The War On Campus Sexual Assault Goes Digital

HughPickens.com writes: 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.

Comments

Re:"nonconsensual sex or touching"

[swb]

I think the "problem" is probably much deeper than that and involves a whole bunch of cultural assumptions, behaviors and perhaps even physiological responses that aren't even questioned, let alone well understood.

I've always been kind of curious about the assumptions implied by the language used to describe sexual encounters. Sex is often described in active/passive giver/receiver terms. "I let him have sex with me" or more colloquially "I let him fuck me", implying that sex in some way is an experience where men actively act on women who somewhat passively accept or recieve it.

Men and women typically approcah sex with men as the initiators, with women signallling their approval quite often by passive acceptance of male advances throughout the sexual experience.

I also think there's something of a physiological element as well. I've read that some percentage of women actually experience orgasm during consciously unwanted sexual encounters. Which leads somewhat to a kind of paradox where women may actually by experiencing some kind of physical pleasure during a sexual encounter that they may not conscioulsy want from an intellectual and emotional perspective. It's not hard to see this leading to a kind of cognitive dissonance and confusion which allows results in the sexual act to be completed (physical response in the moment overriding longer term desire and motivation) yet longer term the experience is evaluated by women as being unwanted despite the appearance of it being desired at the time.

Now, ladle on to that all the other elements of college -- alcohol and drug use clouding judgement, a lack of experience by both men and women in terms of what they really believe to be a holisitically good sexual experience, broader social expectations about "hooking up", etc.

And then you have a fairly strong undercurrent of ideology in feminism that tends to view most sex, including sex that most people would consider consensual, as being rape or male aggression.

But let's ignore all that, create an app that just turns sexual assault into a yes/no checkbox.

Re: Co-Eds Needs To Stop Showing

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe its not PC to say what he said, but look at it this way. I have a 6 year old daughter. I am going to teach her (when she's older of course), "if, in college, you go to a party without any friends and get totally smashed and dress very revealing, your likelihood of something bad happening to you is going to rise dramatically. Use your common sense."

Is it non-PC to tell my daughter that? Should I instead say, "honey, do whatever you want, get drunk, show your cleavage, go to parties where you don't know anyone. Cause you know, nothing that happens is ever your fault."

Effective, level-headed way

[sycodon]

I have a great idea.

We can set up a system. Let's call it a "Criminal Justice System". Catchy, ain't it?

Then, we train and hire people specifically to deal with "aggressors". We can split them up into "Cops","Prosecutors", and "Judges".

I guess we'll need to pass some kind of rule or something that says you can't have sex with someone unless they want the same. And no Groping and stuff.

So, once in place, any women is is raped or assaulted in any way, can file charges. The perp is taken away by the cops, the Prosecutor argues he should be take away for a long time, and the Judge agrees or disagrees. Maybe you can have something like a bunch of random people make that decision too.

There ya go, an effective, level-headed way to deal with the aggressors!