News flash: College students drink. A lot.
They’re also at risk for sexual assault, which has reached epidemic proportions on many of our campuses.
And yes, the two phenomena are connected. But the link between alcohol and rape still isn’t widely understood or accepted. And talking about it can get you in hot water, if you don’t choose your words carefully.
Just ask Candice E. Jackson, the top civil rights official at the Department of Education, who sparked nationwide outrage on Wednesday with her remarks about campus sexual assault.
“The accusations — 90% of them — fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right,'” Jackson told reporters.
She was wrong to claim that most rapes are really just misunderstandings, which insults both the victims of sexual assault and the many people working to prevent it. But much if not most sexual violence on campus does involve drinking, on the part of both the victim and the perpetrator, and we should all own up to that.
Jackson later apologized for the “flippant” tone of her comment, noting that she was herself a sexual-assault survivor and “would never seek to diminish anyone’s experience.”
Her remarks did exactly that, of course. Between one in four and one in five college students is a victim of sexual assault, as a big body of research has confirmed. If you think that they’re mostly jilted lovers, well, I’ve got a Title IX investigation waiting for you.
Indeed, it was precisely these kinds of attitudes that led the Obama administration to invoke Title IX — the federal law barring gender discrimination — against campuses that weren’t taking sexual assault seriously. Under rules promulgated in 2011, colleges were instructed to use a “preponderance of evidence” standard in adjudicating rape charges.
That meant schools had to find people charged with sexual assault guilty if it was more likely than not that they had committed it, not if their guilt was (as in the criminal justice system) beyond a reasonable doubt. Colleges that failed to comply with the directive risked losing federal funding, a terrifying prospect in these tough economic times.
Jackson has suggested that the Title IX rules don’t sufficiently protect the rights of the accused, who can bring a lawyer to campus sexual-assault hearings but usually aren’t allowed to speak with the lawyer or cross-examine their accusers. And she’s hardly alone in this view; in 2014, for example, 28 professors at Harvard Law School signed a statement claiming that the university’s sexual-assault procedures “lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process.”
It’s hard to know how often people are falsely accused of sexual assault on our campuses. But here’s what we do know: Your chance of getting raped goes up when you drink. And your chance of getting falsely accused of it probably rises, too.
According to a 2015 Washington Post poll of college students, two-thirds of campus rape victims had been drinking just prior to their assaults. Some of them said they were too drunk to articulate what they did and didn’t want; others suspected they had been assaulted, but were too intoxicated to know for sure.
And eight of 10 students in the survey agreed that drinking less would be an effective way to prevent sexual assault. But many of our colleges seem reluctant to emphasize the alcohol-rape link, for fear of blaming victims and letting their assailants off the hook. Alcohol doesn’t rape people, the mantra goes; rapists do.
Please. When we advise young women not to walk alone late at night, are we somehow excusing rape or rendering victims complicit in it? Hardly. We’re just using common sense, because we know that sexual assault is more likely to occur at certain times and places.
Likewise, we know that rape is more common when both parties are wasted. Candice Jackson was flat-out wrong to suggest that most student sexual-assault charges are the result of drunken misunderstandings. But she got one thing right: Whether true or false, a huge fraction of these accusations are associated with alcohol. And the more that people drink, the harder it becomes to establish what happened — and who was responsible for it.
Consider a recent episode at Occidental College in Los Angeles, where two students had sex but were too drunk to remember any of the details. The woman charged that she was raped, the man was expelled, and then he sued the college. So did an accused student at Duke, following a drunken encounter that led to a rape charge against him. When both parties are intoxicated, a Duke administrator testified in the lawsuit, “it is the responsibility . . . of the male to gain consent before proceeding with sex.” Really?
Let’s be clear: Sexual assault is a huge problem on our campuses, and it won’t go away if alcohol use declines. But one of the best ways to reduce rape, right now, would be for everyone to drink less. Anyone who denies that might have had a bit too much to drink themselves.
Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Campus Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know.”
