(If you’re missing background on the Sulkowicz story, here’s a piece by Megan McArdle with lots of context.)
On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely do you judge it to be that Emma Sulkowicz is being truthful in her recounting of events, with 0 being “I’m quite certain that she’s lying through her teeth” and 10 being “I believe her 100%” (and 5 being, of course, “there’s a 50/50 chance either way”)? Really — tell me in the comments. (Except Marsy or anyone else who wants to push an agenda rather than have a discussion.)
In the case that she’s truthful, the accused student committed a serious crime. In the case that she’s lying, she herself committed a crime (or what most people would consider a criminal act, even if we don’t make a practice of jailing false accusers, and, in this particular case, she didn’t bring a criminal complaint).
Shorn of all context, to judge one case more likely than the other, you’d have to believe that either men or women are more likely to commit crimes. In the “she said” version, hidden behind that mild-mannered college student exterior is a cruel, vicious, violent man. In the “he said” version, the crusader for justice is really a vindictive woman scheming to punish a man who rejected her.
Conventional wisdom says that, yes, the “she said” version is almost certainly the truth — which carries more than a small dose of assumption that men are more likely to be violent perpetrators than women are likely to be vengeance-motivated liars. We look at such a situation and say, “why would a woman lie?” and assume that she has no motivation, but take it for granted that a man needs no motivation to attack a woman, because it’s somehow just inborn. Which is kind of troubling, isn’t it?
Of course, in the case of a woman who accuses a man in criminal court, and knows that, assuming he’s convicted, he could be jailed for many, many years, perhaps even for life, we expect that the seriousness of the consequences of the charge (coupled with the fact that perjury is, in fact, a pretty serious crime) would discourage all but the most sociopathic of women from making a false accusation (though these pop up periodically, say, when a woman claims rape to explain a pregnancy when a boyfriend was out of town). But in a university context, when an accusation means expulsion, not jail time, and when the charge is not made under oath, it would seem at least more likely for a woman to make a false accusation, if she wants to inflict harm on someone, and has the confidence of knowing that the harm she inflicts will be malicious but only metaphorically life-ending.
Megan McArdle, last week, wrote about the lack of data on the question of false accusations. And rape accusations have a completely different sort of character than, say, lying about theft to collect insurance money — it’s an accusation against a specific individual.
So what do you think? Or is my perspective too colored by being the mom of three boys, the oldest of whom just finished his freshman year of high school, and who gives us a lot of worry in terms of his ability, three years hence, to navigate the college environment?
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