Sexual assault, things we do, and who we are

[cos]

I considered locking this to friends-only, but I think it's important and I want people to link to it and re-share it and that's not going to happen unless it's public. Please read it, and share it?

I'll start with a story, something that really happened though I changed the names and some details for anonymity. Ella was good friends with a couple, Bob and Cate, and they flirted and kissed. Sometimes they attended the same sex and BDSM parties and scened with each other. One time, years ago, at such a party, Ella was having sex with someone and Bob came over. While she was giving the other guy head, Bob went down on her after what he thought was a nonverbal okay from her to join in. Ella actually would've rather he didn't, but she didn't think she minded much and she was having too much fun to interrupt what she was doing and tell him to stop, so she just enjoyed herself and let it go. Later, however, she realized that it was more of a problem for her than she knew at the time, and it made her feel icky and a little bit violated. Wanting to keep her friendship with Bob healthy, she told him about it. Not only did Bob get defensive, but Cate really freaked out. She seemed to interpret this as an attack, an accusation that Bob was a bad person, and she knew he wasn't! They weren't able to reconcile this and the friendship fizzled.

It's been on my mind lately, partly due to attending the "Addressing Sexual Harassment in Our Communities" panel at Arisia and the hours of fascinating post-panel conversation with a few people. Not long after Arisia, a friend told me about finding out from someone close to her that, a long time ago, she'd had sex with the person thinking it was consensual when actually this person did not want to and wasn't able to tell her so and just went along with it. I've long known that it's possible that I've done something like that sometime in my past, despite trying to be very careful never to do so, and I might've really hurt someone, and if it has happened, I may never know. In fact, after that post-panel discussion, I told one of the people I'd been talking about one instance where I worried, after the fact, that I might've made a mistake and crossed someone's boundaries even though the interaction seemed good while it was happening. It's on my mind because I know that any of us - including most of you who read this - may possibly have done this to someone, and may never know for sure.

My reason for writing this post is my belief that our very efforts to combat harassment and assault and rape are exacerbating this aspect of the problem, and I want to explain why, and what we can change to stop doing this. Here's another anecdote to help me illustrate what I'm about to say...

A guy I know, Ian (again a pseudonym), is thoughtful and gregarious and well liked in his group of friends. Once, someone new in that social circle told someone else in that social circle about getting into a conversation with Ian at a party, where due to his body language and mannerisms, he effectively backed her into a corner where she felt she could not easily get away, and it made her feel uncomfortable and a bit scared. Although he responded well upon finding out, and apologized, and said he didn't intend that and would pay more attention in the future to try to avoid making someone feel trapped at a party like that, getting the message from her to him was challenging. In the ensuing discussion, I noticed and pointed out an element that I thought was problematic: the use of the term predator, and the idea of identifying someone who did something bad as "someone who does bad things". I made the analogy to the way conservatives like to label "someone who crossed a border without authorization or who overstayed their visa" with "an illegal" - it's not about a thing they did, it's about who they are.

Now I want to be clear: there are sexual predators. They exist, and talking about them is important. We have studies and surveys that begin to help us understand some things about them, and one piece of the emerging picture is that while predators are a relatively small subset of the population, they repeat what they do so often, and are able to get away with it so easily, that they account for a very large proportion of assaults and rapes. So we do need to pay attention to them and figure out ways to disarm them.

However, another piece of the emerging picture is that the large majority of people who assault - not necessarily the majority of incidents, but the majority of people who do it - are not repeat predators. Many of them, and possibly even most, are clueless, or naive, or even good thoughtful people who made a mistake that one time. It's them who I'm writing this post about. By which I mean, it's us who I'm writing this post about.

While some people avoid the issue or don't think about it much, some of us want to make an active effort to prevent this from happening - and we can. We can learn, and pay attention, and adjust how we act, and greatly reduce the probability of hurting someone in this way in a sexual or intimate interaction, or violating their boundaries. We can't reduce it all the way to 0, though. And worse: there's an obstacle that many of us put in our own path towards preventing: Our dichotomy of predators vs. good people.

In this dichotomy, those who rape or assault or harass are the bad ones, the predators, the creeps; those who are good, who are working to prevent rape and assault and harassment, they don't do it. Ergo, if someone does it, they're in that first set - it's not something they did, it's how we identify them. chaiya rather powerfully presented at the Arisia panel the dissonance and conflict caused when one of our friends is revealed to have done something like that, and we feel like we have to mentally reclassify them into the bad set in order to deal with it. That is why it was so hard to tell Ian about the relatively minor mistake he made at that party, and why the discussion around it was so fraught.

Bob and Cate got caught in this trap. They didn't hear Ella telling them about a mistake Bob made, so that he'd know and correct for it; they heard Ella accusing Bob of being a creep and a rapist, and they recoiled. They strove to redefine what happened rather than redefine Bob. Since Bob and Ella had a pattern of sexy play together, and she seemed inviting at the time, and she could easily have objected and he certainly would've heeded her objection, it couldn't have been a serious transgression, right? Lost on them was the fact that Ella actually wasn't claiming it was a serious transgression; she accepted it as an honest mistake by a well meaning person who she wanted to remain friends with, but they didn't seem able to see that. Our dichotomy of goodguys and predators doesn't leave any room for something being both "unwanted sexual contact" and "honest mistake by well meaning person". Since those two things cannot overlap, Ella's insistence that this was in fact unwanted sexual contact was a horrifying accusation they rejected wholly.

Which is a common and understandable reaction, and possibly the biggest reason why Ella was the exception; most people in her situation don't tell. Whether they understand this reason for it directly or not, they know on some level that telling isn't likely to lead to anything good, most of the time. It'll be awkward, possibly scary; they'll offend people, and they'll lose friends, and they won't be easily believed. Someone who hears this kind of thing needs to be skeptical of the complaint in order to avoid being forced to think of themselves or their accused friend as a creep or a predator. The way we talk about these issues forces that choice on them, one or the other: either your friend (or you) are a monster, or the complaint has to be minimized and dismissed.

You can see how this makes it harder for us to improve. Harder for us to learn how to better prevent making mistakes that hurt other people. When we're not ready to hear about what we've done wrong, and about what our friends and colleagues have done wrong, we coerce those who know - those who've been hurt - into not telling people about it. Then we don't learn from it, and we're more likely to do it again, and still not realize it.

Another anecdote. Recently in a group discussion, a friend commended me in everyone's hearing for the time that she and I were in bed together, turned on and both wanting each other, and I told her that I would not have sex with her because her consent seemed ambiguous to me, and I was not convinced that she knew how to say no. It's something I've done a number of times with a number of potential partners, actually. In telling people about it she was sending a few messages to the group. Among those messages, intentionally, she was letting them know that I take extra care about consent and that I'm safe. [Edit: another overt message is "here's something you too could do", a way of both praising and describing good practices.] Unintentionally, she was making it even harder for anyone to whom this message spread to ever tell me, or any of my friends, about any occasion in which I didn't take enough care and got it wrong. Because they know that other people may perceive me as safe and good to a greater than normal extent, they also know that it's even less safe to make accusations about me to people who have that impression. People who will go further to protect their idea of me, by attacking someone who says something that would redefine me. In other words, I'm in a position of power - part of it unsought and mine by default, and part of it legitimately earned through actions and effort over time - and that position of power stands as an obstacle that can prevent me from finding out the very things that would help me improve.

I certainly didn't always know that when someone initiates sexual activity and says "yes", and I really want to have sex, it's possible that she is conflicted and following through would hurt her. It's something I learned, as an adult, after I'd already had sex many times with several people. I'm glad I learned it, and I know it has helped me prevent harm, but learning it also lets me understand how I might have caused harm in the past in situations where I would not have understood that it was even possible. What's more, I'm still learning. I'm still getting better at this. Which means, I'm quite sure, that there are things I don't yet know.

Going on this learning journey requires understanding that we all have some power, to varying degrees, to harm people, and that our responsibility isn't to be innocent. What we actually want to do is connect with people, and have sex, and have powerful and positive sexual and intimate interactions, and at the same time prevent to the best of our ability the harm that we risk when pursuing those things; harm both to ourselves and to others. We need to learn what our power is, and what it can cause, and strategies for mitigating risk and preventing harm. We can't do that if being innocent of wrongdoing is our goal, because the only way to be sure to be innocent is to be ignorant.

For the past few paragraphs I've been talking about people who actively want to learn, and the obstacles that this predator/goodguy dichotomy causes for such people. But it's the people who aren't actively trying who are at much higher risk of harming their partners and others, and the obstacles we're creating are much higher when it comes to getting through to them. Innocence through ignorance is the common defense against being a creep, predator, or rapist, when it comes to people's personal identity. If they don't know their power and they don't understand what mistakes they might make, they can keep their self-image on the good side of that hard line, the side where they've never done "it", where the monsters are other people.

People go to great lengths to protect this innocence through ignorance, and I believe that's the main reason why there's so much resistance to education about sexual assault and rape, and to many related parts of feminism as well. Particularly when it comes to gender relations (though not just when it comes to gender relations), a lot of this is about the power men have and how it hurts women. In order to accept this, men have to accept the idea that they do have this power - even though they didn't consciously seek it - and the possibility that through this power, they have in fact hurt women, though they may not have intended it. Going down that path leads to the thoughts I talked about above, and they're not comfortable. If you're steeped in a predator/goodguy dichotomoy, going down that path is not possible, because you'd have to re-classify yourself as the predator. Most people will never do that. So they have to defend themselves, just as Bob and Cate did, and as Ian's friend's struggled with, and for a lot of people, that defense means rejecting the whole cluster of associated ideas.

To put it another way, if my goal is to be innocent, and someone tells me I violated someone's boundary when I didn't think I'd done that, my priority is to dismiss that claim, because I know I meant well and I know I'm good. Hearing what I did wrong will threaten that image of myself. It's only when I know that I can mean well and be good and still fuck up and that doesn't create a new identity for me, and when my goal is not to be innocent but to learn how to do better, that I can hear what they're telling me and learn from it and adjust accordingly for the future.

If we want to move forward, I believe we must reorient how we talk about these issues, not only to accept that someone who does a bad thing isn't automatically a predator, but to actively encourage the thought that most people who do these bad things are good people who need to hear constructively about what they did and how to avoid repeating it. At the same time, we need to still be clear that some people are predators, and they repeat these actions without changing, but that it takes more than an occasional mistake to cross that line of identity - it takes a pattern. We need to create space, both in ourselves and in our communities, to welcome hearing about these mistakes, apologize for them, learn from them, and change what we do to avoid repeating the same ones... without that preventing us from calling out actual predatory behavior. We've been focusing a lot on the latter, and it's understandable, because it's been a hard thing to do; predators have a lot of social support. But while working hard on improving one side of the problem, I think we're making the other side worse, so let's think about how to integrate our approach and move forward on both.


Edit: Several commenters are getting from my post ideas about there being a range rather than black/white, and that's part of it, but my real emphasis is the distinction between talking about actions and how to change them, vs. labeling people and treating actions as identity.

Comments

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

I'm curious to know how you determine that

However, another piece of the emerging picture is that the large majority of people who assault - not necessarily the majority of incidents, but the majority of people who do it - are not repeat predators.

Numbers are difficult, but best-efforts studies suggest that something like five times as many women are sexually assaulted or raped as men admit to doing so, and those studies are organised to encourage disclosure of forced sexual acts through a variety of methods. This suggests that, indeed, the majority of people who assault (by which I mean "actually sexually assault someone," not make them feel creeped out) would indeed be repeat offenders. Anecdotally, I'm not sure that it's true, either, that accidental-creepiness incidents are one-time things, either.

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

Those numbers could also be used to support cos' thesis -- that many men are committing sexual assaults without having any idea that they did so.

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

Perhaps, though the studies I've read ask questions like "have you ever had sex with someone who may not have wanted to" and "have you ever had sex with someone who couldn't say no to you because they were drunk" - there's no lack of awareness about the acts they're performing, they just don't want to actually call it rape.

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

One of cos' key points is that we might not perceive that someone "may not have wanted to". I've made that mistake myself, in fact, and only learned about it afterwards. And as for drunkenness (or other alteration), someone might be saying "yes", or at least seem capable of saying "no" -- i.e., they're still conscious, when in fact they're not in full possession of their ability to consent. In other words, I can easily imagine situations where someone might answer "no" to those questions and still have unknowingly committed a sexual assault (or other, lesser boundary transgression).

[cos]

A particularly tricky case, because what you describe most certainly does happen, and on the other hand, there seem to be deliberate predators who've learned to mimic this in order to disguise their actions as innocent mistakes. I didn't get into that in this post because it's a long tangent, and other people have been posting about it in recent years.

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

We can imagine anything we like, but the available statistics don't bear out the supposition that most sexual assaults happen, as it were, unknowingly or accidentally, by a first-time offender who then goes on to never do it again. This assumption is illogical anyhow, because if you don't recognise you've done something wrong in the first place, why would you not do it again? The situation cos describes undoubtedly covers a small number of sexual assaults and other situations of creepiness. I don't think it's a large enough number (pending actual evidence to prove it) that we should radically change the conversation. As it is, it comes across as an apologetics for boundary-crossing.

[drwex]

It appears you guys have read good literature on the subject that I'd like to read as well. Is it online and publicly accessible?

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

This is a really excellent summary of the research in the area of who rapes.

[drwex]

Thanks. I just skimmed that and it's clearly going to take me a while to chew through in a thoughtful way.

[rightkindofme.livejournal.com]

From this "Just 4% of the men surveyed committed over 400 attempted or completed rapes." That feels how my life experience goes. It's not a large number of men who are rapists but the ones who are get busy. :(

[cos]

You'll find a couple of good references (and discussion of them) here:
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2010/03/25/predator-theory/

[cos]

> the available statistics don't bear out the supposition that most sexual assaults happen, as it were, unknowingly or accidentally, by a first-time offender who then goes on to never do it again

You're quite right. If you think my post suggested that they do, I hope you'll reread it. My post suggested that while we don't know for sure, it seems not unlikely that the majority of assaults are committed by repeat offenders who we can label "predators" without causing the problem I'm discussing.

Relatedly, BTW, "a first-time offender who then goes on to never do it again" isn't quite the picture I meant to draw of people without the pattern. Never is too absolute. Especially if people don't learn, they possibly will do it again, even if it's not a pattern and they aren't predatory and they mean well.

[tacky-tramp.livejournal.com]

I had a strong, angry reaction to the "most" and "many" you used in that section. That is a HUGE HUGE HUGE meme that rapists use as cover -- that they didn't mean to assault the person they assaulted, it was all a big misunderstanding! Do these misunderstandings happen? Of course. What proportion of assaults do they comprise? We have no idea, and since there's no evidence one way or the other, I consider it irresponsible to support the "rape is usually a big misunderstanding" meme.

[rightkindofme.livejournal.com]

I know a lot of men who have "raped" due to misinterpreting signals. I've talked to the women involved. It truly was a mistake.

Whereas the "rapists" in my life are hard core repeat offenders. I agree strongly with Cos' overall position here.

I've only talked with a few hundred rape victims--it's not like my sample size is *that* large. But it is quite large. And I probably know a far higher than average number of men who will admit to being rapists. The repeat offenders are different. They really are.

[cos]

I think we've looked at some of the very same surveys, and the things you say are consistent with the things I say. As I noted, predators and people who follow consistently creepy patterns do exist, and it's possible that a majority of incidents are done by these pattern-people. You're writing about them, and I agree that it's important to talk about them. Looking at a specific incident, changes are probably fairly high that it was perpetrated by someone for whom it is a deliberate pattern. Yet, as I also noted, a much larger number of people do make mistakes, either multiple times because they're clueless, or just on rare occasions when they're not careful enough or haven't yet learned the strategy that would've prevented that particular mistake. What I'm trying to get across is that while we shouldn't stop calling out and dealing with creeps and predators, we also need to stop applying that identity as universally as we do, because it's getting in the way of dealing with this other side of the problem, and it's making a lot of people resist learning what they can do better. People who would learn and improve if we changed how we handled this.

> This suggests that, indeed, the majority of people who assault (by which I mean "actually sexually assault someone," not make them feel creeped out) would indeed be repeat offenders.

Here's where I think you're mistaken. It doesn't suggest that. It suggests that, possibly, the majority of assaults are committed by a relatively small subset of repeat offenders who repeat a lot. Some of whom are convinced that what they're doing is okay, and some of whom know otherwise but do it anyway. That is, indeed, the picture I get from the literature I read.

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

Lisak and Miller's study suggests that about a third of sexual assault perpetrators were willing to admit to one assault, while the remaining two thirds conducted an average of 5.8 assaults each. That's not inconsistent with the story that many people transgress accidentally (and I'm freely willing to admit that sub-sexual assault transgressions likely occur much more frequently), but it does suggest that it's not a "relatively small subset" - repeat offenders are most of them, actually. (Cite referenced above)

Ultimately, I have to ask, with whom does the responsibility to be aware of one's own actions lie? I don't think automatically tagging everyone who breathes at you funny as a baby rapist is useful, but neither do I think it's useful to excuse people for routine boundary transgression because they might not know. As you noted above, some people really don't know, and some people mimic people who don't know because they know it's wrong and don't care. How are we to tell the difference, and more importantly is it our job to tell the difference?

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

I think the last thing cos intends here is for anyone to be "excused" for their boundary transgressions. In fact, as far as I can tell, he's saying that here's a thing that gets in the way of calling people on their boundary transgressions, so let's work to reduce it and therefore have more people called on their transgressions (or assaults). What I see cos doing here is trying to take away some of the social license that provides cover for the serial, intentional transgressors to operate (cf: https://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/theres-a-war-on-part-5-wallowing-in-the-sl-op/).

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

If we want to move forward, I believe we must reorient how we talk about these issues, not only to accept that someone who does a bad thing isn't automatically a predator, but to actively encourage the thought that most people who do these bad things are good people who need to hear constructively about what they did and how to avoid repeating it.

This is the problem I have: the figures do not bear that assertion out. People know not to rape or sexual assault other people, that much is given. The study evidence, such as it is, suggests that a majority of people who commit sexually predatory acts know that they are doing so and do not care, and in fact repeat these acts regularly and admit to them - as long as you don't actually call it rape when asking them about it. You're not going to educate a serial rapist into self-awareness, they're already self-aware, and you're not going to educate them into remorse either.

This leaves the second category of people cos appears to be talking about - those who commit boundary transgressions (perhaps sexual assault, perhaps not) due to misinterpreting inadequately enthusiastic consent or, perhaps, by failing to read someone's mind. How are we going to let people know constructively about how they may avoid repeating that type of action? We can't. We can not label them predators when they do it, but that's not actually going to resolve the problem of consent for them, it's just going to resolve a social problem of labelling.

[cos]

Those are good relevant points, even though I think you misunderstood my post in a way that reflects the very problem I wrote this post to tackle. So I ought to respond to a few of these specific points:

a. Lisak and Miller's study did in fact find that repeat offenders are a fairly small subset of the population, even though they account for possibly a majority of rapes and assaults. You're extrapolating from that to the IMO unwarranted conclusion that the rest of the people, those who weren't identified as offenders in this study, don't ever do it. Which is exactly what I want to counteract: My contention is that most people do it, sometimes, though perhaps very infrequently.

b. "neither do I think it's useful to excuse people for routine boundary transgression because they might not know."

Of course not. Even less useful, though, is denying that they've crossed a boundary at all, when they in fact have. Unfortunately that's something we do a lot, because we're so used to equating anyone who does so with "predator", and we resist reclassifying someone as "predator" when we don't think they are, even when they have done something bad. It would be much more useful to open a space for acknowledging that people can do these bad things without being predators, because it would allow us to stop denying these things when we see them.

c. "How are we to tell the difference, and more importantly is it our job to tell the difference?"

More importantly is simply acknowledging that both cases are possible, and thus creating greater possibility for people to point out bad actions, and for people to accept that they've done them. Then we can tell the difference by how someone reacts after it's been pointed out to them, and whether they acknowledge it and change what they do. If we instead focus on what you say is the important part, which is "not my job to tell the difference!", then we push a lot of people away from acknowledging that they've done it or changing how they act, and we push a lot of people away from even telling others that their boundaries have been crossed.

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

. You're extrapolating from that to the IMO unwarranted conclusion that the rest of the people, those who weren't identified as offenders in this study, don't ever do it

No, I'm not - I'm extrapolating that many people are willing to recognise that they've committed a negative sexual act, as long as it isn't labeled rape. A majority of those people (and in subsequent studies) admitted to doing it more than once, suggesting that there is no particular stigma to admission, but many admitted only one incident, suggesting that people are aware even if it just happened once. This is contrary to an assertion that "most" sexual assaults are committed unknowingly.

Then we can tell the difference by how someone reacts after it's been pointed out to them, and whether they acknowledge it and change what they do.

How do we tell whether someone's changed what they do? Do we follow them around and record their sexual encounters to make sure they're taking what we believe is the proper care with consent? How do we avoid the problem that "change what they do" could mean becoming more manipulative, more subtle, less likely to be caught out and forced to acknowledge something they don't actually see as wrong in order to avoid social censure? Ultimately, we don't have observability of someone else's adherence to social norms, and we never will. That makes it an unreliable basis for determining whether someone is "really a predator" or just someone with a bad sense of social cues.

Basically, I don't think the overwrought dichotomy of predatory/safe is useful, anymore than any other dichotomies are. However, I also don't think that we have any great insight into the actions or norms of others that would allow us to reliably tell whether someone was "really a predator" or not, which is what you seem to be suggesting we use as the basis for social classification. All that really leaves as a basis for determination is action, not intent.

[rightkindofme.livejournal.com]

Exactly. It was a long road for me to understand how much I pressured males for sex--and that it did really make some of them uncomfortable. I wasn't socialized to believe that was a possibility. Whoops. I did eventually learn. But I hurt a few boys. :-( I have apologized. That's all I can do.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

This actually doesn't follow numerically. Suppose 100 women were each raped once and the set of men who raped them contained 20 men. The mean number of rapes per rapist is 5; but it is consistent with the numbers that 19 men could have been first-time offenders and one could have raped the other 81 women (aieee...). If this were true, the majority of rapists would be first-time offenders and yet the majority of incidents would be from repeat offenders. This type of distribution is actually not uncommon "in the wild" (cf all the discussion about how x% of the people have y% of the wealth, where x is really low and y is really high).

I do not know the literature on sexual assault, but I am a statistician, so the numbers part sticks out.

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

Please look at the references above for more information. Briefly, this isn't the case; about 30-40% are single offenders (self-reported) and the rest are multiple offenders averaging 5-7 assaults each (again, self-reported).

[cos]

I think your misinterpretation of the numbers is based on not acknowledging my core point: that almost all of us offend sometimes, but most people don't know it, no matter how you put the question to them.

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

Oh, you know what? No. I'm not going to engage with you or your readers any further on this, because even though we rarely interact I do still have some respect for your opinions, and I don't want that to diminish any further. I'm going to consign notifications for this to the killfile for the time being. Perhaps we can discuss this again later, when neither of us are feeling so defensive.