Marc MacYoung has an interesting post on his blog from back in 2012:
http://macyoungsmusings.blogspot.com/2012_10_01_archive.html
…as usual, its blunt and controversial but contains a core of truth. The current climate surrounding “rape education” does seem to focus on trying to “train men” not to rape vs teaching women risk reduction behaviors. Attempts to do so commonly seem to result in accusations of “blaming victims” who have already been raped. Personally I find that reaction odd when compared to self defense training of any other sort. If one were to teach “robbery prevention” I don’t think there would be a huge uproar that you were blaming robbery victims for being victims.
Now. I’m not saying that both approaches at the same time would be necessarily bad. Or that reminding boys/men (this is usually in a college setting) about what consent is is wrong and I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to train women how to avoid risky situations.
Like this case.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local…256a1e-10d3-11e3-bdf6-e4fc677d94a1_story.html
In a nutshell…the victim states she went to a party and got intoxicated. She had consensual sex with one guy that evening and a different guy when she awoke the following morning. She found out later that she had sex/was raped (depending on unknown facts) by three midshipmen in between those contacts.
At issue is her condition at the time and if it was consensual. The common understanding (what most people assume) is that if she didn’t remember it than she must have been unconscious and these guys took advantage of an unconscious victim. However….its also possible that she was “conscious”…speaking…and giving these guys the impression this contact was indeed consensual. Alcoholic “blackouts” don’t equate to unconsciousness.
What would the legal issues be if both male and female parties were intoxicated enough to not recall the previous nights happenings? Is the male party still guilty of rape?
The males in this situation may have benefited from some sort of training about intoxication and sexual consent and the female may have benefited from training about the risks of intoxication and sexual victimization.
This is not to condone (by ANY means) those situations where men do indeed know the female is too intoxicated to consent…charge em and convict em. But if a guy is the type of person to do that I highly doubt that a class telling him that was wrong would be much more than a PC waste of time. Women need to protect themselves from people and situations like that. I don’t want any of my daughters to be at the mercy of assuming a guy has been “properly trained” not to rape. If he needs that type of explanation in the first place I wouldn’t want them associating with him. We cant “train” being a good person into a man through anything other than a good lifelong upbringing, and we don’t get it in an hour long class given by a dorm RA that’s for damn sure….the idea that a public service announcement level of “don’t rape guys” is going to accomplish anything is pie in the sky reasoning. If it’s not common sense that a passed out girl is not a target for sex then that person has more issues going on than “poor training”.
I want women to be safe. I don’t think that shutting down discussion of personal safety issues by screaming “YOU ARE BLAMING THE VICTIM” advances the issue at all. We ALL make mistakes..that’s why in the LE/MIL world we have after action reviews (AAR’s) we point out where we made mistakes and hope to learn from it so that we don’t repeat them. It’s not a matter of assigning blame.