Campus rape is becoming a growing issue because victims are being blamed for careless behavior and it seems that colleges are focusing on actions before the rape instead of the actual incident. In an NPR article on March 4, Psychologist David Lisak set out to find and interview men who admitted committing sexual assault and over a 20-year period and asking over 2,000 men in college these were the results.
Two main questions were asked.
“Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated [on alcohol or drugs] to resist your sexual advances?”
“Have you ever had sexual intercourse with an adult when they didn’t want to because you used physical force [twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.] if they didn’t cooperate?”
One in 16 answered yes and have never been convicted or charged.
Still, some believe that a college mistake is just that and that they can learn from their mistakes.
“What surprised me was how many people have made terrible mistakes and can actually learn to be better people from that,” Stetson University law professor Peter Lake says, “that there still is a chance for teachable moments.”
At Texas A&M, Elton Yarbrough was linked to five rapes. Journalist Jennifer Peebles with the Texas Watchdog went to visit Yarbrough at a Texas prison and spoke with him about the women he raped.
“He feels strongly that he didn’t do anything against the law,” Peebles says in the NPR article. “He says he feels like he made a bad decision and that the young woman made, or the young women, made a bad decision with him to have sex with him.”
Yarbrough was sentenced to 18 years in prison after a jury decided that this was merely a bad decision.
Can the same be said for John Gardner?
In 2000, Gardner received a six year prison sentence after committing a forcibly lewd act on a 13-year-old girl, but he only served five of the six. He was then arrested on February 25 for the rape and murder of 17-year-old Chelsea King in San Diego California. Gardner pleaded not guilty to the crime as well as to the rape and murder of 14-year-old Amber Dubois who went missing in February of 2009 . Both girl’s remains were found in the same park.
Four years after Gardner was released, he committed the same type of crime. Did he learn from his “bad decision?”
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