It Was a Wild and Crazy Summer of Criminalizing Campus Sex
“In an effort to address sexual assault, college campuses are on the verge of entering into an Orwellian nightmare.”
Robby Soave | August 27, 2014
Students returning to class this fall, consider yourselves warned: This was the summer that federal regulators, state lawmakers, and college administrators got together for a threesome—incidentally criminalizing campus sex in the process.
The debate over campus sexual assault—how much it happens, and how to handle it when it does—has been heating up for a while now thanks to increasing federal intervention, but the latest round of action kicked off at the end of spring, when the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education (OCR) identified 55 colleges under investigation for failing to report and handle rape allegations. The message to colleges from the federal government was do something, or else.
Colleges are definitely responding to the pressure. Consider Occidental College, which pursued a rape caseagainst a male student for having drunken sex with a female student. Investigators determined that the encounter was consensual, but administrators pursued sanctions anyway, insisting that the female student’s consent was invalidated because she had been drinking. The argument makes no sense—if all drunken sex constitutes rape, then both the accused and the accuser are equally guilty. Nevertheless, the male student was expelled.
Hashing out which person is the initiator of sex and which person is the consenter can be tricky from a legal standpoint. College hookups happen under the influence of substances that impair judgments, and what takes place between the sheets is inherently shrouded from public scrutiny.
But that didn’t stop the California legislature this summer from trying anyway. Responding to the federal government’s call to do something, or else, state lawmakersapproved SB 967, a bill that would force state universities to establish a stricter definition of consensual sex: one that requires the initiator to acquire “unambiguous, informed, freely-given, and voluntary” permission.
That part may not sound so bad—sex, after all, should be absolutely consensual—but forcing college administrators to play the role of judge, jury, and career executioner for the accused students in these cases carries a whole host of problems.
https://reason.com/archives/2014/08/27/it-was-a-wild-and-crazy-summer-of-crimin