How sad that the "lesson" of the Hofstra case is: videotape your sexual encounters so that you can be protected against false accusations. That's just wrong on so many levels. I would say that perhaps the lesson, for men and women both, is "don't have random sex with strangers," because if any of the people involved had adhered to that simple proposition, they wouldn't have been in trouble. Even if you know and trust the person you are with, of course, you can't be completely sure that a false charge (or a rape) won't occur, but it greatly reduces the odds.

One of the problems with the overbroad definition of "rape" -- essentially using that term for any sexual encounter which you wish hadn't happened -- is that (a) you get ridiculously large statistics for the number of women who are victims of "sexual violence," thus creating skepticism about a very real issue, and (b) you end up using a one-size-fits-all legal approach to a more nuanced legal problem.

If your choices are, essentially, "rape/not rape" the approach of the legal system is "charge/don't charge," convict/acquit," and "incarcerate/set free." As Bazelon's essay indicates, there are things that are sort of but not quite the same as rape, from a legal perspective, and perhaps there should be responses that are sort of but not quite the same as a rape charge, conviction, and sentence.

For example, in the Hofstra case, what if the woman could have filed an incident report with a community-based mediation service, which would then schedule a compulsory session guaranteeing the privacy and anonymity of all the participants? The service could have referred the woman to medical treatment if necessary. Then when the session was held, a mediator/counselor could have listened objectively to a recounting of the events from all points of view, and referred the matter for prosecution if the victim wanted it and the facts supported her claim. Otherwise there would be counseling for all of the participants (who, frankly, all need it: the woman needs to learn not to get loaded and fuck a bunch of strangers in a bathroom, and she probably has some raging self-esteem issues; the men need to learn not to take advantage of impaired women and, more generally, need to be more respectful towards women and sexuality and not act like a bunch of misogynist assholes) and some sort of mutually agreed upon resolution.

This would give the situation the attention that it needed but fall short of the "nuclear option" of engaging the wheels of criminal justice, exposing the parties to public scrutiny and threatening some or all of the parties with serious criminal sanctions for behavior that, while distasteful on all parts, was short of being criminal.

I say this with one caveat: finding fair and unbiased counselor/mediators for such a system would be a difficult task. But the more reliable and even-handed the alternative system was, the more likely that all parties would prefer it to the criminal justice system for cases that don't warrant the sledgehammer approach.

I think that would be great if it worked, but I don't see how it would have worked in the Hofstra case. The offender specifically wanted to AVOID letting her victims have anonymity or working out a "mutal resolution". If she had just wanted to protect her reputation she could have said she didn't recognize her rapists, or that they were wearing mask or any number of other stories. She went the extra mile to deliberately inflict cruelty on innocent and defenseless (or so she assumed) people, so I don't see what your councilling idea would have offered her that wasn't already being offered by the many other non-sadistic options she chose to reject.

And that probably includes the participants, but I read an article on the story and apparently the young woman's motive was not to punish the boys as much as exonerate herself in front of her boyfriend, who apparently knew who participated.

To me, the whole thing seemed much more of a poor plan on the part of the woman in question than much of anything else.

I hadn't hear that before. If that's true then I feel a little guilty for jumping to conclusions about her character. I'm not sure it does anything to alleviate the challenges facing this councilling option, though. Stories about her having sex with these men were already circulating enough for her boyfriend to hear them, so there wasn't any hope of anonymity. If she had taken it to councilling instead of the police it'd only change a couple of words in the news reports. The men would be in more comfortable quarters and the woman in a slightly less comfortable situation, which is great for this case but stomach churning in the case of an actual rape.

I suppose that when I was eighteen I tried a lot of things without thinking out the ultimate consequences. She probably thought she could make the accusation, drop the charges and then just walk away from the whole thing.

I always thought that instead of teaching teenagers sex from a purely religious perspective they should instead teach sex as a set of moral choices. Teaching kids real values instead of heaven and hell would make a lot more sense and people like this foolish girl would probably not make the same kinds of mistakes.