Betsy DeVos and the Trump administration battle the #metoo movement

[Cake4Breakfast]

No, it isn't an arcane discussion like angels dancing on the heads of needles. Young men in college accused of rape or sexual assault had been stripped of obvious due process protections. That is being rectified. It's a good thing even if one doesn't care for the people doing it. And of course people accusing others of serious crimes like rape should be closely scrutinized. That's a key basis of our entire system of criminal law.

You are ignoring the context of my previous posts, which were intended to disabuse Trump's and many others' arguments about how scary of a time it is for young men in American because of an epidemic of "pitchfork mobs" and "witch hunts" against young men, etc., and you want to discuss another area.

As for that point, obviously findings from a legitimate investigation should be the foundation of any punishment an accuser receives, but I think you are being doctrinaire about due process without taking into consideration how demanding that sexual assault accusers be cross examined by attorneys hired by the accused is going to make legitimate victims less likely than they already are to report sexual assault. A smart policy would take into account the impediments that currently exist that make victims less unlikely to report (as data suggests, as does the sample of people I know), and should take into account that false reports are rare (as data suggests), but this policy doesn't do either of those and does the opposite. Independent investigators who have received proper training should be the ones doing the interviewing with the goal of getting to the truth, and then if the investigator believes that a sexual assault occurred and punishment is warranted, then the accused's attorneys can try to find holes in that investigation. Or at a minimum allow written questions like Trump was given.

 

[Jorge Luis Borges]

You are ignoring the context of my previous posts, which were intended to disabuse Trump's and many others' arguments about how scary of a time it is for young men in American because of an epidemic of "pitchfork mobs" and "witch hunts" against young men, etc., and you want to discuss another area.

Correct. I wasn't issuing some broad rebuttal of everything you were saying. But it's worth noting that people throw out facts about the rate of false rape accusations that are misleading. We don't have a very good idea of how many rape allegations are false. The FBI has determined the bottom number to be 8%, that's the amount they can show are clearly false. To understand my objection more clearly , consider these stats pulled from wikipedia based on findings by the DoJ and the FBI: "for every 1,000 rapes, 384 are reported to police, 57 result in an arrest, 11 are referred for prosecution, 7 result in a felony conviction, and 6 result in incarceration." While the proportion of rapes to reported rape is clearly an estimate, the rest should be pretty firm numbers. If so, for every 384 reported rapes, we have 7 convictions. So just under 2% of the time we have irrefutable evidence of rape accepted by a court. But I think we'd both agree that the number of actual rapes is much higher. Same goes for the 2% number for allegations proven false. So we have a situation where we simply don't know whether the large majority of rape allegations are true or false. We do not know how rare false rape reports are with almost any meaningful precision, but people misrepresent the available data to suggest we do.

As for that point, obviously findings from a legitimate investigation should be the foundation of any punishment an accuser receives, but I think you are being doctrinaire about due process without taking into consideration how demanding that sexual assault accusers be cross examined by attorneys hired by the accused is going to make legitimate victims less likely than they already are to report sexual assault. A smart policy would take into account the impediments that currently exist that make victims less unlikely to report (as data suggests, as does the sample of people I know), and should take into account that false reports are rare (as data suggests), but this policy doesn't do either of those and does the opposite. Independent investigators who have received proper training should be the ones doing the interviewing with the goal of getting to the truth, and then if the investigator believes that a sexual assault occurred and punishment is warranted, then the accused's attorneys can try to find holes in that investigation. Or at a minimum allow written questions like Trump was given.

It's a travesty of justice to be punished based on the testimony of a witness who is not subject to some sort of cross-examination. However, I do see the dilemma and think you raise good points. I think your idea that witnesses could perhaps answer written questions could be a starting point for compromise.

However, restricting questioning of the accuser to independent investigators is a very poor idea, particularly in this context, where most authorities on campus seem to knee jerk believe all women.