How many college men are willing to commit sexual assault?

From HuffPo:

Close to 1-in-3 collegiate males admitted in a recent study they would force a woman to sexual intercourse, but many would not consider that rape, Newsweek reports.

The survey found 31.7 percent of men said they would act on “intentions to force a woman to sexual intercourse” if they could get away with it, but just 13.6 percent said they had “intentions to rape a woman” if there weren’t any consequences.

The authors of this study note the difference relies on whether or not they described what constitutes sexual assault, versus whether they simply called it rape. For this study, the researchers defined rape as “intercourse by use of force or threat of force against a victim’s wishes.”

. . . The team surveyed 86 male college students, most of whom were juniors and Caucasian, at one university. In addition to asking them about forced sexual intercourse and rape, the participants were quizzed on various items to determine whether they held hostile attitudes towards females. The researchers concede their sample size was small, and hope to expand on it, but Edwards told Newsweek, “the No. 1 point is there are people that will say they would force a woman to have sex but would deny they would rape a woman.”

Similar to the results of this survey of would-be perpetrators, victims are often found to shy away from identifying their experience of forced intercourse as rape. For example, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 17 percent of female undergraduates said in a survey they experienced unwanted sexual behaviors involving force, threat or incapacitation. But only 10 percent of those MIT women also said yes when asked if they were sexually assaulted, and just 5 percent said yes when asked if they were raped.

The study is here: “Denying Rape but Endorsing Forceful Intercourse: Exploring Differences Among Responders

CFP: 2015 Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference

The CFP:

The 16th annual Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference will take place from August 2nd to August 6th, 2015, in Bellingham, Washington. Everyone in the world is invited to submit a paper, or to volunteer to be a commentator or session chair, but conference attendance is limited to those on the conference program (and also to members of the conference program committee, the assistant conference organizers, and members of the WWU philosophy department). This is partly due to funding and logistical constraints, and partly due to the fact that the BSPC is a workshop-style conference that involves in-depth discussions of works-in-progress.

To submit a paper:

Submissions must be in PDF format, and they must be prepared for blind review. They should be emailed to the BSPC 2015 Program Committee at bspc2015@gmail.com. Please include an abstract and a word count, including footnotes and bibliography, on the first page of the paper.

Papers on any topic are welcome, but the conference program committee will be looking for papers that are of interest to all BSPC participants, regardless of AOS.

Papers of any length will be considered, but shorter papers (under about 8,000 words, including footnotes and bibliography) will have a better chance of being accepted than longer papers.

The BSPC is a workshop-style conference, and the papers on the program will be read in advance by all conference participants. So please submit a paper only if you are certain that, if your paper is on the program, you will have a chance to incorporate feedback from the BSPC in any subsequent, for-publication version of your paper.

The deadline for submissions is March 1st, 2015 (at midnight Pacific Time at the end of the day). Authors will be notified of the Program Committee’s decisions by mid-May.

To volunteer to be a commentator or chair:

All volunteers should e-mail the 2015 BSPC Program Committee at bspc2015@gmail.com. Prospective commentators should indicate their areas of specialization. The deadline for volunteering is March 1st, 2015 (at midnight Pacific Time at the end of the day). Volunteers will be notified of the Program Committee’s decisions by mid-May.

Please note: The BSPC is a workshop-style conference whose participants are expected to read all of the papers in advance, to attend all of the sessions, and to come prepared for discussion. You should not submit a paper, or volunteer to comment or chair, unless you plan on reading all of the papers in advance and attending all of the sessions.

More on the conference here. 

‘Somewhere in America’

Via Bustle, a spoken word performance:

“The trio of teenage girls start the poem ominously: ‘The greatest lessons you will ever teach us, you won’t even remember.’ From there, they jump into fairly controversial, dark topics like rape, race, gun control, socioeconomics, and censorship. Emotions rage so hard in the three-and-a-half-minute piece, occasionally you can spot a small vocal crack in the performance, but that just lends more validation to the truth they kept spouting. ‘Somewhere in America,’ ushers in the hard-to-hear stuff,  ‘Women are killed for rejecting dates, but God forbid I bring my girlfriend to prom.’ Another: ‘The preppy kids go thrifting because they think it sounds fun. But we go ‘cause that’s all we’ve got money for.’ “