- First it was "Devos was fighting to protect rapists"?
- Then it was "Title IX enforcement was bad" (as a claim, with no evidence).
- Then it was "how many of these rape allegations are clear cut" (as an attempted defense of Devos' actions).
The first was a leading question, as you're evidently
familiar with the material. The second is the lynchpin of your claims here. It's tautological. "Title IX is bad because Title IX" is bad. You don't actually discuss what Devos did at all, whatever she did, and whatever consequences arose from it, are justified from the existing, unproven standpoint of "Title IX is bad". We'll get more onto this below.
I wanted to hear about Betsy DeVos supposedly fighting a “war to protect rapists.” I got the response that she wanted a “criminal trial level of investigation” before a “rapist,” apparently everyone is guilty until proven innocent, can be separated from the “victim,” - the accuser. Notice the outcome is already laid out.
The third was switching tracks (i.e. moving goalposts) from discussing Devos, to questioning every single instance of alleged rape on campus. It is generally hard to prove a negative, you're right. It's similarly hard to impose a burden of proof like that on somebody in a forum thread. What was it you said - that this wasn't a research paper? So why are you asking Drakle to litigiously prove a presumably vast amount of alleged rape cases when you yourself don't want to be held to the same standard?
But regardless - asking you to prove a negative is difficult. So you probably shouldn't rely on it as the key point behind "Title IX is hard because it causes too many issues in determining rape accurately". If Title IX has caused a demonstrable number of cases where it wasn't rape, you should be able to prove this - statistically. Because this is the foundation of your problems with Title IX applying to cases of alleged rape.
Betsy DeVos rescinded the guidelines from the Obama administration, which were widely criticized across the political spectrum from law scholars and even some liberal feminists for not protecting the rights of the accused.
The discussion naturally went to the issues with Title IX and the guidelines on it from the Obama administration.
I think I see what you’re talking about with goalposts now. I asked how many cases of rape were clearcut. I asked this because, I don’t see how a rape accusation can be clear cut when it hasn’t even been investigated yet and it looks like Drakle expects students to be barred from the campus while the investigation is in progress.
Then with the heavy drinking and hookups going on and the fact that most sexual assaults come from an acquaintance or friend on campus it stands to reason a lot of these accusations are not “clearcut.”
This isn't evidence that allegations are made months after the fact. Specific cases may involve circumstances where allegations are made months after the fact, but this happens outside of drunken encounters on-campus. It's a popular argument people make against (actual) rape victims - why did they wait X days / weeks / months before coming forwards?
Do you want to know why? Because they get people who voice opinions like yours, i.e. telling them they were just drunk and regretting it
Among any other number of victim-blaming excuses. Rape is traumatic. In the cases where it happens, you cannot expect a traumatised victim to behave rationally nor logically. Meanwhile, the attacker will be able to. This is why having additional protections like those granted by Title IX can situationally benefit any given case.
It shows how difficult to navigate one specific case can be. Again, this isn't the evidence that I was asking for.
I said some of the cases involved drinking, accusations made months after the fact and charges against someone over reported speech. You wanted me to prove these were statistically relevant. It wasn’t clear which one of these details you were talking about.
Alcohol is relevant to over half of the cases. Some professors have been brought before investigators over Title IX related charges over things they said in class or in an article. And in some cases accusers have not brought their accusations forward until months after the fact. This includes cases in which the accuser stayed in a relationship with the accused, proven through text messages, with no change in behavior or signs that an assault happened.
Is this statistically common? Probably not and I doubt someone has collected this kind of data. I mentioned this detail to show the absurdity of some of the charges. In particular I was thinking of this case:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/laura-kipniss-endless-trial-by-title-ix/amp
A professor was fired over Title IX charges brought against him by a graduate student (not his student) who was a serial Title IX filer and had continued her relationship with him months after the alleged incident detailed by emails and texts.
The link doesn’t really go into detail on this, I read about the story in Laura Kipnis’ book, she was investigated again because of her writing about the student in question in her book on her Title IX investigation, in which she writes about the issue in general.
The New Yorker article talks further about the serious problems about how Title IX is handled and I don’t know how anyone can defend that unless they’re seriously blinded by ideology.
It's easy to cherry pick individual incidents and say "this is a mess". Thankfully, the law exists to deal with mess. The fact that individual cases can be messy is not an argument that the cases shouldn't happen in the first place. Which is what you're trying to argue. You're trying to say that these kinds of allegations shouldn't be allowed to be made in the first place, right? That's why you're opposing Title IX, and therefore supporting Devos' rolling back of it (and presumably whatever else she did on the general subject)?
No, not really. I believe the accused should have rights and that there should be evidence.
