buffer-overrun

—John Heilemann “The Choirboy” New York Magazine 5/30/2005

Clearly I am spending too much time thinking about the stupid Emily Yoffe article. She so clearly hasn’t thought through what’s she’s saying. I basically agree the premise of her article, that colleges are not equipped to adjudicate campus sexual assault cases.

But her insistence that “preponderance of evidence” is the wrong standard for punishing alleged perpetrators is really confusing. “Preponderance of evidence” is the standard for civil cases, and is the same standard that is used in the Title IX cases that Yoffe used as evidence that innocent men are being unjustly punished.

And, honestly, a lot of sexual assault cases go through civil court, because the plaintiffs feel that it would be impossible to reach the criminal court standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt”.

I feel like when Yoffe talks about how bringing criminal cases is the only way to protect future victims of serial predators, she is implicitly blaming victims for not doing enough to save other people. With no compassion for, as Lessig describes it, “what it is to be a teenager”

“When he was a college student, Matthew was expelled from two consecutive schools, Liberty University and Christopher Newport University, after accusations of rape. Tragically, neither case ended up in the criminal justice system. It is precisely because serial predators of the kind Lisak describes do exist that we should recognize adjudicating rape is not the job of college administrators but of law enforcement. Expelling a predator only sends him out into society to attack again.” The College Rape Overcorrection“ by Emily Yoffe, Slate 12/7/14

OK. I’m not allowed to talk about this article any more. I’m going to go look for some more grainy pictures of Kate Moss.