I wonder, but I'm too lazy to see if anyone has researched it, whether living on campus matters either way.
And sure, yeah, it's all about privilege. But people have a not-unreasonable expectation that a college campus is going to be a safer place than the rest of the world.
This may have something to do with the attitude that 19-year-old women (or indeed men) who aren't at college are adults who can vote, own property, drink, run their lives etc and 19-year-old women (or indeed men) who are at college are really just schoolchildren.
Well, it could have something to do with college campuses being places that have very high concentrations of 18-24 years old -- if you were trying to make an argument that it's not only about privilege.
I was also thinking something like 3 - non-college young adults more easily blur in with all adults in general, and all adults in general have a lower rate of sexual assault and rape. Whereas college adults are an isolated at-risk population.
What exactly does "account for" mean here?
Does it imply the statistics might be less reliable—as if after the week of discussion we've had on this subject anybody believed in those statistics—regarding these different groups, or is it merely asking about the breakdown of victims by class?
I'd be willing to argue something different (all speaking ex recto(. Students on campus are encouraged to go through university channels and therefor report fewer of the rapes. Women not in school have only one place to go: the police.
6: No, it means that if you match individuals for wealth and SES, does the discrepancy disappear or reverse?
I assume the study was going off of incidents reported in a survey, not incidents reported to an authority.
Are we talking about a mediation analysis with wealth and SES introduced as covariates to see what happens to the effect of college status or are we going to do an actual matched case-control design? If the latter, I'm already supposed to be doing that now, but with knee pain.
7: That is to say, I wonder whether the statistics showing a higher incidence of women off-campus are, in fact, accurate.
Having said that, I think that the discussion needs to include all women.
I think either way we're going to hit up against the fact that SES and wealth correlate so strongly with college status that we won't have enough variance to do a model unless we get into a very large number of cases.
There would be plenty of low SES women going to college, so maybe we could restrict to that. It's the high SES women who don't go to college that I wonder about. I think they'd be different enough from their high SES peers in college that you wouldn't be measuring college vs. no college so much as looking at the effects of various learning disabilities or substance abuse issues or something.
13.last: Or emotional trauma related to a recent sexual assault, IME.
Isn't there a statistical thing (yes, very specific terminology here) where on any health measure, if you look at any plausible identifiable group, they're going to be healthier than the population at large? Unhealthy people, by whatever measure, are less likely to: be in the military; be nurses; be members of a bowling league; you name it. So whenever you're looking at the health of a particular group, you're screening out a percentage of really unhealthy people.
I'd expect the same thing with rape: not exactly that there's likely to be a smooth correlation with socioeconomic status, so richer college students are raped less. But that there's a class of people whose lives are generally in such disorder that they're very vulnerable to any kind of crime, including sexual assault: homeless people, the very poor even if they're not homeless, sex workers, people whose social group includes a high percentage of violent people, and those people are both going to account for a disproportionate number of people subjected to sexual assault and also aren't likely to be college students.
I have no idea what the OP is arguing, but anger is focusing on colleges not because rape prevalence there is worse than anywhere else, it's because colleges have affirmatively failed to respond appropriately to the incidents they have been presented with. It's similar to the church sex abuse scandals--my understanding is that the number of predatory priests wasn't significantly different in percentage terms than the number of predators in the population as a whole, but people were (rightly) furious anyway--the issue wasn't that some priests were abusive (that's tragic but inevitable), but that the church tolerated them and even enabled them--reassigning them from parish to parish, etc., and generally covering up rather than calling the police. Just like college administrators.
I have no idea what the OP is arguing,
Really?
16: I'm not sure what you mean. Certainly it isn't hard to identify groups that are less healthy than the population at least.
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This is just great. Status of a friend from Facebook, posing in a picture with Arianna Huffington:
Arianna: Dahling, you need lipstick. Use mine. And then we'll take a picture.
Me: Hey, now we're both lipstick lesbians. Hahahaha.
Arianna: *silence*
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Certainly it isn't hard to identify groups that are less healthy than the population at least.
Starting at the hospital.
If you're picking them out for that purpose, or if you're running into some occupational disease, or whatever, you can find an unhealthy group.
But if you pick a random health measure and a group that doesn't obviously have relation to that health measure, the group is very likely to be healthier than the population at large. Employees at Olive Garden are less likely to be diabetic than the population of the US, even matched for age, because once you're looking at people working in a restaurant, you're looking at people who aren't disabled by diabetes, and that eliminates a part of the diabetic population. And so on. Someone who knows something about public health say they recognize this as a phenomenon? I swear I've read about it.
18: I get that you're suggesting that the prevalence of rape may be higher on college campuses (compared to the population of 18-24 year olds writ large) once the socio-economic status of the relevant populations is taken into account. But I'm not sure I'm following what you think the implications of that might be.
Certainly every employed group is healthier than the population at large.
It's the high SES women who don't go to college that I wonder about. .
There are lot of people (including high SES) who enter college these days and leave it temporarily or permanently during that age period (18-24). Data of completion rates by SES.
In my experience, many high SES drop outs have more mundane problems than learning disabilities, traumas, or substance abuse issues. They just don't have the work habits or interest in showing up and doing academic work. 40 years ago they probably would have never enrolled in the first place, but they try to psyche themselves into it these days to avoid precarity and/or spending your twenties living with your parents.
I didn't actually know the figures. That's much lower than I thought for the high SES. That will be enough variation.
Hooray for potential downward mobility.
7 - possibly, but then again college students also have formal welfare systems and reporting lines in a way that adults don't.
24: I think the argument of the OP is that "We're all het up about rape with impunity on college campuses, and college administrations diverting victims from complaining to law enforcement. Actually, women in college are victims of sexual assault at a lower rate than women in the general population and we just care more about them because, as college students, they're presumably nice middle-class women. We should focus more on the rest of the population where sexual assault is a worse problem."
29: Right, and my question is: how many of rapes reported through those alternative reporting lines make it into the statistics and how many are covered up by the administrators who want to protect their school's reputation.
30 is what the link is asserting. I was being a bit contrarian by arguing that the campuses were artificially low due to wealth...maybe urple is right that I don't have much of a point, though.
I recognize what LB is describing, and I swear I've read a standard term for it, similar to "excluded middle." Composition something?
32: Oh, I get you. Yes, colleges are safer than the general population, because you eliminate vulnerable people with disorderly lives. But still, no, maybe colleges aren't safer than non-college environments for a matched cohort of women, and these stats don't tell us much about that?
I think I'd want to do the comparison for college students in non-college environments. Is an undergraduate more likely to be raped in a given month when she is living on campus taking classes, or while she's off campus working on a summer job?
I think LB is speaking of Simpson's Paradox. D'oh.
Heebs, I correctly understood you. Not because you were making sense, but because I'm awesome.
No, just kidding, you were perfectly clear. And I think 16.2 is the specific mechanism that makes the stats (however flawed) show what they do. I suspect that, once you control for SES, you'd get trivial* differences between college and non-college sexual assault.
That said, I think urple's 17 gets it basically right - whether college rape is more or less prevalent, it's nonetheless shocking because a lot of ostensibly responsible/upstanding institutions are failing to do anything about it. An American college campus should be a safer place for women.
*trivial in the sense that they wouldn't be revelatory, whether they were explained by poor data collection or factors that are obvious and not especially striking - e.g., college is *slightly* safer because it's a cosseted environment, or *slightly* less safe because frathouse rapists and free-flowing alcohol
The obvious way to do the comparison is to compare offence rates against college students while at college to those against college students in the vacations...
Right, and my question is: how many of rapes reported through those alternative reporting lines make it into the statistics and how many are covered up by the administrators who want to protect their school's reputation.
Very good point. And there's also, on the other hand, the figure: how many happening to non-college women are just not being reported at all to anyone, because (eg) the police are seen as unsympathetic? So there's imponderables on both sides really.
35: No, I just looked up Simpson's Paradox, and that's different.
This was already pointed out in 9, but I'll do it again. The info in the OP is based on a survey and includes reported and unreported rapes. There may be a bias to the survey method that results in differential reporting by SES, but views on the police and the actions of school administrators shouldn't affect it.
34:
Another comparison I've been thinking about, while reminiscing this week, was raised above re:living on or off campus. I never lived in a dorm or frat or group housing of any kind as an undergraduate, I was an independent adult living at home but working odd hours and coming and going as I pleased, not expected for dinner, nor indeed always coming home to sleep.
I sing with a university chorus of a state U a few miles from my house, and the students at that school live very much the same way I did: home-work-school. The pattern is also similar, although not exclusive, at the large urban Catholic universities in my city and probably in yours: many of the students live at home, and work all the time.
Now I'm presuming that the incidence of reports in the student population I just described is significantly lower, just based on opportunity, but it may not be and the distribution would be interesting.
Ah, in fact there's a bit of Simpson's Paradox in that lefty earnings stat from a couple weeks ago: The effect is larger for both men and women than for the larger population, because the lefty-earning men still earn more than righty-earning women, reducing the overall skew.
This interesting statistical artifact is offered with no political subtext.
If this is the new rape thread, then I recommend this timely piece by an author I resquet quite a lot.
The link in 44 is really something. Who would have guessed that Billy Graham has a grandson named Boz Tchividjian? Also, this:
Dr. Walter Fremont, a BJU professor and author of a book on Christian counseling used at the school, suggested as an example of a victim who needed to repent for her part in the sin "a teenage girl who only takes a bath when her mother is away from the home and leaves the bathroom door unlocked, inviting the father's corruptness."
What?
Although for grim hilarity, this is pretty great:
One student who sought help for an eating disorder says her counselor admitted she knew nothing about the topic, and then went on to ask the counselee for dieting tips in preparation for her upcoming wedding.
I've shared about my bad counselor who said that since I had a history of anorexia, they could try to find an antidepressant that would cause weight loss, because I'd probably feel even better if I lost some weight, right?
Some people really do need a box outside of which they should not think.
On the other hand, as the author asks in closing, why does it seem that even in the presence of an antithetical ideology to the one we all profess, are the results so similar?
It's impressive that an organization like GRACE should exist, with some standing and authority in its world. Can you imagine what kind of body could possibly truth-to-power our secular colleges like that?
45 That's just...I don't even...do they not know that people can see how twisted they are inside when they say shit like that?
J, Robot, this is totally off-topic, but I seem to remember it might be relevant to your interests? (Pahokee & football?)
Some thoughts while reading the report (thanks for not linking directly to the pdf, Heebs - my browser gets funny with pdfs):
The total rates of rape seem low to me. Table 3 shows a rate of 6.1/1000 per woman per year, so assuming no repeats we get about 3.6% for women 18-24. Maybe that's not low. I dunno.
The difference in the rate of male rape for students vs. non-students is really striking. As a man you are 5 times more likely to get raped in college than if you were a non-student. Maybe there's some kind of reporting issue, with students more likely to report rape than non-students. I could easily see that having an effect like maybe a factor of 2 or so, but 5?!
47: She's an idiot. Try to find? It's called Adderall, duh. Fucking counselors, learn some pharmacology.
Statements like 45 should be treated as probable cause for a warrant to search that guy's computer for kiddie porn.
53: Wellbutrin too, if that's your goal.
52.last: I have literally no idea what I'm talking about, but if that were an actual difference that showed up reliably, which I have no reason to think it is (hedge hedge hedge, qualify qualify qualify, now I'm going to pull a theory out of the air) my head would go straight to frats and sports teams, speculating that men get raped primarily in single-sex formally hierarchical environments, and college students are much more likely to be involved in those than non-college.
52.2: Probably because you can't pass out around white people. (at about 1:12)
53: HE, sexist. And I didn't follow that suggestion, nor the one that probably I'd feel better about myself if I got some Glamour Shots done. I really did not have any particular weight to lose at that point anyway, so I lost the therapist. I only went to him anyway because I really needed some anti-anxiety meds and anyone who sees the psychiatrist he's affiliated with leaves with multiple prescriptions immediately.
probably I'd feel better about myself if I got some Glamour Shots done
This is brilliant. I may start using this as general-purpose advice whenever anyone is having a difficult time. Rough day at work? Probably you'd feel better about yourself if you got some Glamour Shots done. Car wreck? Probably you'd feel better about yourself if you got some Glamour Shots done. Sister diagnosed with cancer? Probably you'd feel better about yourself if you got some Glamour Shots done.
"And I just happen to have a camera with me."
whether college rape is more or less prevalent, it's nonetheless shocking because a lot of ostensibly responsible/upstanding institutions are failing to do anything about it.
I am not speaking to shocking, but part of the outrageousness of college rape is that everyone is paying a gazillion dollars to be there. If they think about it, they probably think that part of what they are buying is safety from sexual assault (college police, RAs in dorms) or failing that, an appropriate response to a sexual assault.
Paying that much money isn't the direct issue, but it gives the purchasers another reason to think that assault shouldn't be happening.
A Glamour Shot just sounds like a really foul mixed drink. Amaretto, peach schnapps, and a drizzle of pomegranate juice.
Served in an old-style champagne coupe.
Wait, what was that awful stuff with gold flake in it? [googles] Goldschlager. It'd need Goldschlager.
I see people drink that at the smokey bar. I hadn't known it existed before.
All that glamors is not goldschlager.
Pomegranate juice and vodka isn't bad. It's not as good as whiskey, but it is better than either ingredient by itself.
Not just as a horrifying response to sexual assault in particular, but this selection makes it seem like the sum total of Bob Jones theodicy is "everyone deserves whatever happens to them" (or at least every woman does).
When Berg was told of students who alleged abuse or rape, he usually met with them for only one to three sessions, and bragged to a colleague that "in five minutes I can tell you what is wrong with somebody," and provide them with the proper sheet of scripture verses, "and say go study this and you will be all right." Berg often began to immediately ask them probing, accusative questions about their own "moral life"...
idp, I recommend the longer Prospect piece which goes into the origins of GRACE.
I don't think there's any other violent crime as to which, if you segregate out the class/wealth/education demographics of college students and compare that to the remaining age cohort, you'd get anything close to comparable numbers. How do murders or robberies or non-sexual assaults look for college vs non-college students? That in and of itself suggests that there is something unusual happening with rape on college campuses.
All that glamors is not goldschlager.
I love this.
And, as the OP link points out, college student women who live on campus are substantially more likely to be raped than college students who do not live on campus, suggesting that there is something particularly bad about being on campus.
74: not necessarily. People on-campus tend to be first year students, and several articles have mentioned that first years get preyed upon.
part of the outrageousness of college rape is that everyone is paying a gazillion dollars to be there.
When I was at Chicago, I remember feeling that parents should get a full tuition refund if their kid committed suicide while at the college. It made me just blindly, insanely angry at the school authorities. YOU FUCKING FAILED. You couldn't even keep the student alive, much less give them a meaningful education in values. I realize this is not exactly the height of reason now, but I remember my rage about it then. (Actually one suicide I vividly remember -- it caused my calc midterm to be cancelled -- followed a sexual assault. So awful.)
(N.b. I have restricted access to Unfogged to 10 minutes during work hours, so let me here issue blanket sympathies to anyone who has recently posted about a personal crisis. And to everyone in general, I guess. it's been an above-average year for me but obviously crap for large swathes of the population.)
OK, then there's something particularly bad about being a first year on a college campus. Anyhow, the better inference is that colleges take a slice of the overall age cohort of women, who, because of their background, are generally extraordinarily unlikely to suffer violent crime, are not part of an overall culture of violence or grow up in a violent area, and subject them to risk for a particular crime, rape, at rates that are near-equal to their peers who live in affirmatively violent areas.
The TNR article eems to be arguing that these numbers show that colleges can't be particularly bad or the problem, but that's wrong. Crime is heavily dependent on socio-economic status and for essentially every other crime tracks those factos strongly, yet colleges have created an environment where that apparently is not the case. A better comparison would be to rapes between similarly socio-economically situated college and non-college women, though I think this would be hard to do these days because essentially all MC-UMC women these days attend college somewhere.
I also wonder about the international comparisons. Are rates of college student rape in, e.g., Germany, where people don't really live "on campus" but just move into a city where a university happens to be and take classes there, but there's no real "campus life" in the US sense, anywhere close to the US levels? I don't know but would bet heavily that the answer is "no."
71:
I did read it, thanks. Pretty impressive.
Isn't 77 exactly the argument in the OP?
78 et al:
This is the point I was raising in 42. Lots of American college students don't have much contact with "campus life" either. What are their results?
Basically, my view is that the idea of residential life in colleges should be destroyed and put to an end. We can have state-run research institutions and classrooms for tertiary education where professors focus on research and teaching, and operate classrooms, offices, and labs. The rest of the campus can die in a fire. The primary value of campus partying life is to elites, anyway, as that excellent-looking book about fraternities that was reviewed at Crooked Timber reveals; it's the university as font of connection-making, and also rape.
Students can hang out in cafes or apartments or whatever but in a setting that has at least some marginal connection to the real world.
Yeah, it looks like the data would also classify as "students" people in community colleges, who are multitudinous.
Not to say they aren't students, but not really the same thing being discussed here.
I thought the point in the OP was "kwitcher bitchin about college rape, elitists, rape is a big problem for this age group everywhere so colleges aren't at fault." The "big problem" point seems right but the "aren't at fault" argument seems very wrong, or at least something that's not supported at all by these numbers.
But maybe that wasn't the point of the OP!
similarly socio-economically situated college and non-college women, though I think this would be hard to
You could compare seniors in high school to freshman in college.
Nope, it was the thing in 80 (and 32).
I misunderstood just like you did. 86 is the point TNR was making in the link in the OP. Heebie was in the OP (subtly!) disagreeing with it along the lines of 77.
Aren't the college rape situation supposed to be specifically a fraternity problem? So maybe some colleges have a very low rape incidence and some, with a fratboy culture, a very high one and it just happens to even out?
88: That's a big age jump, even if it's only a year. I think the comparison with college kids off campus over the summer is better, although it still has problems.
91: I don't think they're at all solely a frat problem, just that frats are a particular nexus of it.
A better comparison would be to rapes between similarly socio-economically situated college and non-college women, though I think this would be hard to do these days because essentially all MC-UMC women these days attend college somewhere.
The data (assuming it's) in 26 suggests that 38% of UMC women in public 4-year universities drop out / don't get a degree in 6 years, which per 27 seems enough to generate a sample that would allow you to do this comparison.
82: Then how do kids leave home?
Maybe this has nothing to do with colleges. Maybe it just has to do with that dangerous period in an animal's life when they have to leave the family nest and go on their own.
On the subject of rape, this post excerpts (and links to) a talk on the biological and psychological effects of rape. The excerpts (I didn't watch the video) point out that some of the side effects of the rape directly cause the victim to appear incoherent or false.
Professor Campbell's research was an attempt to investigate why the police could be so certain that most of the victims reporting rape and sexual assault were lying, while she was so certain that most were not.
What she found was that there are certain neurological events during a sexual assault that explain most of the officer's complaints:
it's the university as font of connection-making, and also rape.
I'm not sure why you want to throw out this baby with this bathwater. Connection-making (and the associated expansion of social horizons and engagement in new experiences) is valuable.
56: If it's a real thing, my baseless speculation would be that a lot of the difference is women raping men, and male college students being much more ready to label themselves as rape victims, especially when the perpetrator is female.
67 Wait, what was that awful stuff with gold flake in it? [googles] Goldschlager. It'd need Goldschlager.
The official drink of U of C Scavhunt items that ask you to recreate the Rutherford scattering experiment with items you can find in your dorm.
That's plausible too -- that men sexually assaulted by women outside of the liberal/academic bubble are much likelier to lack any structure for understanding it as an assault, and so don't classify it as such.
96, 98 -- Not all connection-making is bad. The particular US college campus connection making scene basically favors the already-elite, for reasons I found totally convincing in in this summary of someone's excellent looking research.
The problem is that other students (all [the subjects of this study were] women), who do not have the resources to get jobs in the industries to which the easy majors orient them, and who lack the wealth to keep up with the party scene, and who simply cannot afford to have the low gpas that would be barriers to their future employment, but which are fine for affluent women, get caught up in the scene. They are, in addition, more vulnerable to sexual assault, and less insulated (because they lack family money) against the serious risks associated with really screwing up.
103: Oh, ha, one of those authors was a classmate of mine. I'd considered linking to it. So yeah.
Anecdotally, 99 sure wouldn't be my guess. I don't work a campus so maybe I'm way off. I've never taken a female on male rape and I can't even think one I've heard about from any co-worker.
103: I keep hearing about that book and occasionally checking the social science section of my local bookstore for a copy. I suppose I should just go ahead and order it.
Basically, my view is that the idea of residential life in colleges should be destroyed and put to an end
Tim Burke had a proposal along those lines a while back, which might or might not be available as a bandwagon to get on (I like the idea in theory, but I have no idea how to move in that direction, since the current trend seems to be towards increasing the set of services and activities that get included within the university).
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NOTE -- Extended Tangent.
While we're talking about academia: I had a dream last night in which I was back in school and struggling to figure out how to structure an essay* (a genre of dream which I used to have moderately frequently, but hadn't had in a while, and thought I'd finally aged out of) and, somehow, as I was waking up and processing that, it made me wonder how academics within Political Science and Sociology respond to something like the protests about the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner?
I suspect the answer shares some of the characteristics with the conversation on this blog -- that many people are personally outraged, but that professionally the feeling is that these are individual cases which are representative of larger issues (which have, of course, already been written about), and that the questions they pose, while important morally, aren't interesting theoretically. I hope I'm wrong about that, and I'm asking in part because I'm curious if somebody here can say, "oh, so-and-so is doing interesting work trying to connect political theory to contemporary political crises."
I just think that, as much as we criticize economists, there is at least some sense that the field as a whole has to attempt a response to current events. I haven't gone looking, but I haven't happened across any political scientists** taking the position that, for example, racial disparities in policing is exactly the sort of thing that the discipline should be prepared to address (if it is prepared to address contemporary politics at all). Not just in the sense of, "there are a couple people documenting the scope of the problem" but, "there are thousands of people in this country paid to think about how political institutions function, and succeed or fail and I would hope that they could at least agree on a technical vocabulary to use to describe this situation."
* No one cares, but I remember waking up thinking that I'd arrived at an interesting solution. In the dream, I was supposed to write something using the work of some theorist to some event (I remember watching a video of some sort). Then, at some point it shifted (in a vague dream like way) from being an event to the outcome of some game, and I decided that I could apply the political theory to the rules of the game itself, rather than dealing with the outcome, and that seemed like a much better path.
** I majored in political theory, so that's why I was immediately thinking about Political Science as a discipline -- even though my own experience and interest in the field was pretty abstract and removed from contemporary politics.
*** I did make the mistake about reading some of the comments on the CT post about political legitimacy. That just made me depressed. Also, now that I've linked to both CT and BDL in this post, how is it that both of them happen to have recommended Postmodern Jukebox videos within the last week? That also makes me slightly sad.
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93: I could have phrased that better, but colleges might have very different incidences of rape depending on the (male) student culture, or the attitude of the administrations.
105: That doesn't seem surprising -- any non-wacky female on male sexual assault scenario seems, given the typical strength differential, social assumptions, and so on, to be the sort of thing that'd be really hard to prosecute. (Situations not that far off from your story about the woman in the car the other day, Non-consent, maybe expressed verbally, but overridden by surprise more than by forcible struggle. Or non-consenting but drunk and confused victim.) Doesn't mean it never happens (and I have no real sense of how often it does), but I'm not surprised it's very rarely reported to the police.
99: The study puts female-male rape at a statistically insignificant level (not enough reports to get accurate stats).
There is something very weird about either the reporting of male rape or the environment on campus. I think reluctance to admit to it could explain part of the difference, but it's a factor of 5. That just seems incredible. Maybe there's some combination of LB's hypothesis about hierarchical structures (which implies the military ought to have about the same rate as campuses) differential reporting and some weirdness with the way the question was phrased.
Part of this is personal. I was basically black-out drunk 4 nights/week for all of college, briefly in a fraternity (not a rapey one, as far as I know!), and did pretty well with a relatively easy major, made some good friends and connections, and ended up fine. But hey guess what I also had a super privileged background and independent academic interest various easy options to fall back on, so no big deal. Two of my buddies in black-out drunkeness without such resources just left, substantially the poorer from it, one works as a cable installer now and one is "whereabouts unknown." Other people also did fine but for the most part like me they were pretty much fine going in. There's basically zero good reason for colleges to have these scenes.
And I'm of course excluding the female teacher banging male high school student from that statement.
From Slate: "Last year the National Crime Victimization Survey turned up a remarkable statistic. In asking 40,000 households about rape and sexual violence, the survey uncovered that 38 percent of incidents were against men. ... prosecutions of sexual crimes against men are still rare. But gender norms are shaking loose in a way that allows men to identify themselves--if the survey is sensitive and specific enough--as vulnerable. A recent analysis of BJS data, for example, turned up that 46 percent of male victims reported a female perpetrator."
Or non-consenting but drunk and confused victim.)
[Cyril is unconscious in the bathroom]
Pam: Cyril. Hey, you awake? [Undoing her belt and dropping her skirt] 'Cause this is about to get weird.
Lana: Pam! Get off Cyril!
Pam: [Coming out of the bathroom] I was trying to get him off, Buttinski!
One of my graduate school roommates married his high school teacher, AIMHMHBIIGTAR.
Another reason college rape gets attention is the in loco parentis factor. (I thought of this when reading something, although I think it wasn't here, about why colleges have a role in investigating rapes at all. Relevant here too.) I don't know exactly in what way that works at most colleges these days, but I think there's still an element of it.
As for the stats about SES, I agree with 27 that the numbers in 26 are surprisingly low, but note that their highest category of family income is $70,000 and up. That's around the 80th percentile of income.
78: The problem with an international comparison is that most other countries have saner laws about drinking by minors.
82
Basically, my view is that the idea of residential life in colleges should be destroyed and put to an end.
Disagree. Personally, those years of my life would have been a lot more miserable and I'd still probably be going in a more dead-end direction even now. Something structured, surrounded by a peer group, and more than six hours from home was good for me between high school and the real world, and I don't see how you can get that without something residential-college-like. (I'm as sure about that as I can be about any coulda-shoulda-woulda, at least.) (My experience shouldn't guide government policy, but on the other hand I assume I'm not completely unique.) In terms of more serious policy issues, doesn't research tend to subsidize education in some schools, and vice versa in others? Separate them, and what's likely to happen is that the funding is likely to dry up. Not logical, but that's our country.
111: whereas I was from not such a privileged background and drank some in college but not excessively and mostly studied hard but still met a lot of people that I wouldn't have met had I spent four years living in an apartment somewhere off-campus (and I mostly stopped meeting interesting people when I moved into an apartment off-campus in the middle of my junior year).
113: The claim that men and women are being sexually assaulted at near the same rate by the opposite sex just instinctively strikes me as crazily wrong. I really have a hard time believing this is actually going on.
I think I've only been black-out drunk once in my life. It's not pleasant. I don't see why people can't just get wasted and leave it at that.
118: Yeah, that seems nuts to me too. I'd believe it happens much more than it gets reported, but at the same rate seems very implausible. The links in the article didn't lead to anything where I saw obvious backup for the claim, and Rosin isn't super reliable.
That was me. the BJS article. I haven't read it.
I'm glad that Ripper's been driving this discussion in the direction it's going.
As peep suggested, it's the age of the person which creates the risk factors, and most UMC are in college 18-22. My own different path, college indeed but Army and a succession of manual/construction jobs currently with college has had a profound influence on my life. Throughout those years I didn't spend much time hanging out with people of my class as residential college students do.
Several rape threads ago, earlier this week, Chris Y asked why more American liberals don't do such things as join the police. One reason is how they will have developed in early adulthood, and most are products of environments where their daily interactions have mostly been with people like themselves. It puts up barriers. Our counterexample, gswift, started out that way but life intervened.
Ripper's experience like mine didn't derail our academic and professional outcomes, but did give us a perspective we might not have had.
The "campus life" cohort is never all of the population of American colleges, but the higher up the scale you go, the more dominant it is.
Positive experiences like Urple's are common, and I'm glad of them. But experiences like 103, or indeed like I Am Charlotte Simmons are common too.
118: That's not what those stats would say. It would be 17% of rapes are male raped by female while 21% were males raped by males. Then 62% were of females, perp's gender not specified (but almost certainly male).
The BJS article.
122: No one deserves the experience of reading I am Charlotte Simmons.
My experience at ucb never included dorm life, I always worked as was paying for the whole shebang myself (loans were involved, but no parental support except for room & board the first year, see below) and apart from the first year when I was also finishing hs I didn't live at home. So I think I had pretty close to the euro experience tro is describing and I don't recall ever having difficulty meeting interesting people or finding cool things to do. I certainly don't hold in my mind a more traditionally usian collegiate set up as an ideal that my experience fell short of or that I want for my kid and to be honest I'd resist paying for that pretty strenuously.
My one, brief experience of a more traditional us college also perhaps coincidentally provided my only experience of knowing peers involved in a rape accusation. The entire cast of characters was somewhat desperately stereotypical (vulnerable victim with credibility undermining issues, accused with deep connections to school's power structure, obvious ham-fisted administrative cover up, obvious and crude social pressure on victim to drop the whole thing, etc). I didn't gain any special insights into the situation.
I saw that. I thought it was a pretty great illustration of something.
In a way, I kind of admire that Harvard professor. Why not demand punitive damages for a $4 overcharge. Why not write a 4 paragraph legal argument complete with citations about why your Groupon applies to the prix fixe item. Live out your principles in every sphere. It's like he's breaking down the walls between my personal and professional life and living as an integrated human being. He may be horrifying, but at least he's a fully integrated human being.
I've never aspired to being a fully integrated human being. I'm very contextual.
I could have been a diplomat if I thought I was supposed to be polite in any contexts.
129: There's a "functional integral" pun in there somewhere.
I'd guess (still speculating wildly!) female sexual assaults aganst adult males very rarely involve knife wielding, just drugs, not waiting for consent or preying on emotional vulnerability, so hard to prosecute even aside from gender roles.
114 is something I something I was going to bring up as especially likely in college.
Maybe a lot of f/m sexual abuse is in the context of abusive relationships (something that's definitely much more common than people think).
If "black-out drunk" means blacking out, as in not remembering anything about a period of hours, I'm pretty sure I've never done that.
I've been drunk enough that my memories were spotty half a dozen times, maybe a little more than that to be honest but not too much more. But there were never any wacky or scary gaps and I didn't wake up next to anyone unfamiliar or wearing anything weird, it's just that I remembered getting to my floor or house but not getting into bed, that sort of thing.
The problem is, the wild, crazy, fun kind of drunk overlaps with the the spotty-memories kind of drunk and the line between them and the getting-sick kind of drunk is blurry and often depends on decisions made hours earlier.
I think "black-out drunk" is often unhelpfully equivocal between passing-out drunk and losing-memory drunk, and losing-memory drunk, while it doesn't happen short of being quite drunk, is a pretty idiosyncratic state that for some people happens well short of passing out. Back in college, I definitely didn't remember some evenings; nothing where anything upsetting turned out to have happened, but missing hours.
I thought black-out drunk was a technical term for losing-memory drunk. Passing out could just be really tired or bored or too many wings.
I just meant gently passing out, not really big-time memory loss, that happened for sure a bunch as well but not 4x/week.
I had a very very typical college experience, I think. Big state U, friend group had an informal party going on most nights, I was one of the least heavy partiers because I didn't really enjoy drinking two nights in a row.
ISTR a whole bunch of distinct news items from the past year or so about contexts where male rape (by men) is vastly traditionally underreported. Specifically, rape in war (I think it was during the Rwanda genocide specifically) and in the US military. This is not in response to anything in particular.
My experience at ucb never included dorm life, I always worked as was paying for the whole shebang myself (loans were involved, but no parental support except for room & board the first year, see below) and apart from the first year when I was also finishing hs I didn't live at home. So I think I had pretty close to the euro experience tro is describing and I don't recall ever having difficulty meeting interesting people or finding cool things to do. I certainly don't hold in my mind a more traditionally usian collegiate set up as an ideal that my experience fell short of or that I want for my kid and to be honest I'd resist paying for that pretty strenuously.
A comparable experience, although you moved out quicker; I paid everything myself too.
And I had a broad and stimulating circle of acquaintances too, but I think the amount of "cultural capital" I had was a necessary part of that. That may also be true for you. Experiences like Urple's, or what my son describes happening to "townie" students he knows, suggest that the exposure to a broader culture among peers is crucial for many, as it wasn't for me.
Both my kids have had the liberal arts residential college experience, and have flourished. Without substantial financial aid it wouldn't have been possible, and I'm sure they'd have been fine commuting to a college in the city, had that been necessary as it very nearly was.
127: that's a slatepitch that doesn't go far enough. I'm amazed at how this douchebag restaurant manager who couldn't be bothered to keep his online menu up-to-date has turned into a folk hero who's now "ready to forgive and move on". Forgive what? *You* were the one who was ripping people off! "But we're such a humble hardworking immigrant mom-and-pop operation."
I paid everything myself too.
The fact that it now seems largely impossible to meaningfully work one's way through college in the US (of course you most definitely also "pay it yourself" by taking out loans, but that's a very different thing psychologically) seems like a really big deal in these conversations. But it's all worth it because the gym has a climbing wall.
I feel like I should unify the two subthreads by quoting things Harvard professors said during the faculty meeting about the school's sexual harassment policy, but I can't really remember anything especially shocking except for one old guy's claim that a university preponderance of evidence standard sounded "unconstitutional".
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Coffee to taste like yak butter. For some reason, in a week notable for toxic bullshit, this is still memorable.
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I don't know, there are so many threads here containing my pseud and the word "H/rv/rd" that I can't really imagine how that comment would come back to bite me.
Whee, helicopters and protesters outside my window again.
They finally found you, thanks to 143.
Maybe you should just give in and keep the watch.
The fact that it now seems largely impossible to meaningfully work one's way through college in the US (of course you most definitely also "pay it yourself" by taking out loans, but that's a very different thing psychologically) seems like a really big deal in these conversations.
Explains a lot of the disconnect between people saying "He just got kicked out of school? That's the punishment? Is that even a punishment?" and people saying "Oh my god I can't believe he was kicked out of school, after going into massive debt for tuition. Now what does he do?"
If I had to choose one to vanish, I'd choose the academics at Berkeley over my living situation at Berkeley. The academic life at Berkeley was either indifferent to me or actively trying to cull me out (when I was in the same classes as the pre-meds). But the living situation gave me the people who are still my core friend group. True, my friends came from the co-ops, not the dorms. But in the long run, I've gotten more value from the residential part of college than from the academics.
151: Well sure, but that's a state school. What about at someplace prestigious?*
*N.B., I make this joke to Cavalier AB all the time.
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Coffee to taste like yak butter. For some reason, in a week notable for toxic bullshit, this is still memorable.
|>"
The scam-y part is the "mold-free" coffee beans that the dude sells.
I always ask for extra mold when I buy coffee.
155. Yak yogurt is wonderful though.
In a business email, how do you tell somebody to fucking google that shit.
Because the fuck. I can't figure out if he's paralyzed by perfectionism, overestimating my niceness, or hates me.
I always ask for extra mold when I buy coffee.
MMMM. GOOD TO THE LAST MOLE.
It's the kind of question Mussolini would have asked Hitler if he wanted to see if he couldn't trick Hitler into invading Greece for him.
The fact that it now seems largely impossible to meaningfully work one's way through college in the US
It's like Belle Knox has taught you nothing.
Which quickly killed the blog.
That thought left her mind all agog.
107: This is a growing area of research in parts of most of the PS/IR sub-subfields. A lot of it is described as the "race and politics" literature. Fwiw, my dept chair just initiated an email discussion about how we can can do more of this research and facilitate on-campus fora on the subject. Another colleague noted that the F/ord Foun/station is funding more race and politics research.
s/b "Foundation."
On the other topic, I spent far too much of my senior year and first two years of grad school blackout drunk with no memory of large periods of evenings. Getting married seems to have cut down on that unhealthy tendency, though I was still proud that I didn't let that happen at Unfogged'con because experience tells me that I would have ended up climbing into bed with someone other than Thorn and trapnel. That, or I would have pulled an urple and taken Ace for a walk around the park whe Heebie was sleeping.
Getting married seems to have cut down on that unhealthy tendency
I got married at 20 and all my blackout drunken episodes (quite a few, TBH) have been with my wife. It takes the trepidation out of the "waking up naked not quite sure what happended" scene.
One of those might be in progress right now. Good times.
I suppose the relevant missing information is that my husband doesn't drink at all.
I don't dwell on it much at this point, but my undergraduate years at an institution where everyone else in this thread seems to have been fine, were by far the worst years of my life socially. I'd have been far better off in the dorms or at a more residential college.
Then number of times I've lost time is probably countable on my fingers. Damn near all of which since I've been with my spouse. Which is now like twelve years.
169: I suspect trapnew and I would have been appropriately a welcoming had you tried in your proper bed, but you kept insistently not being the drunkest. Do-over?
fa, have you explained in TFA why you weren't in the dorms? I missed out because I married at 19, but I'd have been better off in dorms, I assume. (Though maybe I'd also change not really drinking until my late 20s.)
176: Damn, maybe I should have stayed at the party house after all...
177: He was living with his parents, IIRC.
177: Living at home was basically fine in high school and college was more or less in the same place and it was significantly less expensive not to move out. It didn't occur to me that it would make such a big difference to not live with other students and then inertia and finally a big housing shortage - way more people accepted the acceptance offers than the school expected, making apartments scarce - at the start of my senior year (my final semester) led me to just not move out.
Plus, it wasn't until after doing a semester in DC and then a summer language program abroad that I realized that all I needed was to be around more people more of the day and at that point I was about to graduate anyway, so I did. And then I had a kind of repeat pattern in graduate school but I at least was living on my own, plus I read a lot of books, so there's that.
It's easy now to see how many social connections I had despite going to college living in my parent's home, but of course I felt lonely and frustrated at the time. But that was more about time than isolation. I can remember one day driving to work in a factory in winter, at a stoplight behind a car full of kids going skiing, and it hitting me pretty hard. As if I'd ever be in a group like that anyway.
The huge rise in tuition in recent decades is only half the story of not being able to work your way through now. The other is that someone could make decent money then whenever he was willing, or so it seems.
It's also true that I read a prodigious amount and saw a huge number of movies because of my isolation and schedule. Drank less, read more.
way more people accepted the acceptance offers than the school expected, making apartments scarce - at the start of my senior year
was this fall of 96, by any chance?
Fall 98. I think it might have happened more than once, but I didn't look at apartment listings in earlier years. Or my memory is wrong.
The huge rise in tuition in recent decades is only half the story of not being able to work your way through now. The other is that someone could make decent money then whenever he was willing, or so it seems.
That does seem like an odd world.
Nowadays a young person can find some sort of job pretty easily, but it won't be a job that has much effect on whether they can pay for stuff or not.
AIMHMHSBWIWPA, my uncle went to graduate school in the 70s. His stipend was enough to make a payment on a new car and to rent a one bedroom apartment in a nice area. I could barely manage with roommates and a paid-for used car. I suspect it has gotten worse in the 20 years since I started.
Speaking of universities paying shit, people on projects with me are hiring people for different projects at salaries well below mine. The people hired are people who finished their dissertation. I guess the millennials are fucked. But at least nothing bad can ever happen to me.
Note to self: If you have not heard of a beer, it has too much alcohol to drink before dinner.
Anyway, I just saw my neighbor's kid (i.e. 20 something) trying to lead what was either a group of protestors or Jewish carolers. They had a peace flag and were singing about love. He's a quiet boy. He had a megaphone and was continually over shouted by the those without amplification.
The fancy hipster bar was closed for a staff meeting (you could see them inside talking) and the usual bar never opens until 6 on Sunday. So I'm in my tertiary bar.
It's possible my neighbor was protesting police shootings.
Winter quarter, 1974, when I saw the kids going skiing, I was making $4.20/hr in the factory. Just now I thought, "Could that have been so much, then?" Inflation calculator says $20.23/hr today.
187 is usually true.
What I assume is your tertiary bar is our primary bar, because no smoke and the prices are so much better than the hipster bar. It's nice on a Tuesday or Sunday afternoon when no one else is there.
It's actually my secondary bar if I think about it. It's right on the bus line.
Did you know somebody opened a book store (not a used book store) near the Radioshack? I went in to see what was there and it looked very nice. A bit awkward to walk by the Holocaust survivor and not buy his memoirs. I nodded in such a way as to convey that I was a gentile who was Christmas shopping.
Anyway, if you go tonight, the chicken dinner special looked great.
The special at the Radio Shack, or the bookstore?
Tuition and fees for OSU Ohio residents at that point, 1974, would have been $270 a quarter. Inflation calculator makes that $1300 in today's money. OSU has gone to semesters, so make that $2000 for a semester. Actual for an in stater today is $10,037.
AIMHMHSB, my dad took the job in Columbus so that his children would be able to go to college. In that time frame it was the best choice. Ten years later, it wouldn't have been, but been reversed. My cousins who are about ten years younger than we are and mostly went to college in the early 80s in Ontario did not pay any tuition.
The social welfare arcs of the 2 countries crossed, US on the way down, sometime in the 70s at what must have been right angles. Ontario in the early 60s was a notably less prosperous place than Ohio.
197.last: My usual (exaggerated) illustration of that is to compare Toronto vs. Buffalo on almost any metric across the 2nd half of the 20th century.
Toronto Buffalo diverge; Buffalo is the loser.
Buffalo buffalo Toronto buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
In-state tuition was about $2300/semester at Berkeley in the mid-90s, I think.
Buffalo and NYC also diverged, right?
I think of Toronto as much larger, if the metro area is considered, and having a much more diverse economic base than Buffalo. That change may have been part of what the comparison may have been measuring, it may be that Buffalo in 1960 was a financial and cultural center, certainly compared with what it is now? Or not so much in which case maybe Toronto/Buffalo is somewhat misleading.
Perhaps Toronto/Chicago?
Hiring a nanny is amazing. It's like co-parenting with an incredibly compliant, agreeable yes-man. Today was absolutely lovely.
207: Hey now, let's not be too hasty...
Buffalo buffaloed the SHIT out of in Wisconsin today though.
One of these years the mice are going to win Act One of the Nutcracker, and it's going to be AWESOME. Act Two will be like the parade of gross national punk stereotypes.
204: Go back to about WWII and before and Buffalo was arguably the more vital city (and about the same size). Toronto has pulled away so significantly that the comparison now seems ludicrous.
Dairy queen, we made it to the performance today and I even think I saw you at the end but there was no way to confirm without massive awkwarrisk. Thanks for the pointer. Kid had a great time and remembered to (endlessly) whisper. Also [whisper] did they slow down the tape on a few numbers?
Oh so sorry to miss you! No slowing of tape I don't think, it's just a Russian recording with some slow tempos. Also some hideous distortion, but oh well. Nastia was wonderful as the SP Fairy.
My usual (exaggerated) illustration of that is to compare Toronto vs. Buffalo on almost any metric across the 2nd half of the 20th century.
Acemoglu, "Why Nations Fail", starts off with an extended comparison of Nogales in Mexico and Nogales in Arizona, why one is rather nice and the other a hole, and concludes that it's all because of superior institutions. He does not, for some reason, conduct the same comparison of Buffalo and Toronto.
215: And per prior discussion here, there is the additional factor of being on the wrong side of a big lake with respect to prevailing wind direction and resulting snowfall and cloudiness.
On topic: I can't decide if this story is ironic and awful or just awful.
(Executive Summary: Asshole threatening to dox the alleged victim named in the Rolling Stone article isn't particularly better at fact checking than Rolling Stone.)