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Abstinence-Only Ed Sez, “You can’t rape a slut!”

Jill

We all know that abstinence-only ed teaches kids some pretty horrific stuff (you can get AIDS from tears, sexually active women are like chewed-up peppermint patties, etc etc), but this just might take it to a new level.

The Ohio program is Abstinence ‘Till Marriage, which started receiving annual CBAE grants of $600,000 in 2006 (set to run until 2011). On their “Miss the Mess” website, you can enter the “Party Room”, where you learn the story of Rochelle, Jason, Monica and Tanner. Each person tells their perspective about what happens during and after a party one night.

Rochelle tells how she drove her drunken friend Jason home after the party, and then is raped by him. Jason denies that the rape happened, saying their sex was consensual. Monica and Tanner observe that Jason was being a drunken idiot the entire night, with Monica (Jason’s ex) adding her opinion that Rochelle has a reputation for “putting out” and being a “slut”.

The site then asks the question: “Based on all accounts, whose story sounds the least credible?”

Guess who is the “correct” answer? Rochelle.

It gets worse. The website continues, “Do you think a rape occurred?” The answer:

We don’t really know if Rochelle consented to having sex with Jason. She did make several bad choices and had a motive to lie when her dad went “ballistic.” Unfortunately, we are left to judge Ro’s honesty by her character and her actions … Monica implied Rochelle had a promiscuous reputation and the whole school seemed to know it.

The website then goes on to point out how how alcohol and drugs played a role in this situation. How?

Also, alcohol makes people less inhibitive. Jason was extremely vulnerable to his circumstances (like his recent breakup, crying, and being with a “hot” girl who comforted him).

So Jason was vulnerable, poor thing, and Rochelle is a lying slut. And at the end, they all get STDs.

If you’re American, your tax dollars are funding this, and effectively subsidizing rape culture. As Joe points out, abstinence-only ed has received $1.8 million in federal funding so far, and they’re slotted to receive another $1.8M in the next three years. We’ve spent $1.5 billion dollars on these programs in the last decade.

Tell Obama to stop funding medically inaccurate, rape-apologist abstinence-only education. Young people deserve facts and information that will keep them safe, not dangerous misinformation and shame.

84 thoughts on Abstinence-Only Ed Sez, “You can’t rape a slut!”

  1. email sent.

    i saw something like this scenario in my human sexuality class, and when it was time to vote on who was at fault here, the results were similar. the only difference was that i saw my own classmates telling me that this girl shouldn’t have dressed in a mini-skirt.

    this sort of shit isn’t taken into account for other types of crimes. when someone is robbed at gunpoint we never ask the victim if they’d been drinking, or flashing money around…it’s absolutely disgusting. i don’t care if a girl is known to “put out”; that doesn’t give anyone the right to rape her! why is it still necessary to have this same conversation over and over again! oh, wait…

  2. Here’s a copy of the letter I sent using the link:

    I am writing to call your attention to a vile use of my taxdollars. This would be the “Miss the Mess” website of the Ohio Abstince ‘Till Marriage Program. In a “party room” on the website, we learn the stories of a bunch of teens who go to a party with alcohol, a boy rapes a girl, and the website tells us that the girl probably wasn’t raped because she’s, well, a slut.

    I will gladly hand over any amount of money you want in tax dollars to make this country better and improve the lives of myself, my fellow citizens, and hopefully all living creatures on this planet. However, the fact that the government is funding what amounts to hate speech against sexually active women is, well, I got an 800 on my verbal SAT and I don’t have an adjective to describe what this is. Please please please please please gather up some folks who know what they are doing and get replace this “abstinence” stuff with real sexual education. I’m sick of other people’s religious beliefs being policy in this country. There is nothing scientific about waiting until a socially constructed institution to engage in sexual activity. How many teens are getting STD’s? How many young people are raping/getting raped because no one has taught them about sexuality and mutual respect? How many young ladies are going to end up pregnant before they have had a chance to start lives of their own? ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.

  4. You can also contact the organization that created the website.
    http://www.missthemess.com/contact/index.php

    I plan to write to Obama using this website as an example of what the money has funded, as well as contact the org about this dangerous line of thinking. Not that the latter will do any good, but hopefully the former will.

  8. Well, if she called the police, they would (one hopes) take her to the ER to gather forensic evidence. And then she would testify under oath.

    But I don’t really get your point. Just because something can’t be proven in a court of law doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

  9. It’s the “until marriage” part that really illuminates the fact that abstinence-only ed is all about someone’s idea about morality and NOT about teen health.

    Years and years ago, before all this, I heard someone on a talk show respond to the idea with a statement so simple it floored me: “Marriage isn’t on everyone’s agenda.” That’s right, and why should it be? Some people won’t marry til they’re 40. Some people won’t marry at all. So what. Health information shouldn’t be withheld from people who don’t follow arbitrary religious traditions.

  10. Just because something can’t be proven in a court of law doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

    Obviously; I wasn’t trying to be obnoxious. But if the police find no visible signs of forced sex, and it becomes a he said, she said, is she left with no recourse?

  12. You were trying to be obnoxious, Head. This post isn’t about the law, crime or punishment. It’s about slut-shaming and victim-blaming and you are attempting to take the focus off that.
    I sent my letter to Obama but I feel totally helpless and outraged that rape culture is literally being taught in school by people who pretend to care about children’s health.

  13. You were trying to be obnoxious, Head.

    No, I was curious about her legal options, not trying to take focus off anything. My question was perhaps poorly worded, especially in light of this bad hypothetical (and admittedly large amounts of naivete/ignornace), but it was not intended to derail the discourse. But seeing as how you have no idea who I am and what my views are, I do appreciate your assumptions.

  14. But wait. I thought girls only cried rape to protect their reputations after regretting sex. But Rochelle already had a bad reputation, so this motive is unlikely. (/sarcasm)

    The part about the drunken young alleged rapist being the vulnerable party in this scenario is rich. That’s a new one, at least as far as my knowledge goes. “She is guilty of looking hot in the proximity of a drunk man. How does she sleep at night, that slutty temptress! Rape is the least of what she deserves.”

    So sick that this is being taught to young people. Puke.

  15. In an ideal world, Head, the very fact that the woman brought rape charges at *all* should count as evidence in her favor.

    See, if a woman claims that a man raped her, either she is lying or she is telling the truth. If the man claims that he didn’t, either *he* is lying or he is telling the truth. So far, we don’t know which one is lying, but one of them must be.

    However, which one has a motivation to lie? If the man committed the rape, and tells the truth, he will go to jail. If the woman was not raped, and tells the truth… what? She has a reputation for being promiscuous, so it’s not like she has much to lose. She can say “yeah, I had sex with him, and it was a dumb idea because he was drunk off his ass. A two-pump chump, know what I’m sayin’?” if she wants to humiliate him or get revenge on him.

    There are very, very few credible motivations to lie and claim someone else committed a non-monetary crime against you. You aren’t going to get paid if he goes to jail, so there’s no financial compensation in the picture. Maybe you’re afraid of being slut-shamed… but if you already have a rep as a slut, that’s not in the picture, really. Maybe you’re mentally ill… but if you’ve never been diagnosed as mentally ill, that doesn’t seem likely. Maybe you hate him so profoundly that you want revenge… but shaming *him* as a lousy lay is an easier way to get it, and besides, why would you have agreed to drive him home if you hate him so much?

    So when we ask the question, “who has more motivation to lie”, the *obvious* answer is always the man. You need some pretty extreme circumstances — women who are plainly mentally ill, women who are extremely religious or belong to religious families who would suffer a great deal of harm for being known to have sex, women who have been hurt really really badly by a man to the point where such a vicious form of revenge might make sense, women who think they can get money because the guy’s a celebrity… and even in *those* circumstances, except in the case of the woman whose family might hurt her for having sex, the situation might imply that it’s just as likely that rape *did* occur. Because mentally ill women are targets, precisely because no one believes them, and if a woman hates a man really badly he probably hates her just as much, and when *men* want revenge on women they hate, they rape; and celebrities often have a sense of entitlement that makes them think they can literally have any woman they want.

    Jason’s story, above, is less credible than Rochelle’s, because Jason has a much, much greater motive to lie and say “the sex was consensual” than Rochelle has to lie and say “he raped me.” Rochelle gains nothing from claiming rape when rape did not occur; Jason evades punishment for rape if he claims it did not occur when it did. Jason was a “drunken idiot” all night, which does suggest, given that drunk people are more prone to impulsive behavior and violence, that he has more reason to be violent and impulsive than Rochelle, who was sober enough to drive.

    If Rochelle’s claim was that Jason had taken $300 out of her wallet while she was driving him home, and Jason’s claim was that Rochelle had given him the $300 because he’s hard up for cash and she felt sorry for him, Jason would be prosecuted for theft. No question. Only if after cross-examination on the witness stand Rochelle’s story broke down and started to make little sense would Jason be acquitted. But it’s just so assumed that women are likely to lie about being raped that no one even *questions* what Rochelle’s motivation to lie could possibly be and if it is more or less likely than Jason’s motivation to lie.

    I would say that the presumption should be, in a case where DNA analysis reveals that sex did take place, that the woman who brings the charge is telling the truth, not the man who denies the charge, *unless* the woman’s story fails to make sense, or has significant logical inconsistencies, or the woman’s credibility (*not* her likelihood of having sex, her likelihood of *lying*) can be challenged. For instance, if she is in the habit of telling her friends that her boyfriend is a famous rock star, that she fought off terrorists on her last plane flight to France, and that she totally paid the electric bill and she can’t understand why the power company loses her payment *every month*, that would speak to her credibility and suggest she might have a motive to lie. This would be no different from how we treat property crimes, where when she says it was theft and he says it was a gift and the circumstances are such that there would not reasonably be a written contract (ie, a casual gift between friends), she is presumed to be truthful unless evidence can show a pattern of a lack of credibility.

    The problem is that the courts don’t look for a lack of actual credibility; they look for the likelihood that she had sex, overlooking the fact that the important thing here is not whether or not sex occurred, which is not in dispute, but whether either he or she is lying about her consent. A slut may be more likely to consent to sex but she is also more likely to be comfortable with admitting that yes, she consented to sex. Actually, the stereotypical Christian virgin is probably more likely to lie about having consented to sex than the slut is. Again, no one questions the basic premise that women just lie about rape all the time and the problem to figure out is how likely is it that she consented, not how likely is it that she consented AND THEN LIED ABOUT IT.

  16. Okay, am I reading too much into the fact that the “promiscuous” “least credible” character is also the only character with a name predominantly associated with black culture (at least in my experience)?

  17. The Amplify site gives folks the option of sending a prepared email. I rewrote the text because … I do that. Feel free to use it, or any part of it, without any attribution. The more your email differs from others the less it looks astroturfed, though the the more it looks like the grassroots outrage it is.

    Mr. President, I write to you as a citizen and a parent, to bring to your attention the harmful misinformation and unhealthy biases introduced into our schools by federally funded abstinence-only sexual health education.

    First, I thank you for your outspoken support for medically accurate, age-appropriate sex education. These programs are an important component of smart national healthcare policy.

    However, as you know, the federal government has already spent more than $1.5 billion on abstinence-only programs. Empirically, these programs have repeatedly proven ineffective; they are at best wasted dollars that could be better spent on comprehensive sexual health education. Worse, they mislead our teens and young adults by withholding important knowledge and spreading ideological misinformation to dissaude those who do have sex from planning to protect their and their partners’ health.

    I recently also learned that some of these programs are misinforming our young men and women about rape. One program that receives a Community Based Abstinence Education (CBAE) grant runs a website, which your staff can access at http://www.missthemess.com/party/index.php, which spreads misinformation about rape. The website encourages children to disbelieve the account of a young woman who was raped after a night of drinking with a friend, and to sympathize with the rapist, and to take into consideration in evaluating her credibility that she had a reputation for sexual availability. We should not permit another generation to be raised with these views! Certainly the United States government should not be funding efforts to promote these views, which will only discourage young women who are raped from reporting the crime and getting the help they need to heal.

    Accordingly, Mr. President, I urge you in the strongest terms to eliminate from your fiscal year 2010 budget the $176 million that is currently spent annually on abstinence-only-until marriage programs, and instead fund comprehensive sex education. Healthcare spending should promote health, not the narrow moral posture of the loudest segment of the population.

  19. Perhaps if its handle wasn’t itself a barely-disguised racist statement I’d be more inclined to grant HeadSandn!&@aInCharge its claim of good faith. But I am harsh and strident and unforgiving.

  20. Probably, Kaninchen, but I can’t resist an opening to make my argument, even if I’m just feeding the troll. 🙂

  22. Pingback: Tax-Payer Funded Rape Denial - Ugh « 24 Percent

  23. This completely horrified me as something designed for children and funded with taxpayer money. It doesn’t simply slut-shame, it’s clearly and explicitly designed to teach kids to slut-shame (and use poor grammar and spelling while doing it–e.g., “less inhibitive,” “wrecklessness”). Scarily, the production values are actually not bad, so you could see kids taking part in it, and taking away that this crap is what adults want them to think and how the world works. Really evil on all levels. I wonder if it’s possible to force Ohio to run a counterprogram that explains how this is wrong.

  25. The only thing that I would learn from such a scenario would be to let my drunk and obnoxious male friends drive themselves home.

  26. Wow, that really hits a note with me. I used to be very promiscuous in high school, but after being forced to do sexual things by a so-called “friend” of mine, I stopped having anything but monogamous sex… so what happened to me is okay even though I said no? I kind of want to cry now. Just because I didn’t sell my virginity for a diamond ring, doesn’t mean that I was not scarred. After this happened, I started starving myself, and I have never been as confident in myself both sexually and in my daily life as I was before what happened. And because of the shame I have surrounding my sexuality, I have not been able to seek help for the cause of my eating disorder. I have only treated the symptom, not the cause. Anyway, enough of my whining…
    Feministe, thank you for sending letters to stop this nonsense… at least someone won’t call me a whore who was “asking for it” here. Also, if someone sees this happen again, would you mind punching them for me?
    Love, Miss Werewolf

  27. Oxygengrrl: “It doesn’t simply slut-shame, it’s clearly and explicitly designed to teach kids to slut-shame”

    Absolutely…. there’s so much shit within this whole exercise it would take all day to count, and you could add the entire aspect of scaring kids out of having sex, because once you do and then get raped, nobody will, or should, believe you.

  29. Miss Werewolf, that’s not whining. That’s the truth of your life. It’s not weakness to say it; it’s strength. And, because it can never be said too much: what happened to you is not your fault. You are not defined by what was done to you.

  30. Jeeeez-us! Did you all go through the whole thing? Did you happen to notice that Rochelle is also the one that is mentioned as hypothetically having AIDS. What a racist, sexist, piece of crap this website is!

  31. For me, the most precious part of this whole thing was this throwaway line at the end:

    And at the end, they all get STDs.

    They all get STDs? Not just the slut and the poor, vulnerable lad who had no choice but to rape her, but their two friends, too? How? Do you get STDs just by befriending people who have sex?

    I suppose I could register for this website and find out, but I’m afraid I might get an STD.

  32. This is totally wack. I just found this blog today and really like it. Keep up the good work.

    I grew up in Texas and these sorts of ideas were very common in the culture I was raised in – conservative Christian bullshit. The more time I spent with girls in high school and after I dropped out the more I found out about the rapes and horrible shit that was hidden under a veneer of “sluttiness” by Respectable Society.

    I’m aghast that these programs are funded by the federal government. Aghast, but not that surprised I guess.

    Solidarity,
    -Communist

  33. oxygengrrl, it doesn’t just teach them to slut-shame, it is teaching the boys how to get away with rape.
    Rochelle is the only person in the story who acted responsibly. She gave her “friend” a ride home when he was too drunk to drive. Jason got blitzed out of his mind and had to be taken care of by Rochelle, and the other two just stood by and watched and then talked about Rochelle behind her back!

  34. MissWerewolf, it’s not whining to tell your own story, particularly in response to this kind of victim-blaming. I hope you can get the help and support you need, too. And you’re always welcome on these comments threads.

    Absolutely…. there’s so much shit within this whole exercise it would take all day to count, and you could add the entire aspect of scaring kids out of having sex, because once you do and then get raped, nobody will, or should, believe you.

    And if you do fuck up and have consensual sex, you should lie about it. Because if you get a reputation as a slut, your whole life will be ruined and everyone will hate you. And nobody but rapists, I mean vulnerable young men, will ever date you. And then they’ll brutalize you, but you won’t have the right to call it rape, because you can’t rape a slut, and you’re a slut, because everyone knows you’re a slut, because….

    Honestly, this website is like the duct tape of misogyny: it covers everything. I’m not sure there’s any aspect of sexuality that it doesn’t make more hostile to young women.

    Do teenagers even use the phrase “put out?” It sounds a lot older, personally.

  35. Phbbbt. Phbbbt! Seriously, I don’t know what to say. Wrong in so many obvious and different ways. Like 2nd grader Law and Order logic, for one. Let’s see…the totally logical response to consensual sex is kicking the boy out of HIS OWN CAR and driving it home when you knew your father would be furious. Totally.

  36. Wow – it seems to be getting worse on this front. Two other greatest hits from the abstinence-only folks:

    “A guy who wants to respect girls is distracted by sexy clothes and remembers her for [only] one thing. Is it fair that guys are turned on by their senses and women by their hearts?” – Sex Respect curriculum

    “The young girl learning to understand her changing body often has no idea the effect it has on surrounding males. Signals she doesn’t even know she is sending can cause big problems.” – Why kNOw curriculum

    Both of these curricula are widely used by federally-funded ab-only programs. All of this only reinforces the belief (held by many of us I’d guess) that proponents of the abstinence-only approach don’t care so much about preventing unwanted pregnancies and STIs amongst young people as they do about getting us back to traditional, rigid, and punishable gender roles.

  37. Oh, I want to respect girls, but those damn sexy clothes won’t let me! Maybe I’ll feel better if I call them sluts.

  38. I thought it was interesting where they were listing what Monica did wrong and how credible her story was. Most of it was that she was excusing Jason’s actions. But they never mention that her attitude toward sex is pretty messed up (she doesn’t want to have sex with her boyfriend, but has oral sex because it makes him happy, and knows that he sleeps with other girls but it’s OK because she’s the one he really loves), and thus any statement she makes about how “slutty” Rochelle is should be viewed with suspicion.

  41. “The young girl learning to understand her changing body often has no idea the effect it has on surrounding males. Signals she doesn’t even know she is sending can cause big problems.”

    The hell? What “signals” does a teenage girl’s body send other than “I am a teenage girl”?

    As for “no idea the effect it has”? Yeah, right. I hit puberty fairly young. I was definitely aware of the effect my 12-year-old C-cup body had on some males. I hated the effect. And, depending on how the adults in the girl’s world talk to her about it, hating the effect can lead to one of two things — hating the men who stare or make comments to/about a person who, despite the breasts, is still obviously a little girl, or hating her body. These people seem to be advocating the body-hating option.

    I found it interesting that, in the party pictures, the “slutty” girl and the “naive” girl were wearing similar outfits — jeans and spaghetti strap top — but the “naive” girl was showing much more midriff. The “slutty” girl, though, had much bigger breasts.

  42. The premise of this website seems to be that by being abstinent the teen is missing out on the “mess”, bad things that happen when teens are sexually active.

    So…are they implying that she was not abstinent and therefore got raped (the mess), or are they implying that the rape meant she was not abstinent and therefore she had to deal with people’s reactions to it (the mess).

    Either way, WOW IS THAT DISGUSTING and frankly just plain innacurate.

  43. the crazy thing is that she didnt even need to sleep around to be considered less credible, all it says is that she has a reputation, it never actually says she has been sexually active. this could literally boil down to “she deserves it for wearing the wrong clothes” w/the amount of info they give. i dont think it makes a difference if she slept around or not but they dont even tell you if that was true.

  44. This disgusts me that the American government is funding this kind of “education”. I was a sexual assault educator for 5 years in Canada at an organization run out of my university. Travelling to different schools and talking about these exact scenarios, I could tell you that these ideas are already floating around and we try to de-bunk these myths of “you can’t rape a ‘slut'” or “it’s always the woman’s fault” ideology. Now, you guys have government funded shit to fill these kids heads with. UGH!

    Do you know how many kids believe that a woman “wearing the wrong clothese” brought rape on herself? Do you know how many kids believe that “partners can’r rape their partners”? Do you know how many kids believe that “you should have known better than to drink”? It’s sickening. But, I loved my job of trying to change it.

    This is exactly what lets rapists believe they have the “right” to rape. As well, allows survivors of assault to believe that it was their own fault.

    Is there some kind of petition going around to sign?

  45. Also, I don’t know about the US, but in Canada (I believe) that legally, alcohol is NOT an excuse for committing a crime.

  47. ((Miss Werewolf))

    Just wanted to add a voice of support. You aren’t whining…you’re sharing. Sharing is good. I hope you can find the help you need. Please know that you deserve better (we all deserve better). You deserve happiness and joy.

  48. How does one get a job as a sexual assault educator? I’m Australian anyway, don’t know if the answers would apply to me. But generally just as a career stream, how does one get into it? I’m floating around for a career anyway, if I could do something that puts my feminism into practical use I could probably commit to that.

  49. Looks like they’ve taken down the most offensive bits of the presentation. They weren’t very competent about it though–the end makes no sense anymore.

    Also, I don’t know about the US, but in Canada (I believe) that legally, alcohol is NOT an excuse for committing a crime.

    If I recall correctly, in most states in the U.S. intoxication can be used to negate specific intent, but not anything below specific intent. Typically this means that a “successful” defense of intoxication doesn’t result in the defendant being found not guilty, it just results in them being found guilty of a lesser offense. For example, a successful intoxication defense to first-degree murder (which requires specific intent to kill) would result in a reduction to second-degree murder (which requires only criminal recklessness) or manslaughter (which requires only criminal negligence).

    Rape is not a specific intent crime, so it wouldn’t be a legal defense to rape.

  50. It’s the same way as “a lawyer” says in Canada.

    Honestly, I was not aware of any link between the name “Rochelle” and race. I would have guessed it was French.

    I’m going to go with nobody’s story being credible. Because it’s a hypothetical scenario designed specifically to slut-shame. Which is incredible.

  51. “The human eye is a wonderful device. With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.”

  52. Please please please put the direct quotes from the website under a trigger cut. Feministing didn’t and it really fucked with my head. My boyfriend tried to do something like this — claiming that he had a zillion witnesses to the fact that i wasn’t raped, except none of them were there, they just saw me before and after he did it.

    Anyway, so like I said on the Feministing thread, I’d say that the least credible witnesses to Rochelle’s rape are Monica and Tanner, seeing that THEY WEREN’T FUCKING THERE. WTF?

  54. It’s sad…but this doesn’t surprise me about Ohio. I live in Ohio. Years ago I knew a guy (we weren’t friends, we had friends in common) and he attended OSU. We will call him Jack. Jack and his roommate went to a bar and the roommate invited a woman back to their apartment. Later the roommate was accused of raping the woman (by the woman, obviously) but Jack swore that would never happen because “she clearly wanted it”.

    Needless to say, the roommate was never convicted.

  56. Alara Rogers, mentally ill people get raped and abused also. Actually trauma is a contributing factor or cause of a number of mental illnesses, in which case your comments about mentally ill people lying about rape is a double whammy there.

  58. I’m impressed that they did actually change it. Now, instead of telling whose story is least believable and most believable, they summarize each person and say to discuss it, and that there are no right or wrong answers. Also, Rochelle’s “reputation” is no longer listed as something counting against Rochelle, but Monica believing Rochelle’s reputation does count against Monica as making her possibly biased. And Jason’s drinking is used as evidence that he doesn’t have respect for the law. And they definitely emphasize that this is something for the courts to decide. It’s certainly not perfect now, but it is much better. A lot of groups would have responded with “The liberals are attacking! Circle the wagons!” But this one actually listened to the complaints and changed things. Not perfect, but better.

  59. Alara Rogers, mentally ill people get raped and abused also.

    I believe I pointed that out about one paragraph later. Mentally ill women are actually *targeted* for rape specifically because no one believes them.

    To be completely honest, if I were on a jury, and the woman accusing the man was proven to be diagnosed with a mental illness, and forensic evidence indicated that sex had happened between them at *all*, I would vote to convict, because a. most mentally ill women aren’t going to be confused on the issue of whether or not they consented so much as whether or not the incident happened at all, and if there’s proof it happened, I’d believe them when they said it was rape b. men specifically target mentally ill women and c. if she’s so sick that she thinks she was raped when she verbally consented, I’d consider her too sick to give informed consent, and consider the incident statutory even if she *did* verbally consent.

    I was simply pointing out that there *are* circumstances, rare ones, where a woman *might* lie… but in almost any circumstance where a woman might lie (or be mistaken), the woman would also be a more vulnerable or more likely target for a rapist.

    But if a woman is not mentally ill, has no motive for revenge, is openly sexually active and stands to get no financial gain, my argument is that there is *no* reason whatsoever to imagine that she might be lying.

  60. Ruchama–thanks for the update. I must have been watching while they were in the middle of rewriting it. I didn’t get to see the original but this is much better than it was being described as.

  61. Just realized my last comment has some pronoun issues, so let me try that again:

    I didn’t get to see the original, but this revised version is much better than the original was described as.

  62. Pingback: BadMormon » Abstinence Only Education Promotes Rape.

  63. alara, so in the case of no mental illness, no revenge, etc when a rape accusation is brought, automatic conviction? mentally ill woman brings rape accusation, automatic conviction?

    bringing the charge at all should count in her/his favor but should that be able to override the protections we have in place for the accused? i dont know.

  64. I feel extremely ILL.

    The girl had a reputation for being a slut? And therefore is not to be believed/is to blame?

    I had a reputation for being a slut at one of the schools I went to, it was said I’d jump into bed, cars, locker rooms, or the nearby woods with any guy. To the point I was regularly lectured to by teachers about this ‘problem’ I had.

    At the *same time* I had a reputation for being a lesbian, and a ‘cold bitch’ because I… wouldn’t even date, much less, you know, have sex with, any of the guys. (Who also never asked me out, not that, considering the things they all said about me, I would have ever said yes.) To the point I was regularly lectured to by OTHER teachers about this ‘problem’ I had.

    Great. It’s nice to see how well public schools educate the kids these days- Now they’re being OFFICIALLY told that to spread rumors about anyone they dislike is their best fucking ‘defense’ against ever having to take responsibility for their own damn actions or lack thereof.

  65. As terrible as that article was, (as no doubt about it that women was raped, whether or not she was a slut) I was also offended by what the blog wrote- “We all know that abstinence-only ed teaches kids some pretty horrific stuff (you can get AIDS from tears, sexually active women are like chewed-up peppermint patties, etc etc)”
    Excuse me? Of course, there is always going to be radical and inaccurate info when it comes to sexual education, as it would for anything. But the majority of abstinence teachers do not spew out lies as such, and I certainly hope what you said was an exaggeration. And what about other forms of sexual education which give kids free condoms? Thats essentially saying, “Here go ahead and go have sex”

  66. I hate to break it to you, Kaitlyn, but according to the Waxman Report and every other study that has come out about abstinence-only education, the majority of abstinence educators do “spew out lies.” That’s essentially their job, to lie about sex to teenagers who don’t know any better. Check out the report [PDF] for yourself if you don’t believe me. It has quotes from the actual curricula in it.

    And what about other forms of sexual education which give kids free condoms? Thats essentially saying, “Here go ahead and go have sex”

    You have a problem with teenagers having sex? I don’t. I just figure teenagers are going to have sex most likely anyway, and if they do, they should be responsible about it, that is to say, using birth control and prophylaxis so they don’t wind up an unintentional parent or infected with a STI.

    In my experience, anyway, comprehensive sex education keeps a lot of kids from having sex (far more than abstinence-only education does, since abstinence-only education doesn’t work), strictly from the point of view that kids wind up thinking Uh oh, they’re onto us. Also, if kids do have sex, at least if they’ve had comprehensive sex ed, they’re more likely to prepare and take precautions, and less likely to have impulsive, unplanned sex that leads to negative emotions later on. After all, these abstinence-only programs basically teach girls that if they have sex, they must be “bad girls,” and their lives are ruined forever. So they’re then less likely to prepare for sex, and more likely to find themselves feeling negative about any sexual experiences they do have. I don’t think anybody should think (although I know far too many people do) that sex is dirty, bad, and wrong, and that’s one of the reasons I think abstinence-only education is a bad idea — it gives young people the wrong ideas about sex.

    Maybe if our culture treated sex as something that was positive, fun, and part of healthy adult romantic relationships (instead of something to be feared, despised, sanctioned, and disapproved of), more people would treat sex with respect.

  67. Kaitlyn – programs that give out condoms are not saying “go ahead, have sex.” What they are saying is “We know you might want to have sex and there is nothing wrong with that, so long as you are prepared to do so responsibly.”

    Arming teens with information AND supplies to fight off STDs and unwanted pregnancies seems like a very wise plan, at least for me. I mean, honestly, being given a condom is not going t be the deciding factor in a teen’s sex life; if they want to have sex they will, if they want to wait they will… regardless of whether or not their sex-ed class gives them condoms. The only difference? The teens who are given condoms have a higher likeliness of being safe!

  68. alara, so in the case of no mental illness, no revenge, etc when a rape accusation is brought, automatic conviction? mentally ill woman brings rape accusation, automatic conviction?

    Automatic? No. But it should be counted *as* evidence.

    When I accuse a person of taking my property, and I can prove it’s my property, and the property is found on their person… they can argue all they want “She gave it to me as a gift!”, but even if they present evidence that I give them gifts all the time, they’re going to have a *very* hard time getting acquitted.

    When a woman charges a man with rape, AND IT CAN BE PROVEN THAT SEX OCCURRED BETWEEN THEM (if there is no DNA evidence then that’s a different story), then the argument “She consented!” has to be taken with a grain of salt, given that if she consented, why is she now bringing charges? The accused would have to present evidence that the woman is not credible (ie, she’s a known pathological liar, or she has threatened to bring false rape accusations), or that there are other extenuating circumstances that would give her strong motivation to lie, in order to be acquitted.

    It’s not a case of violating the precept of innocent until proven guilty. I realize this concept is difficult for people to grasp because we’ve lived so long in a culture that just assumes that women lie about being raped, but again, if I claim that you took my property and my property is found at your home, the argument that I gave it to you as a gift will *not* get you acquitted, because if I gave it to you as a gift what motive do I have to accuse you of theft? The very fact that I’m saying you stole it is considered some evidence that you stole it, and when it’s found on your person, that’s considered proof. The way you get acquitted from a charge of theft is if no one can find the item on your person, or it turns up in someone else’s possession, or a contract or receipt can be found proving I gave it as a gift or sold it to you. You don’t get acquitted when it’s proven that you *have* my property, because if I gifted it to you why would I be lying and saying you stole it? The same should be true of rape.

    Women do not have sex with men consensually and then lie and say they were raped, unless they have a very strong reason for doing so, such as their husband running up to them with a shotgun, or their father threatening to beat them to death for being pregnant, any more than people lie and claim that gifts they gave were actually stolen. An acquittal for a man who is accused of rape should be centered around the question “did he have sex with her”, not “did she consent to the sex”, because without very good evidence that she might have lied, she wouldn’t be bringing charges if she consented.

  69. Alara:
    Actually, if you accuse someone of theft, and they can plausibly argue that you actually gave them the item in question, they will (or at least should) get acquitted, because there’s a reasonable doubt that they actually stole the item. Obviously that’s a harder argument to make in cases where the person with the property is a stranger to you, but that’s because it’s less likely that you gave the item to them consensually in the first place.

    You also seem to misunderstand the process by which the criminal justice system works: the State has the burden of proving each element of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt. The elements of rape are, at its base a pair: 1) sex with another person 2) without the consent of that person. What you’re proposing is that, once the state has proven the first element, the burden lies with the defense to prove that the second isn’t present. This isn’t just a terrible idea, and it isn’t just unconstitutional, it would have the effect of giving people a very strong incentive to lie about their consent.

    In your system, having sex with any person would create a significant possibility of criminal liability. Each partner would have tremendous power over the other (after all, except in states with terrible laws like Georgia, rape is a crime that can be committed by either sex), in that they could go to the police, accuse the other of rape, and get them thrown in jail for a sentence that could potentially keep them in jail for the rest of their lives. Since the accusation would be taken as almost irrebuttable evidence of lack of consent, and the sex undisputedly happened, the partner who didn’t go to the police first would have little or no defense against a baseless rape charge.

    While individuals do not currently have significant incentives to lie about rape accusations, a system which presumed that lack would itself create an immense incentive to lie. And, lest you think that people are fundamentally decent and wouldn’t lie about such things to gain legal advantage over people they are intimate with, I’d recommend taking a look at family law practice, where people can and do create terrible lies about one another in order to secure a more advantageous position over property distribution or custody of children.

  70. Apparently, in response to the internet firestorm that this blog post has created, Abstinence ‘Till Marriage has dramatically changed the text of there “Party Room”. While this is to be “commended”, they still need to tell visitors to the site why they changed their original, highly offensive text, and offer an apology, if you ask me.

  71. Rayna…

    Sorry I took so long to say something. I actually started at a volunteer at a sexual assault survivors’ support line and then got a job as a coordinator for outreach and resources. The outreach involved me getting spots at schools to talk to students about sexual assault and healthy relationships. Didn’t get paid much though, but it was a university thing. However, I did see in the US, the Rape Incest and Abuse National Network (RAINN) had a job posting for an outreach coordinator (but that’s in DC), so I’m sure there’s somewhere in Australia for you to put your education to use…hope that helps

  72. ok, I guess they changed the text because I just watched the animation and it didn’t actually state who the least believable person was. I did however, find the following text absolutely halarious:

    If you have sex before you marry your are more likely to:
    …
    2. Scare off someone who wants to marry a virgin
    …

    HAHA, scare off someone who wants a virgin? Is this Riyadh? Anyone with such a perversely twisted sensibility that prevents them from loving a non-virgin needs to be liberated from their cult, deprogrammed, and rehabilitated; not exceeded to.

  73. I’d tend to think that if “but she gave it to me!” was a plausible line of defense against being accused of theft we’d hear about it being used more often. Mostly we hear “I don’t know how that got there!” In fact, I had an employee and former friend who stole from my business and tried to claim that we gave him the stuff in lieu of unpaid wages, to the cops. By the time he lawyered up, though, he was pleading guilty. If his lawyer thought that was going to be a defense that would work, why did he plead guilty?

    In cases such as custody cases, divorce cases, and cases where there’s property at stake, there’s a motive to lie. Then you have to consider very, very carefully, and *if* there’s a reasonable motive to lie, in the absence of physical evidence that it was rape as opposed to consensual sex, it would be very hard to convict. Which is upsetting, because men who are angry at a woman for trying to divorce them could well rape her for revenge, but it’s certainly true that when there is a reasonable presumption that a person could be lying, the very fact that they brought an accusation wouldn’t be evidence of anything.

    The point I’m trying to make is that in most circumstances women have absolutely no reasonable motivation to lie. And given that they have no reasonable motivation to lie, the very fact that they brought the accusation is evidence in favor of the accusation. It’s not bulletproof evidence, because some people are unreasonable. But if the victim appears to be a reasonable person, and she has no reasonable motive to lie, then there is no reasonable doubt. Sure, she could be a sadistic psychotic bitch who just likes sleeping with men and then destroying their lives, but how likely is that? If someone kills someone and then tries to present reasonable doubt by claiming that their long-lost twin brother actually did the deed, in the absence of clear evidence that there *is* a long lost twin brother or that he was in the vicinity one would not accept that as a reasonable excuse.

    The whole reason we’re *in* this situation is that the whole world seems to think that “she’s a vicious lying bitch who just wants to hurt and punish men” is a more reasonable belief than “he’s a rapist”… although *all* evidence suggests it’s the other way around. I believe that if a man cannot present evidence to suggest that a woman has motive to lie — if his only evidence is that she has motive to have consensual sex — then there *is* no reasonable doubt. If she’s a reasonable person and she says he raped her and the physical evidence suggests it’s possible and she has no motive to be lying, then he raped her. If she *has* motive to be lying then we’re back at square one. But given that both rape and false accusations destroy lives, but one gives the perpetrator sexual pleasure as well as the feeling of power over another person and the other doesn’t and involves being publicly humiliated, it’s pretty obvious to me that rape should be vastly more common than false accusations, and therefore the reasonable thing to assume in the absence of evidence of her motive to lie is that he’s the one lying.

    And yes, it *would* mean that any time you have consensual sex there’s a possibility that your partner would bring rape charges… which is different from the current situation, in which any time a woman has consensual sex with a man there’s a possibility he will strangle her to death or continue with sex she finds painful after she’s asked him to stop or otherwise hurt her, but there’s really very little a man needs to fear from a woman he is having sex with. Every time a woman agrees to have sex with a man she doesn’t know well (including men she *thought* she knew well), she takes her life and physical health into her hands. I don’t think it’s unfair that men run a risk as well, especially given that the likelihood of “crazy psycho bitch who brings false accusations for fun” is significantly less than the likelihood of “rapist.”

  74. Hey, I don’t mean to be a whiner, but this is the kind of stuff that should be under a trigger cut. After my last post, I have been feeling very bad about everything that has been happening and fighting the urge to starve myself again. I set up an appointment for a therapist, but still, Feministe, next time could you put this under a cut? Thank you.

  75. Alara:
    You clearly don’t give one whit about justice, since you see the risk of the criminal justice system being used as a weapon against innocent people as a virtue of your scheme, rather than a vice. You’re also erasing the existence of weak men and strong women, and anyone who doesn’t fall into your “women = helpless; men = all-powerful” paradigm.

    And, of course, you’re forgetting that, because rape charges can be brought against women as well as men (well, except in backwards states like Georgia, where raping a man is a the same crime as groping someone), men would gain this power over women too. Sure, it’d be held somewhat in check by social norms that prevent actual male rape victims from coming forward, but being able to send someone to jail simply by making an accusation is such a hefty power that it’s unlikely that unethical people would be able to resist.

    Which leads back to the fundamental problem with your “argument,” such as it is: you premise your evidentiary weighting on the claim that no (or almost no) woman would lie about getting raped, but fail to see that giving such an absurd degree of weight to the accusation would create enormous incentives for someone of either sex to lie.

  76. There currently aren’t a lot of people falsely claiming that their friend stole stuff from them when in fact they gave it away.

    There currently aren’t a lot of people who get a friend to spar with them, get some bruises, and then falsely accuse the person of beating them up.

    I *don’t* see the threat of “omg, if we take the accusation of rape as seriously as we take the accusation of ‘x beat me up’ or ‘x stole my stuff’, people will lie!” as being all that serious, certainly not nearly as serious as the fact that thousands of innocent women are condemned to the punishment of being *raped* because their rapist was not arrested, prosecuted or convicted the first time he raped someone, because it’s not happening now in the crimes it’s possible for.

    Also, no, it’s really unlikely that hordes of men will accuse women of raping them, because the physical experience of a woman raping a man is much more difficult to achieve than the physical experience of a man raping a woman. People would need a good deal of circumstantial evidence to believe that a woman committed rape, such as evidence of drugs in the man’s blood, ligature marks on his skin, a significant size difference in her favor, or some other physical evidence to suggest that she could have overpowered or threatened him. And because men don’t currently accuse falsely women of stealing from them when there’s no reasonable motive for them to do so, so why would they start falslely accusing women of rape?

    I think the evidence suggests that in other crimes, when there’s a “person X said, person Y said” thing going on, and the physical evidence suggests that the incident happened and the question is whether or not it happened in a way that makes it a crime, the rate of false accusation is still really damn low. Why would rape be different just because we start taking the acusation of rape as seriously as we take the accusation of “so and so took my car?”

    I’m not suggesting that we blindly assume, under any circumstances, that if Jane says John raped her she’s telling the truth. But if Jane says John took her car, and John says that no, she lent it to him, odds are Jane will win her case and John will be charged with stealing her car. If Jane says John beat her up and John says they were practicing martial arts… well, actually, that gets into the whole “women lie” thing again that applies whenever there’s a crime that women are disprorportionately victims of, so let’s say that if Steve says John beat him up and John says they were practicing martial arts, there would need to be evidence that in fact, not only do Steven and John frequently practice martial arts together but that John is dating Steve’s ex now and so Steve has motive to lie before anyone would acquit John. It’s *only* crimes that men commit against women that are held to this absurdly high standard of “if it’s theoretically possible that he’s telling the truth, she must be lying.” I want to see rape held to the same standard all *other* crimes are held to.

    ANd no, I don’t think women are totally helpless and men are all-powerful. I’m well aware of the existence of female criminals, including women who abuse men. What I think is not that women are helpless and men are omnipotent, but that almost no one brings false accusations of crimes *ever*, and in almost all crimes we understand that simply the fact that an accusation has been brought is a piece of evidence in itself, but in rape, we’ll apparently take *any* absurd excuse a man can come up with as justification for why he isn’t a rapist, including “she voluntarily jumped into the bushes to have sex with a total stranger” and “she is pretending to be unconscious on tape while she’s being humiliated, raped and burned with cigarette butts because she wanted to be a porn star.” Rape is damn near the only crime this happens with. (Domestic violence is usually excused but not denied — “yes, he beat her within an inch of her life, but she flirted with another man and insulted his penis, so he was totally justified in doing it!”)

  77. Speaking as someone currently working as a defense attorney, I can tell you that accusations are not treated as dispositive evidence for any other crime. If, in a theft case, the complaining witness testifies that they did not consent to the defendant taking the item, that will be considered evidence, but that consideration will depend heavily on the credibility of the witness. If the defendant testifies that the complaining witness did consent to him/her taking the item, that will also be considered evidence, with that consideration depending heavily on the credibility of the defendant.

    There is no thumb put on the scale for this evidence, with the accusation making the complaining witness’ testimony more credible than the defendant’s. To do so would be to eliminate the standard of “innocent until proven guilty,” as defendants would be required to overcome an evidentiary burden in the states’ favor in order to prove their innocence. That’s not the way the system works for any crime. To repeat, with emphasis: your understanding of the criminal justice system is wrong.

    Rapists should be punished, but your idea breaks with fundamental checks on the power of government that are necessary to have a free society. Your proposal would require any person accused of a crime to prove that they are innocent (and proving a negative is fundamentally impossible), rather than forcing the state to prove they are guilty before removing their liberty.

    You also seem to be completely incapable of understanding that a change to criminal law will change how people interact with the criminal law. I don’t disagree that there is a low incentive for people to make false accusations as the law currently stands. However, if an accusation were taken as sufficient to prove that sex was non-consensual (with an affirmative defense available to prove that it was consensual), the result would be a change in incentives, with a sudden increase in the incentives to make false reports in order to use the court system as a way for people to attack intimate partners that have wronged them.

    And then there’s your failure to remember that rape is not just forced sex – many states now (rightly) define rape to include any type of non-consensual sex, even if there was no force applied to the victim. This means that there doesn’t need to be evidence of drugs, restraints, or use of force in order for a rape to have been committed, which means your argument regarding the difficulty of a man sustaining a false rape charge against a woman he consensually had sex with is flat-out inaccurate.

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  79. Except you left out a part. I don’t agree with the negative views of sexuality presented in the story, but Rochelle’s story is flawed because of Tanner’s statements, not because she may or may not have had sex in the past.

    Rochelle claims she was cooerced into breaking the law (driving on a suspended license) in the name of friendship but when she was offered an easy way out of it by Tanner, she didn’t take it. Are you suggesting that Tanner is lying as well? Unless there’s proof of that, Rochelle’s story _is_ the least believable and there is more than reasonable doubt that rape took place.

    Except for the fact that some people label a sober person having sex with an intoxicated person as rape? Or does that only count if the sober person is male?

    And Alara, if you think that no woman would accuse a man of rape in order to ruin his life, you’re naive.

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  81. I was date raped and didn’t report it because the guy told me it was my fault for looking too beautiful. I was only 21 and totally fell for it. When I finally told my mom, about a year later, she was mad at him, but she was also mad at me for “getting myself in a situation like that” and being alone with a guy.

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  83. To AnonymousCoward: No wonder you want to be anonymous and yes you are a coward. It does not surprsie me that you are a defense attorney. I wonder how many rapists you have gotten acquitted. I would like to know the statistics of how many women have raped men. From my personal experience, I know a myriad of women who have been raped, by strangers, acquaintenes and partners (myself included). I am also an attorney, but I choose not to be a criminal defense attorney because I cannot stomach defending often guilty individuals. Although I do not agree with Alara’s comments on a presumption of guilt in rape cases, I understand the sentiment behind it. But your argument speaks of self-servient BS. I never tried to bring a case against my ex-boyfriend because I knew some prick defense attorney would argue that I had consensual sex with him before and so more likley than not, I wanted t this time, your precious “reasonable doubt” crutch that allows gaping holes in justice for WOMEN rape victims. Plus, then I would have to worry that my ex-boyfriend would hurt or kill me for trying to put him in jail. And excuse me if I do not believe in revers rape cases. Unless a woman has a gun, there is no way she can rape a man. Sorry, welcome to the real world.

  84. Didn’t read every comment but so sorry if this is redundant: wouldn’t being a “slut” make her statement MORE believable? It’s not like she has anything to lose by having sex (as, say, a church girl would), and didn’t accuse any of her other partners of this…my $0.02, and such.

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