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According to a recent study of 27 schools, about one-quarter of female undergraduates said they had experienced nonconsensual sex or touching since entering college, but most of the students said they did not report it to school officials or support services. Now Natasha Singer reports at the NYT that in an effort to give students additional options — and to provide schools with more concrete data — a nonprofit software start-up in San Francisco called Sexual Health Innovations has developed an online reporting system for campus sexual violence. One of the most interesting features of Callisto is a matching system — in which a student can ask the site to store information about an assault in escrow and forward it to the school only if someone else reports another attack identifying the same assailant. The point is not just to discover possible repeat offenders. In college communities, where many survivors of sexual assault know their assailants, the idea of the information escrow is to reduce students' fears that the first person to make an accusation could face undue repercussions.
"It's this last option that makes Callisto unique," writes Olga Khazan. "Most rapes are committed by repeat offenders, yet most victims know their attackers. Some victims are reluctant to report assaults because they aren't sure whether a crime occurred, or they write it off as a one-time incident. Knowing about other victims might be the final straw that puts an end to their hesitation—or their benefit of the doubt. Callisto's creators claim that if they could stop perpetrators after their second victim, 60 percent of campus rapes could be prevented." This kind of system is based partly on a Michigan Law Review article about "information escrows," or systems that allow for the transmitting of sensitive information in ways that reduce "first-mover disadvantage" also known to economists as the "hungry penguin problem". As game theorist Michael Chwe points out, the fact that each person creates her report independently makes it less likely they'll later be accused of submitting copycat reports, if there are similarities between the incidents.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Saturday November 21 2015, @02:56PM
Here. [cracked.com]
Yes, it's Cracked, but I thought it was very interesting anyway. They interviewed a guy who is against sexual assault, committed sexual assault, and didn't realize it at the time he committed it. It's something many of us on this website might accidentally do. And the fall out is... bizarre. I thought it an interesting read and thought others might enjoy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 21 2015, @03:37PM
>Cracked [imgur.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 21 2015, @10:05PM
This sounds like a guy with stockholm syndrome.
So, he and she did everything leading up to it, go back home, drink together, lay together, she falls asleep, he continues, she wakes up, provides motion and every indication that she's conscious with no problem with what's going on -- and he's a criminal?
At worst, this is where you go, "Oh shit -- I'm so sorry. I honestly thought you were ok with it all!" But alas, he's being harassed by the girl, by friends, by the school, by police -- over a genuine mistake and misinterpretation. Now he's defending her and saying he was behaving badly and he shouldn't have ever done any of it...
What happened in this article is normal human interaction. Without it, no relationships can develop. Without it, society will crumble. What this resulted in is the near destruction of someone's life. This is far beyond merely out of hand. In modern America, Sleeping Beauty is Sexual Assault.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Sunday November 22 2015, @05:12AM
Not Stockholm Syndrome. That part comes later. It's the freeze response [psychologytoday.com] of "fight, flee, or freeze".
I have a friend who was recently raped. Not sexually assaulted. Raped. She definitively said no multiple times, but it only encouraged the psychopath. Her next response was to freeze and she remained that way for the rest of the whole multi-hour ordeal. (And for those who say she should have just fought back, it doesn't work like that. She had no physical control over her body.)
My assumption from reading the cracked article is that the guy touching the girl invoked her freeze response and they were in a situation where he didn't realize it. She drew her lines differently than the guy did and the guy accidentally went well over her set of lines. Assuming neither are fault: Did she make a mistake? Probably. Did he? An argument can be made for yes. We all make mistakes. Sometimes, they lead to very tragic consequences.
Or maybe she lied or maybe he lied. Who knows? My original idea that one of us on Soylent News could find ourselves in a situation like this (guy or gal) still stands, I think. For a small (but too large) percentage of relationships, it could be a problem.
Hearing anecdotal stories of others problems and thinking about how I would handle that kind of situation helps prevent me from getting in them in the first place. (Well, I'm now married, so I don't think I'll have this particular problem, but it's a good warning I can give my friends and family... which is exactly what I've done here. Hmm... I guess this makes a lot of you my friends.)
(Score: 3, Funny) by Mr Big in the Pants on Saturday November 21 2015, @10:16PM
Read that article...what the serious fuck?!
I know WHY this situation has arisen. I know all the sorts of people involved and their motivations.
But that does not prevent me from lamenting about how fucking stupid some people are...in this case on both sides of this argument.