A small development can signal a dramatic social shift. A critical mass of women exchanged “Miss” and “Mrs.” for “Ms.,” and this title alteration was enough to allow women’s public identity to omit all reference to their marital status. I believe that the Enhanced Assess, Acknowledge, Act (“EAAA”) program may foretell a similarly substantial change in how we understand rape. It may also provoke a needed conversation between the right and the left about what causes rape.
Consent Education
I am unclear on exactly how long schools—middle schools, secondary schools, and universities—have offered consent curricula to their students. I encountered nothing of the kind as a student, but at least one of my children studied it in junior high. An important feature of the consent curriculum is the lesson that touching another person without consent is wrong and may amount to sexual assault. The curriculum teaches girls and (in colleges and universities) young women to expect consultation prior to sexual engagement, and it teaches boys and men to consult. It also attempts to change the culture in which boys and men reinforce one another in their indifference to the wishes of their partners.
We could classify the above as a “yes means yes” curriculum. It provides that the default setting between two people is “no” and that one of the people (understood generally to be the girl or woman) must say yes or otherwise affirmatively indicate consent before the setting changes. Defenders of this approach say it recognizes that a girl or woman has perhaps learned to be sexually unassertive and might therefore feel nervous or uncomfortable about saying “no” to an eager partner, even when she wants him to stop. This presumption against consent rests on a recognition that modern norms have flipped the Victorian script: instead of feigning a lack of interest and playing hard to get when they are truly interested in sex, women now more frequently feign serenity in the presence of a man’s sexual advances even when they actually feel discomfort and distress. By presuming a lack of consent absent an affirmative indication, yes-means-yes education recognizes that girls and women may fail to communicate non-consent directly, even when they are not actually consenting.
We cannot truly fault boys and men for their confusion, in this narrative. They are accustomed to expressing themselves clearly and without artifice. Indeed, we presume that men, especially young men, are in a virtually constant state of sexual desire and thus consent. And if someone comes along and expresses interest in a man who feels no desire for that someone, the man will say “no” and use his superior physical strength, if necessary, to repel an unwanted advance. Though I am oversimplifying here, consent education is at least in part an attempt to translate for a male audience what women say and do so that men can avoid the pitfalls of uncounseled sexual liaisons with people who seem to, but in fact do not, plainly speak the language of men.
The Meaning of Rape Under Consent Education
Everyone condemns so-called stranger rape, in which an assailant—almost always a man—attacks a woman he has never met or barely knows and compels her to have sex, with physical force or threats of violence and sometimes with a weapon. No one needs any consent education to know that such an act is a serious crime called “rape.” Politically, moreover, conservatives, liberals, and people on the left would all acknowledge the gravity of this behavior.
Consent education aims mainly at a different set of sexual assaults, acquaintance rapes. Such rapes involve perpetrators and victims who know each other and who may have been out on a date together or even engaged in intimate behavior at the time of the offense. In these rapes, the victim may be sexually attracted to the perpetrator but wants the particular interaction to stop short of intercourse. She may be weaker than he is, so she feels it would be futile to try to use physical strength to stop him. She may also be uncomfortable with volunteering her wish not to go further, just as consent education may acknowledge, so she waits to be asked. But he fails to ask and simply helps himself, unable or unwilling to notice that her interest has waned.
The right and the left have seemingly very different views of the assaults at which consent education aims. The right, as I understand its perspective, would consider the above scenario a product of “hookup culture” and, possibly, of feminism itself. Assaults are unfortunate, of course, but men have a greater and more intense sex drive than women do. To pretend otherwise, to imagine that men and women are identical to one another, is to engage in delusional thinking in the service of ideology. Once a man becomes aroused in reaction to kissing and touching a willing woman, he cannot be faulted for being unable to stop himself. To avoid this class of rape, if one wishes to call it rape, requires a woman to avoid sexual situations with men until a couple has made a commitment (or until the couple is married), such that both people will be comfortable with intercourse. Sleeping around instead necessarily exposes a woman to the appetites of men, which may not—and likely will not—precisely match her own.
I say that the left and right only seem to think differently about the acquaintance rape scenario, because there are commonalities (though the camps allocate responsibility differently). On both sides of the political spectrum, a supposed difference between men and women dominates the discussion. On one side, the difference is cultural, on the other, biological. Yet both sides assume that men as a group operate in a particular and somewhat predictable way and that successful efforts to stop rape will take these ways of men into account. In both approaches as well, though perhaps inadvertently, we classify men as a group in a negative light—as morally clueless in some way (because they cannot detect the conditions for consent) or as lacking moral agency when they become sexually aroused (because their drive is too powerful to reliably control). We then classify acquaintance rapists in a not-entirely-negative light—as simply confused about what a woman wants or as doing what any red-blooded man would do in the presence of a sexual “trigger.” Both approaches are accordingly insulting to men as a class (any of whom might be guilty of rape) and exonerating of acquaintance rapists as a class (because their crimes fail to distinguish them from all other similarly situated men).
The EAAA Shift
The EAAA approach to acquaintance rape on campus trains women to detect danger signs and then to react in a manner that will help protect against sexual assault. EAAA also teaches women some self-defense, in the event that other efforts at self-protection fail. The primary aim is to allow women to understand and appreciate the risk of acquaintance rape, detect when the risk has increased (for example, when she or her date has had one or more alcoholic drinks) and then safely extract herself from a threatening situation. By using threat assessment techniques, a woman can more easily pick up on cues that she is in danger.
One could fault this approach as “blaming the victim,” and a number of feminists have done just that. The argument for attaching the victim-blaming label to the technique is simple. A man rapes a woman, and we tell the woman what she could have done differently to avoid the rape. Had she only done the right thing, she would have been fine.
This description may sound fair, but it is not. First, part of the training involves explicitly rejecting rape myths (including the notion that a woman’s sexy clothing causes rape), and women show a greater belief in rape myths before than after the training. Second, placing all agency in the perpetrator deprives the victim (as well as potential victims) of any sense of control.
When a person suffers a catastrophic event, she usually wants to know what she can do to avoid a repeat of that event. Think about what happens when someone first experiences an extreme allergic reaction to peanuts or latex or a particular antibiotic. He educates himself about all of the places where he might encounter these materials, and he learns to use an epi-pen in case of exposure. Imagine what would happen if he did none of these things and instead participated in courses that taught everyone that they should all avoid triggering one of his allergies. Such courses would leave him utterly defenseless in the likely event that a classmate inadvertently exposes him to an item containing peanuts or latex.
More importantly, for our purposes, no one would interpret epi-pen instructions and a list of foods to avoid as “blaming” the allergic patient for his allergies. We are hardly blaming the victim of armed robbers when we tell him to purchase a more effective lock for his door and to engage that lock consistently when no one is entering or leaving his home. Teaching safety tips to victims helps them protect themselves instead of abandoning them to the whims of potential perpetrators. To know whether someone is blaming the victim, we need only listen to what that someone says when confronting a victim. Is the message “you asked for it” or is it “you can do something”?
In limited empirical studies, it appears that the EAAA training, designed as it is not to blame victims but to empower them, also happens to work. It reduced the incidence of rape by 50%, compared to distributing brochures to female students. Consent education, by contrast, shows little in the way of evidence that it alters the frequency of rape in the college population. In fact, the frequency of rape appears to have remained the same since the early 1990s. The efficacy of EAAA as a measure against rape perhaps will and surely ought to change our conception of acquaintance rape, whether we are conservative/lean right or whether we are liberal/lean left.
If EAAA training succeeds where consent education fails, it may be because acquaintance rape is not about men and women failing to communicate. It is not a problem of translation. It results not from male cluelessness but from predatory behavior by a relatively small number of men who know exactly what they are doing. Teaching men how to detect non-consent will predictably leave everything unchanged if men already know how to detect non-consent and if most of them are following such detection with respect for (if disappointment in) the rejection. If men had been confused about the meaning of “no” or the meaning of a woman’s silent withdrawal, consent education would have measurably reduced the frequency of rape. And if men were sexually “incontinent” (as some have suggested), then nothing would or could work besides a complete separation of men from women. Yet neither theory of men has proven accurate.
EAAA is for teaching women to understand circumstantial risk factors as well as their impact on particular men, men who are typical in perceiving and understanding consent but atypical in their indifference to it. The efficacy of EAAA suggests the fundamental inaccuracy of our narratives of rape. It is simply not true that any and all men have it within themselves to commit rape; most do not, and a small number do. It appears that redefining rape in terms of affirmative consent rather than negative non-consent will, for similar reasons, have little impact: the same men will be active, knowing what the rules say and knowing as well that victims usually stay silent about their victimization and often, when they do speak, encounter outright disbelief from the authorities they tell.
Cultural or subcultural practices and peer behavior likely play a role in promoting or deterring violence against women, including rape. Different groups could accordingly have distinct rape frequencies. In ordinary contexts in which violence is generally unusual and where the population frowns upon rape, however, it will make sense to treat rapists as deviants to be spotted and, if necessary, fought, rather than a potential inevitability that lies within every man due to sex differences. If we appreciate what EAAA’s success has to teach us, we will alter the way in which we talk to boys and girls (and to young men and women) about how it is that some men become rapists.
To be fair to those people on the liberal/left side, I will add a note about the conservative solution to rape. It tells women that remaining virgins until marriage (or at least engagement) will protect them, because they will avoid exposing themselves to men with no commitment to them. Hookup culture is dangerous to women, religious conservatives maintain, because men have a more insistent sex drive than women do. Men will overpower women who “tease” them and then refuse them. This picture is inaccurate, because men can and do control their sexual drives, and most refrain from forcing sex upon anyone. And the picture is inaccurate, because women who save themselves for marriage could wind up married to a rapist, a man who deviates from most men in this regard and whose greater sex drive will result in not just one rape but many. The commitment of marriage has a lot to offer, but a guarantee of safety from rape it is not.
One insight that EAAA’s success offers is that people who constantly argue with each other, each disagreeing with all that the other says, can both or all be wrong. We so easily conclude that if Q is wrong, then -Q must necessarily be right, but that conclusion need not follow in a world in which Q and -Q fail to exhaust the possibilities. Both sides of the political spectrum can now properly feel humbled to learn of their errors. Yet my own prediction is that neither side will. One will pressure EAAA to apologize for victim blaming, and the other will suggest that abstinence followed by marriage will address rape with much greater efficacy than EAAA. I hope that the professionals who train female students will have the courage to ignore the ideological camps that sometimes seem more committed to “their truth” than they are to “the truth.” Women’s safety from sexual assault hangs in the balance.
