Last night, a regular commenter in the Men’s Rights subreddit — inspired by a thread on 4chan — posted a link to an online form on r/mensrights under the headline “Feminists at Occidental College created an online form to anonymously report rape/sexual assault. You just fill out a form and the person is called into the office on a rape charge. The “victim” never has to prove anything or reveal their identity.”
This headline is not only inflammatory but untrue: Yes, Occidental College has an online form that allows victims of or witnesses to sexual assault to report the incidents to the school. But, as a statement at the top of the form makes clear, the point is to collect data on how much sexual violence there is at the school, who the victims are, and so on.
If the person reporting the crime names the alleged perpetrator,
a member of the Dean of Students Office will meet with that person to share that the person was named in an anonymous report, review the Sexual Misconduct Policy, and inform the person that if the allegations are true, the behavior needs to cease immediately. Information shared in this form alone will not result in anyone going through the grievance process.
I’ve put the last bit in bold to emphasize a point: No one will be charged with anything based only on information gathered using this form. As would be clear to anyone who thought about the matter for more than a few seconds, it’s rather difficult to investigate, much less prove, a rape if you don’t actually know who the victim is.
Somehow this rather elementary fact eluded the OP, and virtually all of those who left the hundreds of comments on the popular post.
Indeed, a host of Men’s Rights Redditors were so convinced of the innate evil of the online form they all had the same bright idea: let’s flood the school with false reports of rape and break the form. Here are some of their comments. (There are more in the thread.) Note the number of upvotes each of these suggestions got. (Click the images to see the comments in context on Reddit.)
While a few commenters stood up to point out that in fact the school will not charge anyone with anything as a result of anonymous information gathered by the form, they were outnumbered by Men’s Rightsers gleefully reporting that they in fact had reported false information. Among them:
![froggymorning 46 points 15 hours ago (59|13) I've already filled one out. permalink source parent save give gold hide child comments [–]Muffinizer1 6 points 7 hours ago (9|4) Was kind of fun. I swear to god though, if they track us down it would be terribly ironic, however it's mildly likely.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/froggy.png?resize=546%2C171&ssl=1)
It’s one thing to criticize an anonymous reporting system because of its potential for abuse; this is something else entirely.
The post has been up for 17 hours at this point, with more than 700 net upvotes, and some of the calls for “breaking” the form have been up for nearly as long. The moderators of Men’s Rights have done nothing to stop their subreddit being used to interfere with a school’s attempt to assist rape survivors — including men.
“Breaking” a school’s rape reporting mechanism is apparently a form of Men’s Rights activism.
Covered by Gawker, with a link back here:
http://gawker.com/reddit-forum-encourages-users-to-spam-college-with-fals-1485774081
Falconer, happy ten-months to the babbies. They’re so big! 🙂
@Andrew
And probably not even then. Remember that tween who was gang-raped in Texas a couple of years ago, and everybody was talking about how she dressed and who she hung out with? *vomits*
@Tulgey Logger
Comments deleted, do you have caps, or a summary?
@Cloudiah,
Dammit, it’s ringing a bell but Google’s not being helpful.
A wild Reasonable MRA appeared!
Auggz — even if you did need a form for that, the way you often need to put in a form to get matched with a psych, it’d be a different, non-anonymous form.
Yeah, that AVFMS article is beyond terrible.
…
How many fucking times does it have to be pointed out that the perpetrator name isn’t even required on the form? IT’S RIGHT THERE ON THE FORM ITSELF CLICK THE LINK AND YOU’LL SEE IT V_V
@Argenti, is Elam suddenly in favor of all those things? Things like pressing charges and needing to be moved away from the assailant usually send these guys into a frothing rage.
And our old pal NWOSlave has chimed in:
@Pecunium, I saw that, nut I missed that it was OWLY. As usual, he doesn’t seem to be having the conversation everyone else is having.
The only way it made sense to me was to read it as parody, and that was by accident.
Re: NWO’s comment that pecunium quoted.
It’s pretty telling that he said the man’s feelings (flattered) but not the woman’s (he just said screeching sexual harassment, which would imply the guy was acting creepy and inappropriate somehow).
dang i posted before I was ready. I meant to add “but he doens’t really take her feelings into account like he did them man’s”
Making sense or being relevant aren’t things Owly does. I see he’s trotting out his idiotic fantasies again.
Somehow I don’t think most men would say yes or feel flattered if a random woman walked up to them asking for sex.
It’s gender-neutral because it allows people to enter any gender for the perpetrator and victim. Nothing to do with whether men and women are the same. Is he deliberately misreading what people are saying? O_O
Well, as usual, “women” in this context means “the 1% most beautiful women” because the other 99% don’t exist.
The idea that a man might love one person and not be interested in any other, or that a man might not be a slave to a hypersensitive boner and so desperate for sex that he’d say yes to any opportunity, never occurs to Owly.
Lots of projection going on with him.
Maybe it’s the idea that men and women can react differently to something that’s gender neutral? And somehow that means that you can’t say that things are gender neutral?
I remember a story of a woman in the dorms kicking on doors and asking men to have sex. I don’t know how many doors she knocked on, but she was turned down by most (if not all). Strangers coming up and asking for sex unnerves people of any gender, available or not.
(Admittedly this was a rumor and may have been false.)
Thanks for the baby well-wishes, guys!
Haha. I meant knocking on doors. Thank you autocorrect for making my story all the more odd.
To explain the whole trading tigers for weed thing…
This is absolutely ridiculous……..If I walked up to a randomn guy and said I wanted to have sex, I don’t think he would be flattered. He would think I was nuts, and run away.
I think some of the members of the MRA hide behind the “issue” of false rape accusations, when really they are fighting for the “right” to rape. Because without movements to help understand and prevent rape (you know, the ones some MRAs are always trying to shut down) rape is going to keep happening/increase. – so really they are fighting for the right to rape….in my opinion. Its amazing how pissy they get about the idea of women having resources to deal with abuse.
This. It’s so weird when people make these kinds of statements, “if a woman just walked up to a man and asked if he wanted sex he’d totally go for it” – yeah, maybe in a specific environment, like if you’re in a bar and everyone’s drunk and hooking up left and right, but not if it was just, like, on the street or something. In that case he’d just think you were nuts.
It’s like when people say “women ought to be able to walk naked down the street without getting raped, but that’s not the society we live in, so [enter victim-blaming “how to not get raped” advice here]” But the thing is, I very much believe we DO live in a society where someone can walk naked down the street and not get raped. I bet if I did that, people (men and women alike) would be like “uh, what’s she doing? Is this some kind of art happening? Is she mentally ill and has escaped from the asylum? Is she trying to win a bet? WHAT?” rather than attack me and rape me.
…I guess rape is going to keep happening anyways- but I do believe that researching and educating people about it reduces it significantly. Much to the annoyance of these guys
“@Argenti, is Elam suddenly in favor of all those things? Things like pressing charges and needing to be moved away from the assailant usually send these guys into a frothing rage.”
First, it’s not one of Elam’s rants. So no clue on that part. Second, I doubt it, I find it telling that a rape kit immediately and pressing charges were the first things listed, presumably you’ dhabi to do that to do the rest.
Cloudiah — dibs on adding that to manboobz humor!
“uh, what’s she doing? Is this some kind of art happening? Is she mentally ill and has escaped from the asylum? Is she trying to win a bet? WHAT?” rather than attack me and rape me.”
lol…..that is hilarious and true.
When I was 14, my friends and I dared our blonde, pretty, thin friend Jeni to kiss a random dude we thought was hot, who we were following around at the mall. He was maybe 16. Anyways, she went for it, and he freaked. We didn’t know any better, but realized afterwards that it was wrong of us. Turn the tables, and, genders aside, being advanced on without getting a say in it is shitty for anyone.