Sex Assault Bill Would Hurt Male Victims // Convictions in Bizarre Situations Could Explode

WASHINGTON - July 31, 2014 - PRLog -- Indeed, it may even increase the problem by pressuring colleges to convict and expel more students, says public interest law professor John Banzhaf, who has been tracking the growing number of such male victims who are winning in court, and sometimes even using videotapes to establish their innocence.

        The following situations, all from court cases, suggest that universities are often willing to expel students even when the evidence seemingly doesn't support a conviction.

        A University of Cincinnati student is suing over his prosecution by campus administrators for raping a female student who allegedly had passed out.  However, according to the complaint:
* campus police and a grand jury have cleared him
* a videotape showed that the female was not intoxicated and led the male to her room
* she was awake enough to send text messages immediately after the incident, including some joking about it
* another female student in the room at the time of the "rape" witnessed nothing illegal
* a crime lab reported that the rape kits “are consistent with the version of events provided by [the male].”

        In a bizarre twist on the famous movie "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," a complaint in federal court charges that a coed invited a male student to have dinner with her and her parents twice - and then, shortly afterwards, and only after learning that he had not been faithful to her, charged that an act of intercourse they admittedly engaged in just before the first dinner was really a rape.  It seems unlikely that a woman who had been raped would invite her rapist to dinner twice with her family immediately following the alleged incident, suggests Banzhaf.

        In an equally bizarre situation at the University of Michigan, a female student agreed to spend the night in the bottom bunk of a male student's bunk bed. They kissed, and then had intercourse, while the male student's roommate was trying to sleep in the top bunk.  Although their amorous activities were so noisy that the roommate in the top bunk texted the accused to complain that the two in the bottom bunk were "loud and inconsiderate," he never heard the female cry out for help or otherwise complain. Yet, according to this law suit, the student was expelled, says Banzhaf, arguing that these facts suggest far more than reasonable doubt about she was raped.

        At Swarthmore, a female student climbed into bed with a guy she had been having sex with for three months. She successfully rebuffed his first attempt at sex one night but, when he later made a second attempt, "I just kind of laid there and didn’t do anything - I had already said no [earlier in the evening]. I was just tired and wanted to go to bed. I let him finish."  Getting into bed with a sexual partner of some three months, and then letting him both start and “finish” without saying "no" again, just because she was just too tired and wanted to go to sleep, probably don't sound much like rape to many, including fellow male and even female students, suggests Banzhaf.

        The director of the Association of Title IX Administrators bluntly warned that some male students may have been improperly penalized.  "Some boards and panels still can't tell the difference between drunk sex and a policy violation," he wrote. "We are making Title IX plaintiffs out of these men."

JOHN F. BANZHAF III, B.S.E.E., J.D., Sc.D.
Professor of Public Interest Law
George Washington University Law School,
FAMRI Dr. William Cahan Distinguished Professor,
Fellow, World Technology Network,
Founder, Action on Smoking and Health (ASH)
2000 H Street, NW
Washington, DC 20052, USA
(202) 994-7229 // (703) 527-8418
http://banzhaf.net/ @profbanzhaf