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An old staple of the culture war has resurfaced: District attorney reopens case of alleged Cornell University 'gang rape'. The core allegation is that the girl went to a frat house, got pressured to snort ketamine, passed out, and was raped by multiple people while unconscious.
I first heard about this case from someone at Cornell a bit after it happened. She was adamant that the frat boys were guilty and that there was conclusive proof (though she didn't personally know what the proof was), but the administration went easy* on them because of misogyny. Obviously, this set off alarm bells in my head because it pattern-matched well with Duke Lacrosse, Mattress Girl, etc. I said that it sounded like there wasn't enough evidence to tell, while in the back of my mind thinking that the accusation was probably false.
I was somewhat surprised when I read today that this conclusive proof does sort of exist, in the form of a Snapchat screenshot wherein someone in the fraternity's group chat posted that there was "free pussy upstairs". It's not quite conclusive proof, but it's much better proof than I expected. At this point my assessment is that the accusation is probably basically real.
This got me to thinking about whether it was time to update my model of the world, and whether the discourse around campus rape has changed over the past 10+ years. In a media environment where Jezebel is dead and Rolling Stone irrelevant, should we still expect the mainstream media to be biased to the point of uselessness? What about the power dynamics? Who is Cornell more afraid of, feminists or Republican OCRs?
There're also the evergreen questions, like what the responsibility of a university should be in cases like this, or what the police department or justice system should do. Seasoned culture warriors will point out that wanting to be hard on this kind of crime correlates with wanting to be soft on other kinds of crime.
Another thing that came to mind was the question of how grievous a crime we should consider rape to be. In my lifetime, rape has generally been considered equivalent to murder in severity ("rape and murder" usually being used to indicate the category of "super serious crime"), and the question of whether that's a good thing has been debated to death. However, Zoomers are famously more prudish than Millennials. Does it follow that Zoomers also regard rape as a greater crime, relatively speaking, than Millennials do?
*I see people claiming on Reddit and other places that the alleged rapists' only punishment was that they had to write apologetic essays, but this is not true -- at least two members of the fraternity were expelled. Whether this is a light punishment is up for debate.
Rape is a bit of an odd crime, in that in theory almost everyone agrees that it is an extremely severe crime - nearly as bad as murder, if not worse. My armchair theory is that this is because the prototypical crime people imagine is entirely gratuitous. They can conceive of circumstances in which they might think murder is acceptable or even good (likewise for theft, etc...), but it's hard to imagine a "virtuous" rape unless you're a psycho. Even when people joke about things like prison rape, the victim is a bad person being victimized by other bad people.
However, when it comes to actual, concrete accusations, things come apart. Circumstances are usually far more ambiguous than "creep jumps out of the bushes", accused rapists are often otherwise respectable members of their community, and different people have radically different views around consent and sexual ethics. You've got very stringent views of consent, where both parties need to be sober and vocally assenting. And on the flip side, you've got very loose views (the extreme cases being things like "being alone in a room with a man is consent for whatever happens next" or thinking that women secretly want to be raped).
It's the same effect whereby people imagine the average robbery to involve a gun and the words "stick 'em up", and ignore the fact that most of it's done through means diffuse (white-collar crime, embezzlement, contract violation, etc.) or direct (scams, fraud). They even blame the victim, usually saying "well, they should have noticed the signs/paid more attention" or "people who fall for get-rich-quick schemes deserve it".
Rape, as a subtype of theft, is exactly like that too. Forced entry is obviously criminal; but that's more because it clearly involves assault. The others, as you mention (and for the same reason), are far less clear; justice in cases tackling who consented to what is arguably best handled as a civil matter as well.
(Perhaps surprisingly, this is also a feature of Deuteronomic law; "pay her father some amount and must never divorce her" for casual sex the woman feels wronged by has the character of a civil violation, not a criminal one. One notes the modern standard for this is 'preponderance of the evidence' rather than 'beyond a reasonable doubt'.)
This is more downstream of an human instinct to Protect Women more than anything else. In an environment of equality, this is wage theft.
None of those are robbery. The legal definition of robbery is theft involving the use or threat of violence. Certainly in the UK, the archetypal thief is a burglar (theft involving breaking and entering buildings), not a robber.
The archetypal thief is a burglar and not a shoplifter?
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