Campus Rape Tribunals Are Out of Control

From Just Four Guys blog:
Under the recently-adopted “preponderance of the evidence” standards for campus rape tribunals, many young men are being ramrodded through campus kangeroo courts with seemingly little sense of fairness or pursuit of the truth and are being expelled from college.

I will firmly state that any rape is a terrible thing and the perpetrator should be fully punished. However, false accusations and exaggerating stats to club men over the head are also terrible.

Now, focusing on the topic of campus rape tribunals going overboard, this excellent article by Cathy Young, Guilty Until Proven Innocent, shares one such example, with my comments in square brackets interlaced:

One evening in February 2012, Vassar College students Xialou “Peter” Yu and Mary Claire Walker, both members of the school’s rowing team, had a few drinks at a team gathering and left together as the party wound down. After a make-out session at a campus nightspot, they went to Yu’s dorm room, where, by his account, they had sex that was not only consensual but mainly initiated by Walker, who reassured her inexperienced partner that she knew what to do. At some point, Yu’s roommate walked in on them [damn roommates!]; after he was gone, Yu says, Walker decided she wanted to stop, telling him it was too soon after her breakup with her previous boyfriend [or she was embarrassed to get caught?]. She got dressed and left.

The next day, according to documents in an unusual complaint that Yu filed against Vassar last June, Yu’s resident adviser told him some students had seen him and the young woman on their way to the dorm. They had been so concerned by Walker’s apparently inebriated state that they called campus security. [Were they alarmed that he might have been inebriated too since he had a few drinks?] Alarmed, Yu contacted Walker on Facebook to make sure everything was all right. She replied that she had had a “wonderful time” and that he had done “nothing wrong”-indeed, that she was sorry for having “led [him] on” when she wasn’t ready for a relationship. A month later Walker messaged Yu herself, again apologizing for the incident and expressing hope that it would not affect their friendship. There were more exchanges during the next months, with Walker at one point inviting Yu to dinner at her place. (In a response to Yu’s complaint in October, attorneys for Vassar acknowledged most of these facts but asserted that Walker had been too intoxicated to consent to sex and had been “in denial,” scared, and in shock when she wrote the messages.)

Last February, one year after the encounter, the other shoe dropped: Yu was informed that Walker had filed charges of “nonconsensual sexual contact” against him through the college disciplinary system. Two and a half weeks later, a hearing was held before a panel of three faculty members. Yu was not allowed an attorney; his request to call his roommate and Walker’s roommate as witnesses was denied after the campus “gender equity compliance investigator” said that the roommates had emailed him but had “nothing useful” to offer. While the records from the hearing are sealed, Yu claims his attempts to cross-examine his accuser were repeatedly stymied. Many of his questions (including ones about Walker’s friendly messages, which she had earlier told the investigator she sent out of “fear”) were barred as “irrelevant”; he says that when he was allowed to question Walker, she would start crying and give evasive or nonresponsive answers. Yu was found guilty and summarily expelled from Vassar.

Yu, a U.S.-educated Chinese citizen, is now going after the Poughkeepsie, New York, school in federal court, claiming not only wrongful expulsion and irreparable personal damage but sex discrimination. His complaint argues that he was the victim of a campus judicial system that in practice presumes males accused of sexual misconduct are guilty.

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In April 2011, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights sent a letter to college and university presidents laying out guidelines for handling reports of sexual assault and harassment. One key recommendation was that such complaints should be evaluated based on a “preponderance of the evidence”-the lowest standard of proof used in civil claims. (In lay terms, it means that the total weight of the believable evidence tips at least slightly in the claimant’s favor.) Traditionally, the standard for finding a student guilty of misconduct of any kind has been “clear and convincing evidence”-less stringent than “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but still a very strong probability of guilt.

Another article reports on how a convincing defense by the accused should be taken as an indication of guilt, so basically, if you can’t persuade them of your innocence you’re screwed but if you can then they should take that as a sign of being an abuser–kind of sounds like the old witch trials where you were screwed either way: float and you’re a witch; sink and you’re innocent but you often drowned.

James Taranto reports about how another young man, Joshua Strange, was accused of “misdemeanor simple assault” and “felony forcible sodomy” but was cleared in court. However, “Auburn expelled him after a campus tribunal found him ‘responsible’ for committing the catchall offense of ‘sexual assault and/or sexual harassment.’” Read the article to see how farcical this tribunal was.

Also, recall this feminist who saw the light about the war on men when her son was falsely accused. {Like the old saying, a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.} Luckily, even though he had to endure a kangaroo campus court, he was acquitted.