A personal reaction to Jezebel’s hard-hitting piece on rape and false accusations in what is called the “Rape Capital” of the US.
There’s something very human, and much that’s very disturbing, in this article recently posted on Jezebel.com.
The human part is how much the author, Katie J.M. Baker, finds herself empathizing with the college kids of Missoula, Montana, as they tell her over and over that rape isn’t that big a deal in their town, just that for some mysterious reason there’s something the matter with half the girls in Missoula that makes them claim to have been raped.
Now, I myself actually was the target of a false rape accusation in college, long ago and far away, so there is a part of my brain that wants to consider that maybe these kids are telling the truth, just as Ms. Baker does. Each individual case may be questionable, each set of details is ultimately unknowable, and hey, who are we to say?
The disturbing part is that everyone knows what’s going on, to the extent that they have their rationalizations primed and ready. The disturbing part is a police chief who outright states that most rape accusations are false, in defiance of, you know, the facts. The disturbing part is how quick everyone is to cover up and lie, to push down the knowledge that there sure do seem to be a lot of cases in need of explaining away.
I was once asked how Catholic officials could cover up for priests that they knew to be child molesters. I tried to explain how institutional loyalty works, how you’ve got a few kids on one hand, and the infallible 2000-year-old edifice of the Church on the other, how the Church will be there long after the kids are dead of old age, and why should you allow a few complaints you’re not even 100% sure of to damage those millennia of tradition and authority, right?
It works the same at colleges. Employees, even students, identify so strongly with the school and its reputation that their reflexive alliance, their trained instinct, is to protect the school from… from who? Some girl? Some girl you don’t really know that well, some girl who you started to distrust the instant she threatened the institution? Some girl you can start assigning motives or labels to, since you distrust her? It’s very easy to make the decision to blame the victim to protect the institution, to justify that decision, to live with it. The banality of evil exists at every scale.
Now, imagine for a second that you’re a guy attending UM. Imagine you’ve been raped. By a guy, by a girl, by a professor, a bartender… doesn’t matter. Imagine looking around your community and seeing how people talk about women who’ve spoken up about what happened to them. Seeing what they get called. Imagine hearing about how they wanted it, how they were looking to get laid. Imagine asking yourself who’ll believe you if you try to tell anyone that you, a college boy, didn’t want it, that you tried to say no. Imagine how easy it would be to decide to just keep quiet, cover up, keep your head down, try to persuade yourself it didn’t happen the way you remember it. So much easier, so much safer to go that route, knowing what you know about how things work in Missoula.
Yeah. That’s what we call rape culture.
Photo— greggoconnell/Flickr
About Noah Brand
Noah, your last example is kinda “FUNNY”, not a haha way but in a sad way because you use UM as the example of what a guy would see if he went there and was raped, what you should have perhaps added was that even if this guy went to a Univ where the rape rate was low, HE would be treated the exact same way. A woman making the in that Univ WOULDN’T be treated like that. This example actually says we don’t have a ‘rape culture’ but one of ‘when males are raped culture’
Rape culture is rape culture. There isnt a distinction between male and female rape culture. It’s the same thing and it’s terrible for both sexes.
I can’t always tell in the story who’s telling the truth and who isn’t. I’m sure there are some false accusations and some true ones. I tend to think that the true ones outweigh the false ones by a large margin, but that may be my own bias.
What I’m wondering is the logic of making a false accusation in a context in which no one seems to believe you anyway. If I make a false accusation as a way to get attention, but no one listens to my accusation, then what am I really getting from making a false accusation? Is it that just enough people believe me that I get what I want from lying? In a weird way, the more people who doubt my story, the less likely I am to try to lie to get what I want.
Another way to look at it: there must be SOME people in Missoula willing to believe rape accusations, or else there would be no one coming forward at all whether they are truthful or not.
The sad thing is that it’s probably just a matter of time before the police consider anything that happens at the “roofie bar” to be a consensual act. “You knowingly went to a bar nicknamed the Date Rape Bar, so you consented to being drugged and penetrated. Why else would you go there if not for that?”
The point is, that in this country we put the burden of proof on the accuser. Every single person accused is supposed to be presumed innocent. That means that when someone accuses someone else of rape, they are supposed to be able to prove it.
But this has been flipped on its head in cases of rape accusations. Now the accusation itself is considered proof. This is a terrible mockery of our judicial system. Our founding fathers are rolling over in their graves.
Rape victims aren’t presumed guilty, there’s significant cultural bias against questioning their story at all. Also, it’s a little difficult to say “Rape victims are presumed guilty” when they’re not the ones being accused of a crime, regardless of whether they’ve told the truth or born false witness.
“Also, methinks that some of the gentlemen doth protest too much . . .”
I’m not sure what that was meant to imply (that the above people actually want to be falsely accused?) but using a “no means yes” phrase in a discussion about rape isn’t exactly clever.
Sorry, the comment this was responding to was deliberately put into moderation, my bad.
Exactly. I don’t compare the ‘rape culture’ (an inherently misleading and dishonest term) story to the Catholic child-abuse scandal; I compare it to the “recovered-memory” scandal, where professionals with a strong vested interest persuaded impressionable kids to make false accusations where nothing actually happened.
In this instance, the vested interests are the “rape culture” proponents, who want to redefine, re-contextualize, and otherwise convince young women that they’ve been raped when they haven’t. It helps pump up the statistics and “prove” that all women are constantly at risk from all men.
The notion of rape culture is as bogus as the notion of a child-stealing epidemic was.
@Wellokthen: Perhaps within this community there isn’t a sense that no one will believe you . Remember you are getting the story from someone who has a bias, after all she has the ‘stats’ at her fingertips on rape including false rape. This is someone who went there to “FIND A STORY” not to report a story. When a reporter does that only ‘facts’ that support that story will be reported not those they go against the story. That is the way the world works.
People can’t see outside their own windows, take a for instance, what if there are a lot of girls making up stories and are getting attention, remembe the “Dear College” letter the author mentions, college can and do now expel students for nothing more than a “She said , He said”, no proof needed, just a preponderence of the evidence, not beyond a reasonable doubt. So even if the poilce don’t believe her the campus org will. This is a huge incentive to lie IF someone is willing to do that, after all, she won’t be crossexamined, she won’t have to give further testimony etc. AND she can exact revenge if she wants to.
I notice the author cites the Forensic Examiner article on false rape allegations, calling it “dubious”. Why is it dubious?
Two questions, both asked of Noah in all seriousness:
1. Is there going to be equal time on GMP for the lengthy AP story that ran about Caleb Warner’s experience at the University of North Dakota, and that of other young men at other Universities, and Princeton’s decision?
2. In an atmosphere where there is enormous Federal law enforcement pressure on colleges to expel men (and then track them so they are not admitted to another college) accused of commentary-based sexual assault, let alone men accused of having sex with a drunk woman, what is a practical way in which a Good Man, who doesn’t date rape, and backs off when asked to, can Prove that he is Innocent? Should all sexual encounters and entire sleep-overs be prophylatically videotaped by the man, with the woman’s consent?
That answer is simple. Just pay. It’s cheaper, it’s easier, it’s more convenient and you’ll have less trouble. Sure it’s probably less honourable, but let’s get real. Honour flew out of the window years ago and isn’t coming back.
Cynical? Maybe. Effective? You bet.
But then there’s that whole illegality thing, because somehow giving a girl drinks or a ring (i.e. consideration) for sex is ok, but some Benjamins is illegal for some reason or another. Odd, but there you are. There’s always celibacy you know or trips to Thailand (though that’s illegal too as I understand it). Maybe Columbia? Just don’t bring the president along in tow and be sure to PAY UP!!!
The Wet One
Ex manager of mine used to work security in a very busy night club. She told me that at least once a week she’d have a woman come in and say that her drink had been spiked and that she’d woken up in bed with a man she didn’t know. My manager would dutifully review the CCTV tapes and discover each time that the “victim” hadn’t been spiked, but had downed over ten vodkas before stumbling out with an equally legless guy.
I think it’s possible that college towns genuinely have a higher instance of rape, but I’m absolutely certain that they also have a high instance of drunken sex that one or both partners didn’t really want. When we live in a culture where it’s both acceptable and expected of men and women to drink themselves to the point of unconciousness and memory loss then bad things involving consent are bound to happen.
So maybe Missoula somehow attracts more rapists than other places, maybe they have a rape culture, or maybe they have a drunken sex followed by false accusation culture.
Yes, but as JustAMAN says, as far as colleges ( With the backing of the feds) are concerned, drunken sex is considered rape (only on the man’s part) And a virtual ‘Lifetime’ sentance of expulsion from further education. It looks more and more like The Wet Ones solution is the more pracitial solution. Just be careful, many local law enforcement agencies are renewing their enforcement efforts against prostution (pushed no doubt, buy the feminist desire to ‘save ‘these women)
If women’s testimony counts more than men’s testimony, then the solution is clear: a man will need to surround himself with mutiple women witnesses at all times, or else make sure he is under constant video surveillance to verify his alibi. You say I was raping you at 1am Saturday night? Here’s the video of me having sex with another woman at midnight, and me passed out until 5am, and you are not in the footage anywhere. Fortunately, from what I understand many undergrads are filming each other having sex all the time, so there ought to be lots of admissable evidence to verify any accusations. Another way in which cell phones have made our lives so much better….
“Now, imagine for a second that you’re a guy attending UM. Imagine you’ve been raped. By a guy, by a girl, by a professor, a bartender… doesn’t matter.”
It matters a lot. If I’m a guy who claims I got raped I will be treated completely differently than a girl who claims she got raped. Don’t say it doesn’t matter because it does.
“Now, I myself actually was the target of a false rape accusation in college, long ago and far away, so there is a part of my brain that wants to consider that maybe these kids are telling the truth, just as Ms. Baker does.”
After this you wander off into talking about how everyone is “too quick” to explain that these women are lying. Here’s my problem with your logic and with the logic of anyone who insists on the assumption that the victim is telling the truth, “The Presumption of Innocence.” How can you just throw out such an incredibly important pillar in our court system? Every single one of these men accused of rape is supposed to be presumed innocent, and you do exactly the opposite, even against huge testimony to the contrary, you presume their guilt.
And that, sir, is wrong.
We’ve been over this many times before. We’ve established that that there is no such thing as rape culture.
Wrong. We established that there was such a thing as rape culture, and that attitudes towards men who have been raped, especially those in prison, are proof of it.
Case closed.
That would be prison male rape culture, not rape culture.
I disagree.
Doesn’t matter. That’s what he described.
“In Missoula, I’m learning, drunk guys who may have “made mistakes” nearly always get the benefit of the doubt. Drunk girls, however, do not.”
From the article linked to above. It’s pretty clear what the author thinks of such silly any backwards customs as “innocence until guilt is proven.”
*silly and backwards
People lie about crimes quite frequently for all sorts of bizarre reasons. I’ve seen estimates by experienced police that put the number at 30% of all people who file a complaint with the Police are lying at some point for personal gain. Why do we believe some women (say 30%) don’t make false rape accusations?
I think the Jezebel article highlighted that the percentage of false rape accusations were proportional to false accusations across the board. The point though was that according to the police department, and the university, and the student culture, the belief was resoundingly that false rape accusations far outweighed the legitimate instances, which isn’t the case.
I think it’s possible that it’s the case in Missoula. If it’s possible (as she claims) that a culture persists in the town which leads men to think rape is acceptable, isn’t it also possible that a culture persists which encourages false accusations?
If it’s possible (as she claims) that a culture persists in the town which leads men to think rape is acceptable, isn’t it also possible that a culture persists which encourages false accusations?
It would seem not. For some reason people tend to think that when it comes to either thinking rape is acceptable or if false accusations are encouraged it must be either one or the other happening. I don’t think its that simple.
When a high profile rape case breaks there will be people both calling for guilt instantly and those calling for innocent instantly. But what usually happens is that a lot of sites that cover such cases will seem to actively deny that both are happening and rather choose to pretend that only one is happening.
I am the mom of a responsible male Montana athlete, and I just want all of you to remember 3 simple words: DUKE LACROSSE TEAM.
I have told my son there is one sure-fire way to avoid a rape charge: Don’t have sex in college. Period.
Unrealistic? Probably. 100% effective? Most definitely.
Every man at Montana needs to worry about his reputation, too. The Duke boys and their families were almost destroyed by a liar. Don’t let it happen to your sons!
Good call, but even men who don’t have sex can be falsely accused. I gather physical evidence isn’t required in the US to bring a case to court.
It’s really sad that young men and women can’t enjoy their sexuality, but under the circumstances I find it hard to blame you for advising him so.
Yes it is.
Sorry, I just checked the article I thought had made that claim, it didn’t, my fault.
Am I missing something.
Unless Missoula is somehow different from the rest of the world, there are a few things definitely going on;
1) Rapes are taking place
2) People are lying about rape
3) People are waking after a drunken night thinking they were *date*raped when it was just bad drinking
Isn’t it the job of the Police to figure out what actually happened?
And the job of parents, peers and the Uni to educate?
Seems like this isn’t happening, but I’m not in Missoula
Noah
I found this lovely piece by a wonderful writer – sassy – loud – and filled with attitude!
I just love her style!
Cup Culture is a revelation! P^)