By David Futrelle
Sorry I was out of commission yesterday! This is part of the reason why: my latest piece on The Cut about education secretary Betsy DeVos’s new campus rape policy, which turns out to be not really much of a policy at all.
Here’s the basic argument, minus most of the fun details about the terrible Men’s Rights activists and other reactionaries whose bad ideas she’s basically absorbed.
DeVos had been widely expected to use her speech today at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia to announce a rollback of the Obama administration’s guidance on how colleges should deal with accusations of rape. This she did, declaring the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter — requiring that colleges take rape accusations more seriously — basically null and void. …
So what does DeVos propose as a replacement for this “failed system?” She’s got nothing.
That’s right. After torpedoing the “Dear Colleague” letter, she offers college administrators precisely zero guidance on how the Department of Education expects them to fulfill their Title IX responsibilities. …
Instead of guidance, DeVos offers only a promise that her department “will launch a transparent notice-and-comment process to incorporate the insights of all parties in developing a better way.”
So the “era of ‘rule by letter’” is over, but the “better way” is yet to come. What exactly are college administrators expected to do in the in-between days? More to the point: what are victims of sexual assault on college campuses supposed to do?
Betsy DeVos literally has no answer.
It’s going to be a mess.
Naturally, the MRAs are thrilled. More on that tomorrow.
Brace yourselves, everyone. Because Those MRAs must be over the moon from this… Sigh.
I litteraly can’t even.
I attended college long before the nationwide conversation about — or guidance regarding — dealing with accusations of rape on campus.
But I recall that on two separate occasions we got the news from our resident assistants that there was a rapist right now on our campus, making his way from location to location. Presumably, this was a guy who drove to our 30,000-student school, in a rural location, for the purpose of raping as many women as he could. I don’t recall that either guy got caught. That was a bit of college news that I made sure not to tell my mother.
Before reading, I assumed that her stance on college rape was on the “pro” side. I wasn’t wrong.
Everyone knows DeVos was elected, and is accountable to… Those bears, I guess?
Many of those white women who voted for Trump probably have daughter at or bound for college. I wonder if they’re regretting this vote yet. Or are they happy to sacrifice their own children for the sake of racism and xenophobia?
This certainly smells like DeVos knows at least one “upstanding young man with a promising future” who was “falsely” accused of sexual assault.
She is even worse than 45.
I wasn’t trying to exclude victims who aren’t women. Nor am I letting fathers of college students off the hook for putting their kids at risk for their Trump vote.
I was just making the point that women who think they’ll be insulated from the misogyny of regressive administrations due to being white and middle or upper class are wrong.
@wwth – I’m sure those are all Christian virgin daughters of impeccable reputation. Everyone knows good girls don’t draw “that kind” of attention.
/sarcasm
Considering that DeVos’s only qualification for her current position was her ability to extract wealth from school districts, I’m sure her calculus went, “Can this enrich me? No? Is it from the Obama years? Yes? To the trash can with it!”
too depressing.
also depressing?
nobody is trying to blockade her in her house, or in any way stop her from doing this shit.
or anyone in this obviously corrupt and amoral administration.
and that’s even more depressing.
CN: Discussion of sexual assault
So, you know little old me who’s been sexually assaulted a bunch of times? Two of them are times I qualify as rape, and both happened before I started transitioning, and both perpetrated by men.
One I bothered reporting, one I didn’t. Now, I’ve only ever done or been made to do sexual things while I was in college – I haven’t done anything in the two years since then other than being groped by men for no reason.
The current system failed me. This bullshit is just going to make that problem worse, especially for people who party a lot and drink and wake up on their friends’ couches and shit.
I can’t even wish anything on Devos because I’ve been hoping she sits on a nail every time she sits down for as long as I’ve been aware of her existence.
Will we ever recover from what this administration is doing to our country?
@Victorious Parasol
Only if we can put a true left-wing government with total control into play, and then call a constitutional convention, with enough members of that convention being ideologically acceptable that we end up with a document designed to ensure fairness for everyone and political stability and the rights of the commons over all business.
Other than that, we’ll fight these horrors for the next few hundred years, if the country even lasts that long.
Gotta “love” how MRAs, in their rush to hurt women, end up hurting the very men they claim to want to protect in the process. Because men are raped too, so this hurts rape victims of both genders.
Due process for the accused is important, innocent until proven guilty and all, and I have my issues with the way the Obama era policy was enacted on that front, but just getting rid of it and providing no guidance for colleges will only lead to confusion and problems for everyone.
Your Gay, Elfy, Bull Riding Friend,
The Fereldan Magister
If your policy has MRAs voicing their support, stop and ask yourself: will this policy make rapists happy?
If your policy will make rapists happy, stop and ask yourself: does this policy make it easier to rape and get away with it?
If your policy makes it easier to rape and get away with it, stop and ask yourself: is not putting this policy in action going to result in something like nuclear war or at least a massive number of deaths?
And if your rape-supporting policy isn’t even going to save lives, just stop. And if you somehow think it is, perhaps take a few minutes to brainstorm other possible solutions. Run the problem by a few preschool age children if you’re having difficulty. But find another solution.
@FereldanMagister
That’s because in their toxic little world a man that that gets raped must’ve either wanted it because all men are horny animals, or been insufficiently manly to prevent it from happening, therefore a beta cuck and therefore less human anyways.
For all their wailing about men getting raped they’re awfully quick to persecute and dehumanize the men to whom it actually happens, even more so than they are with women. And that takes some doing.
Getting into their mindset makes me ill.
Oh, so we’re back to the “Perhaps it would be in your best interest to drop out until your attacker graduates; our hands are tied” method of dealing with college assaults, are we? Fabulous.
I fucking HATE this administration and every goddamned stupid enabling sychophant that voted for the POS that is helming it.
This, this is why I feel no pity for any Trump supporter and their fucking bullshit reasons for voting such a scumbag in.
And don’t think for a bloody minute that DeVos’s fucking timing wasn’t planned to coincide with Jr’s hearing today.
I wouldn’t be surprised if his little kumbaya moment with Shumer and Pelosi yesterday was calculated to distract from Jr.’s hearing today. I would believe literally anything of this administration at this point.
The guy David quotes in the article advising college guys to record all sexual encounters “just in case”…recording sexual encounters – especially without the girl/woman’s knowledge or consent – is nothing new in that age group.
There was an old Inside Edition* episode that ran in the late 1980-1990’s that told the story of a high school senior who lost her virginity to a classmate who was acting a tad oddly during the entire encounter. They graduate, both go to the same college; the girl comes to find out that the reason the boy had been acting so oddly was because he was posing himself for a hidden camera, and had tape recorded the entire encounter. And then the boy went on to distribute the tape at the college they both attended, giving her the reputation of being a porn star to the entire student body. Poor girl only learned that the tape even existed, let alone was that widely distributed, several weeks into the school year, long after her reputation was trashed. Not a happy girl, to put it mildly.
And the current Secretary of Education wants stuff like this to be normalized?!?! D:
And now, for something completely different: did anyone here know that this TVTropes page existed:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Blog/WeHuntedTheMammoth
I didn’t, until I did a search for WHTM from the school’s computer, and that came up in the search results. I…have no idea what to think about this.
*An old TV tabloid show. Have no idea if it’s still around or not.
In quasi-related news, the Justice Department has sided with the anti-gay baker in the SCOTUS case about that anti-gay baker. Surprise! But Trump is totally a better friend to LGBT+ than Hillary Clinton. He said so, so it must be true.
It’s only a small step from reframing rape victims as troublemakers to “women really don’t belong on campus, their presence is too disruptive”. In college and in the workplace, men are presumed to be the natives. Women are interlopers who have to prove, over and over, their right to be there. Men never get asked “who’s looking after your children while you work?”
It will be interesting to see who continues to comply. Any college that gleefully throws the old Dear Colleague standard to the wind the moment the guidelines are lifted is not a place to entrust with your son or daughter’s safety.
As someone who hopes to work in education, specifically a high school history teacher, having an Education Secretary who knows literally nothing about the public education system, has never set foot in a public school in her live, and who clearly doesn’t know what she’s talking about, is such a slap in the face.
It’s an insult to every teacher, every student, anyone who gives a damn about education. But, given the anti-intellectualism and hatred of teachers as pushers of “left-wing indoctrination,” I expect nothing less from the Tea Party-controlled GOP. Here’s hoping that the Trump Administration’s failure ends up forcing the party to it’s more moderate and progressive roots, a la Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower.
Your Gay, Elfy, Bull Riding Friend,
The Fereldan Magister
Wow, just wow. As if the misinformation on rape, especially on college campuses wasn’t already trash.
As a rape victim myself, this sickens me. Of course the MRA’s are happy about mental destruction. But, of course I was an distraction.
I was 11, not even on my period, and b cup boobs. So distracting/s
What makes it worse is that not even my family stood up for me, and I continue to be harassed my old men.
Sorry for the sob story, guys, girls, and nb peeps.
@THE_SAMURAi
It’s alright. It’s what happened to you, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting others to hear your story–and you certainly did NOT deserve what happened to you.
I don’t have an appropriate .gif on hand, but insert hugs here.
@Redsilkphoenix, re: TV Tropes
Huh. Ironically, they deleted the pages for Fundies Say The Darndest Things, which is what led me here in the first place. Still, save trope names with ablist slurs in them, it’s not bad.