CASC: Advocates of Mob Justice

We will make five points here:

1. CASC rejects due process and the presumption of innocence. Rather they believe that the accused is guilty until he proves his innocence. They disguise this platform in the apparently innocuous shibboleth, “Believe Women.”
2. CASC misrepresents the statistics that they use to justify this presumption of guilt.
3. CASC doesn’t actually know what ‘rape’ or ‘consent’ mean.
4. CASC believes in a mob justice based on nothing more than rumor.
5. CASC is not a credible advocate for rape victims.

Believe Women

One of CASC’s mantras is “Believe women.” They pushed a Facebook badge campaign featuring the slogan:

Here it is again in the form, “believe victims”:

But what does it mean? What does it mean to “believe women”? And why would it be a “grave injustice” to bring up false accusations?

They don’t just mean that--lacking evidence--the women bringing accusations should be supported and given access to all available resources for dealing with the trauma.

They mean that--lacking evidence--the accused should be punished on the assumption that women are telling the truth. If you take this seriously it amounts to saying that men accused of rape are guilty until proven innocent.

One CASC supporter (he is a signatory of CASC’s letter to the students of Christendom) suggested that the best course would be simply to expel the accused based on the allegation alone, but for the sake of fairness to offer a refund for the semester,

Expelling someone from college--even with a one-semester refund--is inherently punitive. Refunding his tuition for the last semester is no more than a half-hearted nod to “fairness.” “Believe women,” if taken seriously, means throw due process out the window: Punish the accused first and make a gesture in the name of fairness later. For a college to actually put this into practice would (at least potentially) constitute a tort and create a legal liability precisely because it is both unjust and punative.  

Consider this particularly confusing statement:

You can’t actually have it both ways. Either the accused bears the burden of proof (proving his innocence) or the accuser bears the burden of proof (proving the accused’s guilt). You can’t both believe the defendant when he pleads his innocence and at the same time believe his accuser when she says he is guilty. The two are contradictories. We can’t simultaneously believe both.  

Adele writes,  

What does this even mean? Why is the distinction between law and morality relevant in this case? No one is saying that rape is okay as long as the law wasn’t broken.

How specifically did she expect her college to see her differently from the courts? Did she expect to be believed without question? Did she expect her alleged rapist to be summarily expelled without being given a fair trial? More importantly, why would she expect her Catholic alma mater to be less concerned with due processes and natural law justice than the courts?

That appears to be what she was expecting. We can see this in Scott Smith’s letter to O’Donnell which urges the accused to be expelled immediately, based simply on Adele’s uncorroborated word 18 months after the fact.

“Rape Apologism”

Everyone who defends due process is, for CASC, a “rape apologist.” Their reason is that, according to CASC, false allegations “virtually never happen” and occur at a “statistically insignificant rate":

Remember that CASC considers it a “grave injustice” to bring up false accusations.

The problem is that false accusation do happen. Remember the Duke lacrosse team? Remember the Rolling Stone UVA story? Anyone who denies that some accusations are false is lying.

Adele explains (in an article on the Dinah’s Voice website) that the reason we remember these stories, which turned out to be false, is that false accusations make news, but the true allegations don’t.

But both of these stories were all over all the major news channels and generating massive public outcry well before they were shown to be false.

They did make news--big news--before they were known to be false. And of course news outlets have been saturated over the last year with other cases of rape allegations that have dominated the news cycle without having been shown to be false.

The real reason CASC considers it a grave injustice to bring up false accusations is that “over 90% of all reports are true.” This leads to our next point:

CASC Misrepresents statistics

Let's return for a moment to this confusing statement we saw earlier:

The commonly accepted number is that somewhere between 2-10% of reports are false, (In the post on Dinah’s Voice, Adele gives 2-8% and we see that range also given in the original tweet here, though we’re looking at the same organization Adele cites, and the document we have say 2-10%: See this PDF)

By itself that number is not nothing. Even the lower 2% estimate is a long way from the “statistically insignificant rate” or “virtually never happen,” that Donna claims. (Ask the guys who have been falsely accused whether it is an insignificant rate.) If we are going to punish someone for a crime as serious as rape, it is actually a grave injustice not to consider seriously the possibility that this could be one of the 2-10% of cases of a false allegation.

But something is fishy. How can anyone know this statistic? The whole problem of handling rape allegations is precisely that there are so many cases where there is insufficient evidence to know one way or the other. (That fact is of course tragic--it is the reason that we can’t have perfect justice--but it is not the institution’s fault.) In light of this no one can claim to know with any sort of certainty what percentage of rape accusations are actually false.  

And here’s the rub: The people compiling the numbers don’t claim to (see the above link). For statistical purposes only those reports are counted as false that are demonstrably false. Thus the 2-10% statistic is really an estimate of the lower bound on false allegations--at least 2-10% of reports are false. The number only includes those relatively rare cases when a report (an actual police report, the number doesn’t even count accusations that are never reported to police) is able to be proven to be false. The vast majority of reports are neither demonstrably true nor demonstrably false, so no one actually has any idea how many reports are false in total. And it is a gross abuse of the numbers to extrapolate from this that “over 90% of all reports are true.” To treat this statistic as the total rate of all false allegations is essentially assuming the conclusion: it is to count all unresolved allegations as though they are true. But there is no actual justification for such an assumption.  

But that is exactly what CASC does: Believe women, says CASC, because they are only proven to lie at a statistically insignificant rate. But only by assuming that all the allegations that are neither proven true nor proven false are actually true can they cook up the “over 90% are true” statistic.

But set all that aside for the moment. Pretend that Donna is right and false allegations are “statistically insignificant.” Let’s pretend that only 1 in 10 (or 1 in 50) reports is false, and that a rate of 1 in 10 (or 1 in 50) false reports is statistically insignificant.

Will there still be a statistically insignificant number of false reports once we adopt the policy that any woman can get any man expelled from school (or fired, or imprisoned) just by saying he raped her? Making a policy of blindly accepting accusations introduces a moral hazard of epic proportions. Setting aside for the moment principles of justice, there is no way around the fact that, even pragmatically considered, it is terrible policy.

CASC doesn’t accept due process

Pointing out that CASC can’t interpret statistics accurately isn’t just a meaningless quibble, it actually cuts to the heart of the problem: they don’t seem to acknowledge that there are cases that call for a suspension of judgement, cases in which the evidence is simply and unfortunately insufficient to know the truth. They can’t accept that we simply can’t know the truth or falsity of the vast majority of accusations. For CASC one either uncritically accepts the word of the accuser, or one uncritically accepts the word of the accused.

Thus we get false dichotomies like this:

Not accepting accuser’s story uncritically doesn’t mean you accept the accused’s story uncritically.

CASC et al. don’t seem to understand that a reasonable person may refuse to uncritically accept anyone’s word, but instead insist on considering the evidence, and that such a reasonable person may find that as often as not, the evidence is simply insufficient to settle the question.

Rather, for CASC, an accusation that can’t be proven false must be accepted as true. This means that men are effectively guilty until proven innocent. Consider the following:

For Donna, you only have two options. You must believe one of the two parties. You must, according CASC, pick sides even when there is no way to be sure which side is right.

Thus for example their indigation that Christendom would have invited Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to speak,

If he were a “known sexual harasser” then inviting him to be a commencement speaker would be taking sides. But he isn’t. As people have repeatedly pointed out the allegations were not actually proven. Reasonable people do still have reasonable doubts on the matter.

CASC would have us make Thomas a pariah based on an unproven allegation. Shunning, ostracizing, and stigmatizing him just because he was once accused would be unjust. It would be punishing him for something we can’t be reasonably sure that he did. It would be blindly taking Anita Hill’s word against his--and not only his, but also against the word of numerous female coworkers who defended him at the time. This is precisely the problem with the “believe women” mantra.

CASC believes we must pick sides. And we must always pick the side of the woman.

CASC doesn’t actually know what rape is

In an ironic and sad twist, CASC leadership’s own comments on rape give us a very real reason to regard accusations with even more scrutiny, because they insist on publicly promoting a ludicrously broad definition of rape:

While the image Adele was sharing is correct, her interpretation is absurd. It is not rape if you consent unenthusiastically. Otherwise half of all marital intercourse performed after the honeymoon would constitute rape.

It isn’t just Adele who is confused about what constitutes consent. Donna Provencher writes:

(Backstory: Donna got this guy fired by going to the press and accusing him of sexual misconduct. You can google the story if you want to read it, TL;DR: He lied to her to get her to sleep with him.)

Except lying to a woman to get her to sleep with you isn’t rape. Look up “fraud in the inducement” (as opposed to “fraud in factum”). It does not constitute rape. Of course it is sleazy and despicable, but it’s not rape.

The more often such nonsense is spouted, the more reason we to question victims when they claim they were raped. CASC’s leaders are thus actively making it more difficult for victims of rape.

In short CASC is unqualified to speak as advocates in this matter

In sum, CASC leadership has disqualified itself from the conversation about rape policy because they don’t even know what the words ‘rape’ or ‘consent’ mean. In fact, their absurdly broad understanding of rape (which includes taking regret accusations as true) makes a reasonable observer more rather than less likely to question accusations of rape.

How can someone write (as Adele does) that “consent must be given enthusiastically” and be indignant when people entertain the possibility that a date rape, reported 18 months after the fact, might have been after-the-fact regret or a simple case of unenthusiastic consent?

How can someone write (as Donna does) that “rape-by-fraud is still rape” and be surprised that people question her when she claims to have been raped at least three times, by three different individuals? (Of course, she may have been, but it does seem like there are some hard questions that ought to be asked, starting with, What exactly do you mean by ‘rape’?) This sort of nonsense actively undermines the cause of victims, who have suffered grave injustice. It creates one more set of questions that must be asked before a victim’s story can be accepted.

Even more importantly, given that their whole argument against Christendom amounts to, “Trust us, we know that there are lots of cases of sexual assault and rape where the college failed victims, but we can’t tell you about them or show you the evidence,” their not understanding what constitutes rape destroys the credibility of their entire case. Why would we trust them at their word that there is a pattern of mishandled rape cases when they have proven by their own words that they do not know what constitutes ‘rape’ or ‘consent’? (To say nothing of the fact that their disdain for due processes and natural justice ought to lead us to question their assessment of whether a case was mishandled.)

Further, they either don’t understand their own stats or they have wilfully spread a misinterpretation of them. That only 2-10% of accusations are “false” absolutely does not imply that over 90% are true. “False” explicitly means, in context, ‘demonstrably false’.  What that statistic actually implies is not that the vast majority of reports are true, but that that the truth of the vast majority of reports can’t be determined.

Yet for CASC that conclusion is not acceptable: you cannot suspend judgement. You must choose to believe either the accuser or the accused. As far as CASC is concerned choosing not to punish the accused for want of evidence is “taking his side.”

CASC et al. think that there are only two options and everyone must pick one: Either blindly believe women or blindly believe the men they accuse. They don’t seem to grasp that it is perfectly rational not to blindly believe anyone. Indeed blindly accepting one person’s word against another’s is itself antithetical to justice.

For CASC, an accusation is to be taken as true unless the evidence contradicts it and proves it false. That is what they mean by “Believe women.”

What that amounts to is that the accused is to be presumed guilty until proven innocent.  They pay lip service to the presumption of innocence, but it is in direct conflict with their insistence that we believe women. You can’t both give the accused the presumption of innocence while also believing the accusation is true until it is proven false. These are contradictories (‘he committed rape’, ‘he didn’t commit rape’): you cannot accept that they are both true at the same time. If the woman is to be believed until her accusation is proven false, you must refuse to give the accused a presumption of innocence. The outcome, then, is that the accuser is to be automatically believed and the accused is to be automatically disbelieved. Her accusation will stand without evidence, while his plea of innocence is to be categorically dismissed unless he can prove that she is lying.

Mob Justice

What CASC is waging is just like the Nuremberg Trials, except that instead of trials in a court of law, the trials are in the court of public opinion. Instead of evidence we have hearsay and rumor. Instead of a judge and jury we get an angry mob hearing half of the story.

This really is what Donna seems to want. On the infamous thread that we dealt with previously, Donna, after naming names, explained herself,

For Donna, evidently justice is to be gotten by publicly shaming and ostracizing people based on pure rumors (remember CACS’s treatment of Justice Thomas). Calling them ‘rumors’ isn’t an exaggeration: even Donna admits that she knows nothing--including even a first name--about one of the men she explicitly labeled a multiple rapist:

That’s mob justice, and we, as a civilization, learned a long time ago that it has a propensity to go very tragically wrong.

Realizing that doesn't make us "rape apologists."

Read the follow-up in Donna on Rape Apologism and the Presumption of Innocence.