341
2/3/2025 - Trump Orders Schools to Ease Sex Assault Rules
(www.thedailybeast.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
341 points (100.0% liked)
Keep Track
865 readers
1 users here now
Keeping Track of the 2nd Trump administration!
One thing Donald Trump and the extreme right were very good at doing is burying the track record of his first presidency from 2017 to 2021.
Keep Track is dedicated to literally keeping track, day by day, of the policy decisions made by the new Trump Administration.
That is not to say we're interested in the crazy things he says or tweets, he clocked over 30,000 lies the last time he was in office, I don't see how it's possible to track all of that. This is about POLICY. Nominees, executive orders, signed laws, and so on.
Subject line format should be {{date}} {{event}} so: "01-20-2025 - Trump is sworn in."
The international date format of 2025-01-20 is also acceptable!
Links should be to verifiable news sources, not social media or blog sites. So no Xitter/Truth/Youtube/Substack/etc. etc.
Project 2025 tracker here!
https://www.project2025.observer/
founded 6 months ago
MODERATORS
Given that the single greatest hurdle to gaining convictions in rape cases are the lack of witnesses, usually limited to the accuser and the accused, I imagine a good many rape cases, Title IX or otherwise, are largely decided by the relative quality of the lawyers involved.
I am not convinced that is true but let's say it is. How much worse would that be, if lawyers were not involved? At least the difference between how convincing an expensive and cheap lawyers are is not really that big. Being convincing is a job requirement. Remove them and you decide guilt in these cases entirely based on how sympathetic and outspoken the accuser and accused are.
You clearly have no idea how harrowing a rape trial is for the victim, how few convictions there are proportionately and how underreported realise crimes are because of how awful and unsuccessful bringing a case to trial is for victims, or you wouldn't be claiming that bringing that into the principal's office of your local K12 school and your local college is somehow a good thing.
You say that as if I want to do it for shits and giggles.
Yes, I would love for that to be unnecessary. For people to just look at a person and be able to accurately tell if they are guilty or not. That is not the world we live in.
So in absence of that, I want something to prevent innocent people being punished (to a reasonable degree). Nothing better than a (watered down) trial was invented as far as I know.
It's just a school expulsion, not prison, and it's well documented that women don't go to trial because they know it will be them and their lives on trial, not the rapist, who will very very likely get off. Bringing all that into K12 is just bringing a set of scales that are tipped heavily in the rapist's favor and a horrific experience for the victim into a school expulsion.
Trump knows the effect this will have, and I expect you do too, but you're pretending not to. Admittedly Trump is clearly and publicly well practiced at using expensive lawyers to silence women who have been raped and sexually assaulted by him, and I can't say the same about you, but use your brain and stop defending the Rapist in Chief for watering down consequences for rapists in education.
Ah yes, the catastrophic effect having a person ask questions before they expel someone will have.
You know what, since you clearly don't care about expelling innocent people and there are many unreported rapist despite no lawyers being involved, let's just expel everyone. That way, we expel all the rapists. Problem solved.
Because there are clearly no issues with expelling innocent people in your head. It's not like the mere accusation would follow a person for the rest of their life. I am sure they will have no issue explaining to employers, that it was just an expulsion and they are innocent, that they should be given a job.
All that surely won't have worse consequences than a lawyer asking questions.
Your characterisation of attack lawyers as mildly asking questions is disingenuous. It's always full on character-assassination of the already traumatised victim. You also seem to think that lawyers bring truth and clarity where teachers and administrators cannot, and you're incorrect. The situation in court is currently skewed very badly indeed in favour of rapists. It doesn't need to be so in school. You're also dismissing the effect that rape has on girls and women as if it were nothing. You would rather 99 out of 100 guilty rapists get to further traumatise their victim at school. It's because you don't care two cents about rape victims, you only care about male impunity, just like your leader Trump
If your only argument is making up fake numbers and facts and calling me Trump supporter and rape supporter, then there is no point continuing here. I can't disprove every irrational fear you make up about lawyers in your head.
Actually, I made ten points, and you ignored almost all of them, as usual.
"Just" Nope, they're character assassination putting the victim on trial instead of the perpetrator. Saying it isn't doesn't change the reality. Read about it if you care, but you don't and won't.
Seems we either disagree on what "character-assasination" means or one of us has flawed understanding of how witness testimony in court works.
Considering how many actual court documents I read through and how many explanations from lawyers how various rules and procedures work I watched, I would be surprised if it was me with the flawed understanding but it is possible. I was never in court myself after all.
But you are still dodging a big issue with your argument. You are saying the same administrators that are so smart they can determine who is guilty on their own without any lawyers, proper process or cross examination are simultaneously dumb enough to be swayed by a character-assasination and would let 99 out of 100 rapists go.
I didn't say they would be swayed by it, I said it shouldn't happen.
I'm amused by your switch from how harrowing a rape trial is for the victim to less specific stuff including some videos from lawyers, but you still, as I predicted, have no intention of reading rape victims accounts because as you've made clear again and again, women's experiences aren't what you want to understand. I'm not sure the rapist defending lawyers made a lot of videos about how they harangue rape victims in court and drag their reputation through the mud as the standard defence technique. I don't know why you thought that the lawyers would admit to that on youtube.
Let's ignore you misreading what I wrote about court documents and procedures and suggesting I instead get information from the most biased and subjective source available.
Are you arguing the lawyers would do character assassination on rape victims for fun, even though they would know it does not help them win the case?
Because if it did not work, they have no real reason to do it. And if it works, back to my argument about administrators being incapable.
You're confusing court with school. I'm not.
So what actually is your argument? Why shouldn't be lawyers allowed or even required at the school hearings?
I was under the impression you were afraid they would do character assassinations to get rapists of the hook, further traumatizing the victims. Now you say that is not what you claim and you were just talking about actual courts for some reason?
The character assassination and sex life trashing that lawyers do in rape trials is unnecessary, harrowing for the victims, is based on an illogical argument that a woman who has sex with anyone wants sex with everyone, obstructs justice by letting the vast majority of rapists go free, and should not be allowed in school over an exclusion. Kids get excluded every week over far less, but you just care about the rich rapists being allowed to bring their expensive lawyers in to harass girls for speaking out over sexual violence and stay in the same dining hall as their victims.
Ah yes, so the exact argument I just debunked and unfounded personal insults and liabel. Sounds about right.
Let me repeat it for you one last time.
Really interesting that you call what I said libel!
The lawyers are what makes the situation worse, not better.
Making the whole thing an unnecessary ordeal that's just there to discourage girls from reporting it even to the school.
It's all about the victim shaming and humiliation of women. That's the point of it. And it sways juries.
You overuse the "your whole argument" misrepresentation debating technique. If only there were a phrase for that kind of fallacy.
You repeatedly ignore the fact that Trump is a rapist who has a track record of using expensive lawyers to harass women who speak out about it, and that you should have seventy times the skepticism about a rapist changing the rules in favour of rapists, but somehow you can't hear that without shreiking about bias or ignoring it completely.
Don't put the lunatics in charge of the asylum, don't listen to sex offenders proposing changes to how sex offenders are dealt with, and don't defend rapists who want to change how schools deal with rapists. It really stretches people's ability to see you as having any sort of rationality or objectivity on the issue when you can't accept this point.
Because you repeatedly refuse to state what you are arguing. Switching from argument to argument.
How is it unnecessary? Do you believe no false accusations are made? Do you believe the previous system was able to deal with false accusations? Or do you believe that falsely expelling innocent people does not matter?
You repeatedly refuse to answer the above, because you clearly know each one of the options can be easily disproven. So you just try to mix all the options together and throw in extra irrelevant statements hoping to create enough confusion that it can't be argued against.
That's why my previous comment had to have bullet points addressing different interpretation of your vague bullshit and it still does not seem enough.
And you keep throwing in ad hominem arguments and false claims about what I believe. Bringing in Trump who is irrelevant to the argument. Why is he irrelevant? Because I don't listen to Trump. I held the belief that this change should be done for years, ever since I read about 5 girls falsely accusing a boy of rape and being caught bragging about the false accusation. I read how he was kicked out of school. I read how he was under house arrest for months. I read how despite clear recorded admission that the girls made it up, prosecutor refused to charge them with false reports "Because it could discourage girls from speaking up". Yeah, no shit. It is supposed to discourage false claims. I read how the school administration despite clear evidence the claim was false refused to apologise or even just readmit him to the school. I tried to look up that case right now and google finds so many false rape accusation I can't even find the one that I read those years ago.
How many false claims are never included in any statistic, because the accusers are not dumb enough to send each other texts and voicemails admitting to it? So yes, I believe there should be more protections for the innocent people that are falsely accused.
So when I saw Trump actually made the change I believed should have been done for years, I find it ridiculous people will repeatedly shit on it just because of who enacted it. That people could not go a few messages without mentioning Trump is a fascist and rapist in a discussion that should have nothing to do with him. That people would repeatedly call me Trump supporter for happening to agree with single one of his policies.
I shouldn't be forced to write this. In any genuine good faith discussion about policy, individual politicians or parties should not be playing a role. Just the merits and demerits of the policy. But you refuse that. Instead of arguing why you think the policy is unnecessary, you again and again resort to personal insults and "Trump bad" statements that have nothing to do with it.
After writing this shit repeatedly, you have the gall to say I am the one using "misrepresentation debating technique"? Just because I am forced to divine what your argument is from the word spaghetti you keep throwing at the wall hoping for something to stick? So go and make a proper logical argument, without 20 non sequesters weaved in just to confuse everything. I am not able to read minds, so when you write vague statements instead of a full coherent argument, I have to guess what your argument could be.
So much protection.
You don't need to believe me about how harrowing rape trials are for the victims, you just need to read about it even a little bit and you would know, but you have no interest in women's experiences, or the statistics, you just want impunity for rapists.
If you don't like being called a Trump supporter, maybe don't spend so long online criticizing people for calling out the convict and Rapist in Chief for changing the rules to make it easier for his fellow rapists in school to use their wealth to not even get chucked out of the school where their victim is retraumatized every day.
Every time someone mentions that Trump is a rapist himself you start claiming that they only dislike this policy because they're biased against Trump, where in fact we're just not very keen on rapists making the rules about whether rapists can get away with rape in schools.
For every 100 reported to police, about 13 get sent to a prosecutor (the rest being dropped due to lack of evidence, strong contradictory evidence, inability to identify a culprit, that sort of thing) about 10 of which result in a charge and 7 in a conviction, prosecution and conviction rates not radically out of line with other crimes. Prosecutors only try cases they think have a good chance of being successful (meaning they don't think the evidence is good enough in about a quarter of cases sent to them), and the standard for criminal trials is beyond a reasonable doubt. That 13 is a bit lower than other crimes, but not radically so. Most stats you see implying it's much worse (like an order of magnitude worse) are essentially using a fudge factor for unreported rapes as though the criminal justice system can even hypothetically do anything about an unreported rape.
Considering that the standard for a criminal trial is "beyond a reasonable doubt" while the standard for a Title IX hearing is at strictest "clear and convincing" and is often "a preponderance of the evidence" (aka slightly more likely than not), the rate of being found liable in a Title IX hearing is much higher, though not as high as it was when some schools used training said that women never lie but men will say whatever they have to to get their way, the accused didn't need to be told exactly what they were being accused of or what evidence they needed a defense for and an accuser's testimony could not be questioned.
EDIT: Just to point out how ridiculous accounting for "unreported" rapes is, if every time a rape was reported to law enforcement the accused was summarily executed without any process of any kind, just accusation->death, the "conviction rate" would still be at most ten percent.
Me: reporting, prosecution and conviction rates are disastrously low.
You: that's because they don't come forward much, cases aren't taken to court and men are found not guilty, therefore none of those men are guilty.
You need a higher standard of proof to put someone in jail, but this is just chucking them out of the same institution as their rape victim, and kids get chucked out of school for just punching someone, without lawyers being involved. Just move the guy on. That's all.
Your accusation->death line is hyperbole.
So, you want to end someone's college career on someone else's word alone, unless they can provide absolute proof that person is lying (and if we're following Obama/Biden era rules they aren't required to be told what they're trying to prove beforehand) they should be expelled from college in a way that will make it much harder to get admitted to another one, right?
Sounds fair /s
I'd note that the Devos guidelines Trump brought back call for things to be done to make it easier for the alleged victim prior to any finding, so long as those actions aren't punitive - examples given back in 2018 were things like changing housing arrangements or switching classes for one or both as necessary to separate them. The key point being not punishing the accused before any finding and establishing a process that is as fair as could be managed for making that finding.
It is hyperbole, but it's hyperbole to demonstrate a point - when you talk about how abysmally low conviction rates are, even if we went as far in the other direction as possible and simply executed everyone accused on the spot, you'd still be able to complain that the conviction rate was painfully low at ten percent because the bullshit about including "unreported cases" in a way we don't treat any other crime makes a ten percent conviction rate the highest it can hypothetically be, when it's really not radically different than any other crime if measured by the same metrics.
Dude, unreported crime rates exist for other categories than rape and sexual assult, but it's particularly high for crimes where victims believe that they are very unlikely to get a conviction and are very likely to have a terrible time in court and death threats afterwards, like sexual assault, rape, and organised crime syndicates.
It's not jail, it's school exclusion. It happens all the time over far less serious behaviour than rape. Don't bring that expensive lawyer justice-evasion victim-blaming victim-shaming shit into schools.
Don't keep failing to join the dots on the rapist changing the rules to benefit fellow rapists.
...but no one tries to use them when calculating conviction rates, because they're vague estimates rather than any kind of hard number and everyone properly understands in every other case that law enforcement can't even hypothetically do anything about an unreported crime.
Are you college aged or older? Do you have student loans? Now, imagine you have all those student loans, but you have no degree and a dramatically harder time moving to another school (for which you'd have to take out further student loans if you manage to get in) because the previous school says why you were expelled when asked.
If it were just "go to another school" with that being the full extent of the consequences, that would be one thing but it's really not.
Also, under the Devos rules supporting actions can be taken to make things easier for the accuser in response to the accusation alone (before any hearing, finding or even investigation), but those actions cannot be unreasonable, punitive or deny access to education (for example changing class schedules for one or both, changing housing assignments, or other things to prevent contact between them).
So, no one can question or challenge any part of an accusation in any way? Or do you have some (likely media fueled) image in your mind that the guidelines allow for the accused or his lawyer to grill the accuser, shouting irrelevant questions at her until she breaks down and submits? Because what the Devos guidelines actually call for for cross-examination is that all questions have to be submitted to the judge-analog (typically Title IX coordinator, but can be delegated) who is supposed to decide if the question is relevant or not to the accusation and the question can only be asked if it's approved. If she's a slutty slut slut is unlikely to be considered relevant, as is what she was wearing unless an article of clothing is somehow central to the evidence.
Question: In your ideal world, what would the process look like? Start from when it's reported (unless you don't think it should need to be reported, in which I want to know how the school is supposed to know) and go all the way through to a finding and punishment.
There's no need for that kind of language under any circumstances.
But that is in no uncertain terms what you mean by victim-shaming and I'm actively avoiding dancing around it. That is precisely the kind of question the Devos 2018 guidelines are specifically meant to avoid by requiring any questions asked in cross to be approved by the judge-analog and reducing contact between accuser and accused is specifically why the questions are actually asked by the lawyer or faculty advisor representing the accused.
I'd ask you again: In your ideal world, what would the process look like? Start from when it’s reported (unless you don’t think it should need to be reported, in which I want to know how the school is supposed to know) and go all the way through to a finding and punishment. What should it look like were the process fair, according to you?
No lawyers. School management. Done.
So you're otherwise OK with the DeVos process, so long as no one has an actual lawyer present?
The reason there's an option for a lawyer present for the accused is specifically so they can have someone who both understands what the process is supposed to look like and also is specifically there to support their defense and enforce their rights and can be trusted that that is their top priority. You could do this with a faculty advisor (and under the DeVos rules you are assigned one if you don't have a lawyer), but since such an advisor would be trained and supplied by the school you'd have to be very careful to avoid allowing the school to appoint someone insufficiently trained, incompetent, or actually opposed to you having a thorough and vigorous defense in order to avoid biasing the process.
But lawyers aside, there are a bunch of questions and details that have been challenged (with varying degrees of success) under the "Dear Colleague" rules. For example:
Between the hundreds of lawsuits challenging Title IX procedures since the "Dear Colleague" letter and the differences between that policy and the DeVos policy all of those have come up.
That's an awful lot of words for you want rich perpetrators to be able to get away with rape without even getting expelled from school.
That's not very many words to answer what you think policy should actually look like.
I suspect (but cannot prove) it's because your ideal version of policy would look something like "if any woman accuses a man, he's pulled in and questioned and if he can't prove he didn't do it beyond even the tiniest doubt on the spot he's expelled." With the gendering there being explicit, because I suspect you only even think about scenarios where it's a girl/woman accusing a boy/man.
I don't think I've seen a clearer case of amyone making a straw man argument tham this right here. Wow.
You refuse to engage with the question of what the policy should look like except to describe any time the topic of the accused defending themselves is mentioned as some variation of "letting rich men get away with it". I'm not sure what other conclusion I'm supposed to arrive at?
You yourself throughout the thread has always described the accuser as a girl and the accused as a man, you describe any mention of the accused mounting a defense as letting rich men get away with it and refuse to say anything about what policy should look like other than that the accused should not be allowed to have a lawyer.
That's yet another mischaracterisation. I absolutely didn't object to people defending themselves, it's letting expensive lawyers into a school discipline hearing (to giving rape victims a horrendous, harrowing experience where they're more on trial than the perpetrator and the rich rapists get away with it) that I object to, as you know perfectly well because I've said it so many times.
If you want to debate with me, why not discuss what I said instead of reinterpreting it to your exaggerated false version every time?
If you knew anything about it at all, you would know that rape perpetrators are overwhelmingly male and the vast majority of rape victims are female. I never tried to assert that it was exclusive, that was all you, as usual, and to be honest I'm surprised that someone like you spending so long defending trump's policy is objecting to the occasional (and it was occasional, and mostly when I was comparing the rich male rapists to the rich male rapist in chief, Donald J Trump) use of a non gender-neutral pronoun. But then consistency and fair mindedness has never been a characteristic of people who defend misogynists like Trump and their policies.
As I've said all along lawyers into school is all about making reporting rapid more harrowing for the victims and easier for the wealthy rapists to get away with it. That's how trump sees it, that's why he supports it, and if I'm to believe you, apparently he's more perceptive and intelligent than you on this topic.
Because your single biggest key points, repeated time and again are that the accused shouldn't be allowed to have a lawyer and that Trump is a rapist and therefore the policy is bad regardless of what the actual policy is.
OK, so the accused shouldn't be allowed to have a lawyer. Should the accused be allowed any kind of representative (such as a faculty rep), and what would you do to ensure that representative is both competent and acting in the best interest of the accused? I asked 14 questions previously about policy and what it should look like that you entirely ignored.
You can't help yourself but invent things I didn't say. Argue with what I said, not with what you wish I'd said.
What I said was that you'd have to be really, really, really, really, really gullible to believe that the Rapist in Chief, who uses expensive lawyers to silence his victims, is inviting lawyers into K12 exclusion meetings over rape for any other reason but to allow expensive lawyers to let rich rapists get away with it, just like him. Irrespective of who proposed it, it's a terrible idea and you and I know full well it will discourage rape victims from even telling a teacher of their attack because they know they'll have a horrendous experience.
I told you exactly what I think should happen, and as usual, you ignored it and made up your own version of what I said so you could argue with that instead.