NOM

BYU is now offering "amnesty" for sexual assault victims who report their assaults, and they are separating the Honor Code and Title IX offices.
http://www.sltrib.com/news/4353191-155/ ... mnesty-for

I am encouraged by these kinds of changes in the church, and I give them credit for realizing that they were wrong and making the necessary changes.

I'm interested to see what happens from a statistical standpoint. Should we expect an uptick in reported assaults and see comparable stats of other universities?

For the victims sake, I hope not. To measure the effectiveness of the new honor code amnesty, I would expect an uptick.

Hopefully the culture can change!

They are behind on these kinds of things because they are hampered by the idea that everything they do and decide is God's will, and because they want to perpetuate that idea (that they don't make mistakes) with others.

Like everything else, the church needed to be drug kicking and screaming into doing what is right.

Great changes BYU! Now how about getting rid of the year waiting period for getting sealed after a civil marriage, give women the priesthood, and let gays have sex after marriage. I might just start going again...

dispirited wrote:Great changes BYU! Now how about getting rid of the year waiting period for getting sealed after a civil marriage, give women the priesthood, and let gays have sex after marriage. I might just start going again...

The one year waiting "punishment" for getting civilly married first is the next easy thing to go.

I would happily return to full fellowship if people were allowed to openly discuss troublesome issues and their doubts. But they are apparently afraid of truth.

I hope this does not simply mean that traditional Honor Code practices will be conducted in an even more clandestine manner. The time-honored black hood and robes seemed anonymity enough. Adding those black hockey masks will ultimately prove uncomfortable and take some of the enjoyment out of their blood sacrifice ceremony.

My take is that all of these sweeping changes came from two sources on a have to do basis. Federal T9 authorities came up with these "recommendations" for sweeping change and a certain church law firm came up with the rest to avoid paying out any more money than they are going to have to pay for the law suits they have pending. I hope it makes a difference. I am skeptical in this as the church is still sexist and the rape culture and shaming still abound.

I wonder if BYU just put up a curtain to separate title 9 and the honor code office.

2bizE wrote:I wonder if BYU just put up a curtain to separate title 9 and the honor code office.

Like the Zion curtain?

Red Ryder wrote:I'm interested to see what happens from a statistical standpoint. Should we expect an uptick in reported assaults and see comparable stats of other universities?

For the victims sake, I hope not. To measure the effectiveness of the new honor code amnesty, I would expect an uptick.

Hopefully the culture can change!

I don't know that it will, at least right away. I think the stigma about it there would still be just as strong.

That this change has to be *finally* made though, speaks volumes about the previous and current culture.

moksha wrote:I hope this does not simply mean that traditional Honor Code practices will be conducted in an even more clandestine manner. The time-honored black hood and robes seemed anonymity enough. Adding those black hockey masks will ultimately prove uncomfortable and take some of the enjoyment out of their blood sacrifice ceremony.

"blood atonement" ceremony

dispirited wrote:Now, get rid of the year waiting period for getting sealed after a civil marriage, give women the priesthood, and let gays have sex after marriage. I might just start going again...

I would consider going again if they would just make it true.

2bizE wrote:I wonder if BYU just put up a curtain to separate title 9 and the honor code office.

I think they put some duct tape on the floor...

2bizE wrote:I wonder if BYU just put up a curtain to separate title 9 and the honor code office.

You win. Literally laughing out loud at this.

Seriously, though, hopefully more victims will feel like they can get help now. This is good news, even though BYU would have never done this without Madi Barney''s extraordinary courage.

StarbucksMom wrote:

2bizE wrote:I wonder if BYU just put up a curtain to separate title 9 and the honor code office.

You win. Literally laughing out loud at this.

Seriously, though, hopefully more victims will feel like they can get help now. This is good news, even though BYU would have never done this without Madi Barney''s extraordinary courage.

Zadok wrote:

2bizE wrote:I wonder if BYU just put up a curtain to separate title 9 and the honor code office.

I think they put some duct tape on the floor...

Yes, duct tape on the floor to separate the two offices sounds about right.

I guess it is good to know others are as cynical....well almost as cynical as I am about this. I have been feeling more and more that I should just keep my mouth shut about things like this, the new Mormon and gay web site, and a couple of other sore topics, because I am just too bitter to be snarky.

See, the reality is that BYU and ALL universities have an incentive, a financial incentive, to discourage reports of rape on campus and to students even off campus. See, there is a federal reporting law that universities have to report the number of rapes and all other crime on campus and of course parents looking for a safe university to send their girls to can compare universities. So, in order to get students and alumni dollars, the university has an incentive to fudge the numbers. So rapes are officially listed as "unfounded" when they simply don't want to know, so they don't really investigate. There are official and unofficial policies to discourage reporting. And campus police are not well trained in taking rape reports, and because the police know a rape report is a black mark against the university, they treat the victim like the enemy.

BYU is hardly the only university with this problem, but seeing as it is a religious university it would look REALLY bad if they topped UU in number or rapes, they have extra incentive to keep reports low. They seem to think that the number of rapes would never go up if the "few" rapes that do happen go unreported, so rather than really doing something to prevent rape, they just discourage reporting.

While I worked with rape victims at a rape crisis center, The local universities had reported 1 rape at BYU, 0 at Weber, 1 at UoU, 0 at USU, 0 at UV, 0 at SU, 0 at D. But as my clients, I had 2 say they reported their rape at BYU, 4 at Weber, and one or two from some of the others. Let's just say that I was in Ogden, so I really should not have had a lot of BYU students as clients, just the ones who had dropped out of college and went home to try to deal with life. But a total of 2 rapes reported at all Utah universities, and one rape center in one city has 6-7 victims who claim they reported, yet it did not show up on the statistics. My conclusion was the universities just refuse to even believe the victims because they do not want the university to look bad in that annual report of crime on campus.

Until things really change in the culture and the universities have to publish the punishment given to rapists instead of number of victims, or they actually care about their female students being safe and teach more about consent and the culture changes so that men don't brag about forcing kisses or grabbing a woman by her p**** (DT, I am talking about you) then nothing is going to really change. They university will just refuse to believe victims, blame the victims, be nasty while taking the report, not investigate, not report it as "founded", leak the victim's name all over campus. There are just so many ways to get revenge on someone for daring to report.

And just like trump and Bill Cosby knew they could get away with it because the victims did not dare come forward, rapists on campus know they won't be reported, so they feel free to rape again and again.

So, BYU will find other ways to punish any woman who dares report a rape. And since it is not "manly" to be a victim, (it is only "manly" to grab women by their p) in our toxic manhood culture, the men won't report if they are victims. And sorry if this sounds negative toward men. It is the toxic Trump culture of accepting sexual assault as proving a guy is some kind of macho man that I am against and it victimizes men as much as it does women. So, please guys, don't be offended by this unless you are proud of committing sexual assault.

I was thinking of Less Nessman, that all-to-famous news director of WKRP in Cincinnati. If you recall he was able to turn his cubical into a private office with some Duct Tape.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkP9DKnOgn0

Thanks for your informative post Alas. I didn't know about the apparent disincentives for reporting. Abusers need to be punished and have a light shone on their bad behavior.

As with anything, they can implement changes in the spirit of the reform, or they can just outwardly meet the letter. After all, who needs an honor code office when you have a stable of bishops willing to revoke an ecclesiastical endorsement?

Great post Alas. It is counter intuitive, but generally speaking if you want a safe university, you actually want to look for the school that reports the highest number of sexual assault instances on campus. Everyone is under reporting them. The most dangerous schools are the ones that don't take reporting seriously. The safest schools are the ones that do. With the current climate, a schools willingness to report sexual assault is the most valuable indicator for how seriously they take such issues.