student, radically altering his life when there is such a high likelihood that he did nothing wrong used to give school administrators some pause. This sentiment was espoused by a University of Virginia administrator during a radio interview.
To suggest that students found responsible should be automatically expelled is to believe that these cases are cut-and-dried examples of rape. But they’re not. They’re often he said/she said situations where memories are fuzzy, often due to alcohol but often due to the nature of human memory and the reinterpretation of events by outside activists, and where there is little, if any, evidence that an assault occurred.
Under those circumstances, and without due process protections for accused students, the likelihood of campus administrators getting it wrong is high.
To combat any and all problems in campus hearings, the editors suggest, education is needed. The education they suggest is about yes-means-yes policies, and claim that being drunk — not incapacitated, but merely drunk — negates consent.
“It isn’t difficult to realize that if a person is drunk, you shouldn’t have sex with them, because they aren’t in the right state of mind to give you consent,” the editors wrote. “Herein we tie back to the question of, ‘what if one person says it’s okay, but decides in the morning they didn’t want it?’ It’s simple, really: no matter how many times a person may say something is okay, no one is able to give consent when they are drunk. Period.”
So according to the editors of Boston University’s student newspaper, drunk sex equals rape. This follows in the footsteps of Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina, which once posted flyers around its campus claiming the same.
But make no mistake, being too drunk to consent only applies to women in these situations. That’s because schools often include in their policy that accused students, who are overwhelmingly male, who are drunk during the sexual encounter are not absolved of their actions. So in cases where the male accused student was too drunk to consent, where essentially both students sexually assaulted each other, only the accused student is responsible.
In a just world, the accused would have just as much a claim to sexual assault as the accuser in these situations. But this isn’t a just world, and until false accusations and the due process rights of accused students are treated seriously, schools will never be able to adequately adjudicate campus sexual assaults.
