New situation to talk about with my teen son...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DH and I have covered sex, consent, no means no, etc. with our teen son, but now we have a new scenario to teach him about.

My friend's teen son in college was arrested for sexual assault recently. She shared with me and a few other close friends what happened so that we could use her son's mistake to educate our kids. It's honestly not a scenario I'd thought to cover with him.

He met a girl at a football game and they hit it off. They exchanged info. and went on some dates. They began exclusively dating and having a sexual relationship and things were fine. They had sex one evening and she stayed the night with him. He thought it would be "cute and romantic" to wake her up the next morning with oral sex. She was angry when she woke up and told him that was not okay with her. He apologized and she said she needed to re-evaluate their relationship. No contact happened for a little over a week and then he was called in by one of the dean's because the assault was reported by her. Interviews happened and the case was turned over to the local authorities. More interviews and investigating happened and he was arrested by the local police in his college town. He was released on bond and was told to have no contact with her until the school finished their investigation process. He got called before the disciplinary committee right before school let out for winter break and was expelled from college for violating the university's integrity code.

We had the talk with our son that if a woman gives consent and during the act says she'd like to stop, you stop. If during the act she seems like she's in pain or uncomfortable but doesn't say anything, you stop. We've told him that kissing doesn't equal permission to be handsy. Agreeing to oral sex doesn't equal permission to have sex. And now we're going to talk to him about this type of situation this weekend. I was raped, which DH knows, and so we've been a bit more explicit with our kids than maybe other people are. Stressing the importance of consent, drinking, boundaries, emotions, etc. But this scenario is honestly never one that crossed my mind.

I used to think having a teen girl was more stressful, but as my son gets older, I realize that having a teen that could possibly be (or is) sexually active is the most stressful of all, regardless of gender.

A lot going on here.

For starters, if this had happened to me very early in a relationship with someone, I would be completely freaked out and would ABSOLUTELY consider it sexual assault. When you are in a long term relationship with someone, you get an understanding of what they like and what they don't like. My husband would not be okay with me waking him up this way, despite usually liking BJs as much as the next red-blooded straight male. I wouldn't like it either. Oral? When I'm sleeping? No thanks. But we've been married for years and we know that if one of us decided to experiment with something like that, it wouldn't portent anything creepy and serious. In this case, where a young man has known a young woman for a matter of weeks and had only been in a relationship for a few weeks, I would be worried that he now thinks that because we've had sex, he can do whatever he wants to me, whether I'm conscious or not.

Additionally, depending on how this got reported and the state, it could be that she told a mandated reporter and that process got triggered. Either way, it sounds like your friend's son grossly misread what was appropriate in this situation, with the result that his girlfriend felt that she'd been assaulted. That would not have happened if he had stuck to the cardinal rule which is DO NOT HAVE SEXUAL CONTACT WITH ANYONE WHO IS UNCONSCIOUS.

HOW did you achieve this level of understanding with your husband about what you like and don't like? How was the college kid supposed to guess that she wouldn't like it? Why couldn't she have just told him to stop and that be the end of it? Either she wanted out and this made it easy or he wasn't telling the whole truth.

NP. If you don't already *know* that your partner is okay with/likes a certain act, you don't just spring it on them especially when they're asleep and don't even realize that intimacy is about to begin. You talk, you suggest, you ask, or, in a moment where you're both equally engaged in intimacy together you start slowly doing whatever it is and you pay attention to signals that they're receptive or that they want you to back off. Because every person deserves to have final say over whether a sexual act happens to them or not, and if you just suddenly out of the blue start something with someone, at least some part of the physical intimacy has happened before they can give or withdraw their consent at all. If the girl woke up and said, "stop", the consent violation had already happened.

Do people really think that's okay??

How far does this garbage go???

May I hold your hand? May I kiss you? May I french kiss you? May I put my arms around you? May I touch your breast? May I squeeze your breast? May I touch your thigh? etc. etc. etc.

Then on the other end of the spectrum are the millions of Americans reading and watching 50 Shades of Gray!

No common sense, no sense or proportion - just histrionics and a huge rush to blame. It's ridiculous. If she's not mature enough to be sleeping with guys, maybe she shouldn't be doing it.

[Anonymous]

I'm sending my son off to college with a consent pad. It will list kiss, touching under clothing, digital penetration, oral sex, regular sex and whatever other things the kids are doing. I will inform him he must get a signature with the date before each encounter.

Seriously, how do we protect our sons from ruining their lives due to the gray area and he said she said?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DH and I have covered sex, consent, no means no, etc. with our teen son, but now we have a new scenario to teach him about.

My friend's teen son in college was arrested for sexual assault recently. She shared with me and a few other close friends what happened so that we could use her son's mistake to educate our kids. It's honestly not a scenario I'd thought to cover with him.

He met a girl at a football game and they hit it off. They exchanged info. and went on some dates. They began exclusively dating and having a sexual relationship and things were fine. They had sex one evening and she stayed the night with him. He thought it would be "cute and romantic" to wake her up the next morning with oral sex. She was angry when she woke up and told him that was not okay with her. He apologized and she said she needed to re-evaluate their relationship. No contact happened for a little over a week and then he was called in by one of the dean's because the assault was reported by her. Interviews happened and the case was turned over to the local authorities. More interviews and investigating happened and he was arrested by the local police in his college town. He was released on bond and was told to have no contact with her until the school finished their investigation process. He got called before the disciplinary committee right before school let out for winter break and was expelled from college for violating the university's integrity code.

We had the talk with our son that if a woman gives consent and during the act says she'd like to stop, you stop. If during the act she seems like she's in pain or uncomfortable but doesn't say anything, you stop. We've told him that kissing doesn't equal permission to be handsy. Agreeing to oral sex doesn't equal permission to have sex. And now we're going to talk to him about this type of situation this weekend. I was raped, which DH knows, and so we've been a bit more explicit with our kids than maybe other people are. Stressing the importance of consent, drinking, boundaries, emotions, etc. But this scenario is honestly never one that crossed my mind.

I used to think having a teen girl was more stressful, but as my son gets older, I realize that having a teen that could possibly be (or is) sexually active is the most stressful of all, regardless of gender.

A lot going on here.

For starters, if this had happened to me very early in a relationship with someone, I would be completely freaked out and would ABSOLUTELY consider it sexual assault. When you are in a long term relationship with someone, you get an understanding of what they like and what they don't like. My husband would not be okay with me waking him up this way, despite usually liking BJs as much as the next red-blooded straight male. I wouldn't like it either. Oral? When I'm sleeping? No thanks. But we've been married for years and we know that if one of us decided to experiment with something like that, it wouldn't portent anything creepy and serious. In this case, where a young man has known a young woman for a matter of weeks and had only been in a relationship for a few weeks, I would be worried that he now thinks that because we've had sex, he can do whatever he wants to me, whether I'm conscious or not.

Additionally, depending on how this got reported and the state, it could be that she told a mandated reporter and that process got triggered. Either way, it sounds like your friend's son grossly misread what was appropriate in this situation, with the result that his girlfriend felt that she'd been assaulted. That would not have happened if he had stuck to the cardinal rule which is DO NOT HAVE SEXUAL CONTACT WITH ANYONE WHO IS UNCONSCIOUS.

HOW did you achieve this level of understanding with your husband about what you like and don't like? How was the college kid supposed to guess that she wouldn't like it? Why couldn't she have just told him to stop and that be the end of it? Either she wanted out and this made it easy or he wasn't telling the whole truth.

NP. If you don't already *know* that your partner is okay with/likes a certain act, you don't just spring it on them especially when they're asleep and don't even realize that intimacy is about to begin. You talk, you suggest, you ask, or, in a moment where you're both equally engaged in intimacy together you start slowly doing whatever it is and you pay attention to signals that they're receptive or that they want you to back off. Because every person deserves to have final say over whether a sexual act happens to them or not, and if you just suddenly out of the blue start something with someone, at least some part of the physical intimacy has happened before they can give or withdraw their consent at all. If the girl woke up and said, "stop", the consent violation had already happened.

Do people really think that's okay??

How far does this garbage go???

May I hold your hand? May I kiss you? May I french kiss you? May I put my arms around you? May I touch your breast? May I squeeze your breast? May I touch your thigh? etc. etc. etc.

Then on the other end of the spectrum are the millions of Americans reading and watching 50 Shades of Gray!

No common sense, no sense or proportion - just histrionics and a huge rush to blame. It's ridiculous. If she's not mature enough to be sleeping with guys, maybe she shouldn't be doing it.

I can't imagine a roommate actually encouraging her to report this to the RA. And then the RA actually reported it to the university, who reported it to the police, who then actually arrested the guy? Can this be for real? Could there really be such a perfect storm of complete idiots?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:At a certain point I feel like we are going to be just hovering over them while they are doing it.

If there is not more to this story and he stopped, yes sometimes a rose is a rose and it IS a misunderstanding. If there is more, well then the whole story here doesn't necessarily matter

Let's just put chastity belts on them all until they are 25 and their brains are fully developed. Who needs this sh*t.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I feel like there is more to this story. OP is only hearing the boy's parents' version of events.

In any case, it is probably good idea to remind your son that people who are asleep or unconscious cannot consent to sex, and that you should wait until you know someone better before doing things like initiating sex before they are awake. For all anyone knows, the girl had been molested or raped before. And waking up to find someone engaged in sexual activity on you would freak out a lot of people.

I went to the county where this happened, found their court records and was able to locate his arrest record/mug shot. The charge listed is CRIMINAL SEXUAL CONDUCT - THIRD DEGREE and when I looked up what that equated in that state it says:

A person is guilty of criminal sexual conduct in the third degree if the actor engages in sexual battery with the victim and the actor knows or has reason to know that the victim is mentally defective, mentally incapacitated, or physically helpless.

It's possible that there's more to the story that my friend omitted. Or like someone said, alcohol was involved.

Is being asleep considered physically helpless? Those points in the description of what constitutes 3rd degree points more towards someone being drunk in my mind.

They are mentally incapacitated. You cannot consent if you are unconscious. And being asleep is being unconscious.

There are at least 2 PPs on this thread who disagreed with me when I mentioned that earlier. (Not the OP, btw.)

Being asleep IS NOT the same as being unconscious, not matter how much you may want to make it that way in this case.

http://www.nytimes.com/health/guides/injury/unconsciousness-first-aid/overview.html



Unconsciousness is when a person is unable to respond to people and activities. Asleep is just that--stimuli will awaken you. Being asleep is not the same thing as being unconscious. A sleeping person will respond to loud noises or gentle shaking -- an unconscious person will not. An unconscious person cannot cough or clear his or her throat.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm sending my son off to college with a consent pad. It will list kiss, touching under clothing, digital penetration, oral sex, regular sex and whatever other things the kids are doing. I will inform him he must get a signature with the date before each encounter.

Seriously, how do we protect our sons from ruining their lives due to the gray area and he said she said?

I'm just going to mark my kid's body with a Sharpie "No!" "Keep Off" "No Trespassing"

[Anonymous]

I am a criminal defense attorney and have had probably one or two of these types of cases per year. One of my friends has had several as well. They aren't uncommon. If I were the mother of a son, I would be teaching him a multi-step process to follow before having sex. In this case, it sounds like the son made a statement about what happened. That will be used against him.

These cases are terrifying for my clients and their families. Every kid should be taught to remain silent in the face of any accusation like this and to tell their parents about it and CALL A LAWYER. If this family called me and said thisnaccusation has been made and the school/the police want to talk to him about what happened, I would direct the son not to make any statement to anyone about this. He would attend no meeting and would exercise his right to remain silent.

[Anonymous]

Does she not like oral and he kept telling her she would like and pressuring her to do it? Then she wakes up to him performing oral sex on her? This is the only way I would see him getting arrested for this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is highly unlikely that this is the whole story if there was an arrest and the young man was expelled from his college.

Is there a link to a news article about this story?

That's because this story isn't real. OP wanted to do a PSA on teaching teens about consent etc, but that was boring so she decided to post a cautionary tale of a friend like an 80s afterschool special.

Well, that is a possibility. If it is true, I would think a case like this would be in the news, especially since there was an arrest and it seems to present a controversial set of facts.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Does she not like oral and he kept telling her she would like and pressuring her to do it? Then she wakes up to him performing oral sex on her? This is the only way I would see him getting arrested for this.

This is the scenario that makes sense here, if the story is true. If she told him she did not want that kind of contact and he did it anyway while she was asleep, that would be an assault. He would be taking advantage of the fact that she was asleep to engage in activity he knew she had said no to.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Does she not like oral and he kept telling her she would like and pressuring her to do it? Then she wakes up to him performing oral sex on her? This is the only way I would see him getting arrested for this.

What if, the next morning, she had rolled over and started doing that to wake him up and he realized that he really didn't want her to do that. Maybe he suddenly remembered that he already had a girlfriend or maybe he had morning after regrets and was no longer attracted to her. He pushes her away and she stops her advances. But it still happened, she still touched him...

Is that something that he should report to police? Should the young lady be arrested? Should she be threatened with prosecution? Should her frantic parents be called and given these kinds of graphic details about their daughter's sex life? Should she be kicked out of school? Should she be made to feel like a 'rapist"?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Does she not like oral and he kept telling her she would like and pressuring her to do it? Then she wakes up to him performing oral sex on her? This is the only way I would see him getting arrested for this.

What if, the next morning, she had rolled over and started doing that to wake him up and he realized that he really didn't want her to do that. Maybe he suddenly remembered that he already had a girlfriend or maybe he had morning after regrets and was no longer attracted to her. He pushes her away and she stops her advances. But it still happened, she still touched him...

Is that something that he should report to police? Should the young lady be arrested? Should she be threatened with prosecution? Should her frantic parents be called and given these kinds of graphic details about their daughter's sex life? Should she be kicked out of school? Should she be made to feel like a 'rapist"?

If he had told her no and then she engaged in that activity with him while he was asleep, yes, she would be assaulting him. No one should engage in sexual activity without the consent of the other person.

College kids get a lot of training about consent. They need to pay attention and incorporate what they learn into their daily lives. It's on them to stop sexual harassment and assault.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I feel like there is more to this story. OP is only hearing the boy's parents' version of events.

In any case, it is probably good idea to remind your son that people who are asleep or unconscious cannot consent to sex, and that you should wait until you know someone better before doing things like initiating sex before they are awake. For all anyone knows, the girl had been molested or raped before. And waking up to find someone engaged in sexual activity on you would freak out a lot of people.

I went to the county where this happened, found their court records and was able to locate his arrest record/mug shot. The charge listed is CRIMINAL SEXUAL CONDUCT - THIRD DEGREE and when I looked up what that equated in that state it says:

A person is guilty of criminal sexual conduct in the third degree if the actor engages in sexual battery with the victim and the actor knows or has reason to know that the victim is mentally defective, mentally incapacitated, or physically helpless.

It's possible that there's more to the story that my friend omitted. Or like someone said, alcohol was involved.

Is being asleep considered physically helpless? Those points in the description of what constitutes 3rd degree points more towards someone being drunk in my mind.

They are mentally incapacitated. You cannot consent if you are unconscious. And being asleep is being unconscious.

There are at least 2 PPs on this thread who disagreed with me when I mentioned that earlier. (Not the OP, btw.)

Being asleep IS NOT the same as being unconscious, not matter how much you may want to make it that way in this case.

http://www.nytimes.com/health/guides/injury/unconsciousness-first-aid/overview.html



Unconsciousness is when a person is unable to respond to people and activities. Asleep is just that--stimuli will awaken you. Being asleep is not the same thing as being unconscious. A sleeping person will respond to loud noises or gentle shaking -- an unconscious person will not. An unconscious person cannot cough or clear his or her throat.

Irrelevant. We are talking legal definition. Sexual assault happens the moment contact occurs. It doesn't wait til someone wakes up and says no.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I am a criminal defense attorney and have had probably one or two of these types of cases per year. One of my friends has had several as well. They aren't uncommon. If I were the mother of a son, I would be teaching him a multi-step process to follow before having sex. In this case, it sounds like the son made a statement about what happened. That will be used against him.

These cases are terrifying for my clients and their families. Every kid should be taught to remain silent in the face of any accusation like this and to tell their parents about it and CALL A LAWYER. If this family called me and said thisnaccusation has been made and the school/the police want to talk to him about what happened, I would direct the son not to make any statement to anyone about this. He would attend no meeting and would exercise his right to remain silent.

Dear pp, what happens to these cases? Dismissed or legit? Scary to know this is not unheard of as a legal claim.

[Anonymous]

Every case is different. I have had a range of results. Sadly, the vast majority result in conviction because so many people agree to make statements and incriminate themselves. I have been able to get many of them to misdemeanors with jail. Some clients have been convicted of felonies and that sucks. One thing to remember is that a common police tactic is to do what is called a sting call -- they have the complaining witness call the accused and start a conversation about the event. Many, many, many, many times the subject of the call apologizes or agrees with the complaining witness that they were asleep. That is harder to avoid -- you have to be pretty savvy not to fall for it. Then the police usually ask the person to come in voluntarily to "clear the air" and it rarely goes well.