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Blurred Lines on Campus

Ruth Marcus on

WASHINGTON -- The line between consensual sex and sexual assault is not always comfortably clear. Especially when alcohol is involved. Especially in the context of the college hook-up culture.

No doubt, sexual assault on campus is a serious problem that authorities have too often ignored. Yet the new insistence that women must not be shamed into silence and that consent must be evident threatens to edge too far the other way, turning young men who may have misread a sexual situation into accused rapists.

Today, no parent of girls should send them off to college without a lecture: Be careful; avoid being pressured into unwanted activity; speak up if something unacceptable occurs. And don't drink so damn much.

But as a remarkable story in the Yale Daily News demonstrates, every parent of boys should deliver an analogous warning: Protect yourself. Be sure your partner is willing. The consequences of misjudgment can be life-shattering.

The Daily News account, drawn from ordinarily confidential documents provided to reporters Nicole Ng and Vivian Wang by a student who claimed she was raped, offers a chilling look at the complicated new terrain.

The episode occurred in March 2013 between two students who had a typically ambiguous relationship. According to the Daily News, the two "had been involved in a brief yet exclusive romantic relationship the previous fall," and "had agreed to end all sexual contact just days earlier."

 

On the night in question, the female student was playing drinking games with friends in her dorm when the male student texted her. A conversation ensued, with texts that read to an outsider like ambivalent flirtatiousness on the woman's part, but that she later said were her efforts to head off a sexual encounter.

"Don't let me try to seduce you though," she texted at one point, followed by a second: "Because that is a distinct possibility."

Her next text: "I mean ... sex is awesome, and I might try to get it from you. But I shouldn't. I don't think."

The male student then texted that his roommates were out and his roommate's bed was "looking rather comfy." The woman responded: "None of my roommates are here and I'm too hammered to make it to [your dorm]. Is this a bad idea ... " 

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