Uni suicide - tragedy but is this the only recourse for women that experience assault ?

[mids2019]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14060637/Oxford-University-student-20-killed-cancelled-female-friend-told-pals-felt-uncomfortable-sexual-encounter.hotlink

Superficially this is a tragedy and the sites is was the major factor for that led to it. However given the extremely low probability of criminal conviction of the university acting from a disciplinary point of view are women justified in using ostracism as the only till they have left for justice and as a warning to others that may consider assault a crime where there are in reality limited chance of consequence?

The woman concerned comes across as psychologically cruel and the coroner warns against 'cancel culture' but there seems more to this and perhaps the woman concerned was justified in talking to their friendship group at the very least as warning to other woemn?

Is this the social equivalent of a lunch mob with no proven guilt or the actions of a woman who knew there is typically no justice from authorities in such cases?

I don't think it's possible to judge this one unless we know why the girl felt 'uncomfortable.' Lots of women choose not to report sexual assaults because your name gets dragged through the mud in the unlikely event of it actually making it to to court. She'd willingly had sex with him and in that case it always ends up as he said/she said and he said always wins. Of course, we don't know what actually happened, and the death is a horrible tragedy, but I also don't quite see how the investigation led to accusations of 'bullying' and 'cancel culture' without actually knowing xactly what happened between them. The Mail is obviously going to go for the 'non-woke' angle because it's the Mail.

cestlasvielife my son was welfare rep at this college a few years ago. There are posters literally everywhere offering help, the porters are readily available if people are in crisis and all students are aware of the various ports of call for pastoral help at both tutor and peer level. The young person didn't seek help, unfortunately.

A pervasive culture, as pointed out by the coroner woukd not have just been about this case alone. It was something that had happened before. It was something that the coroner felt the college and the DoE needed to be aware of. Who knows if these particular kids just did it once or if they were part of a judge and jury around the college. One is possibly people standing up for their friend. The other is using moral outrage to habitually bully others

I honestly thought that we, particularly us women, had moved past the stage of assuming that a woman must be lying if she doesn't go to the police or someone else in authority.

The reports do not suggest she lied or distorted the truth. The young man felt his actions had been ‘unforgiveable’. But that doesn’t seem to have stopped posters from saying she shouldn’t have told men about it or that they should not have responded by disapproving of the man who would commit such activities.

I don’t think it’s clear or that we will ever know. It’s difficult to interpret the word “discomfort”. I would suggest that if the girl and her friends believed he had done something seriously wrong they should have reported it to the uni and allow the correct channels deal with it and urged him to get help, rather than meting out their own form of rough justice. I don’t think that’s particularly mature, no.

This is why I have an issue over the handwringing. No one is obliged to stay friends with anyone. You can end a friendship for any reason you like, same as you can a relationship. Someone having allegations against them that you’re uncomfortable with is a perfectly valid reason not to associate with them any more.

The coroner has really brought his own bias into this case by even talking about cancel culture imo. He even said in his report that he couldn’t conclusively attribute the suicide to cancel culture - why even mention it then? I can’t help but think if a woman had taken her own life after being sexually assaulted (and I’m not saying that’s what definitely happened here, just using an example) there wouldn’t be anywhere near this amount of soul searching. This case is already being used to conflate “cancel culture” with holding people accountable. Yes, it’s a tragedy this boy felt suicide was his only way out, and none of us know the real details of the story here. The general principle of men holding other men accountable for behaviour that makes women feel unsafe is something we should be encouraging more of, not less of. If

rather than meting out their own form of rough justice

aka ceasing to be friends with someone whose behaviour they disapproved of.

How is calmly telling someone they feel uncomfortable with their actions and need to step back from the friendship “rough justice”?

The truth about what? All we know is that she felt uncomfortable. That could mean anything.

I am a survivor of rape myself and on the other side, I also witnessed a male acquaintance accused of assault at university by a girl, until security footage showed he wasn't even in the building at the time.

Let's wait until the Coroner's report is published which will be soon.

When I find it I'll link to it,

Apparently he was physically attacked and socially ostracised by the wider community. That's bullying. Describing that as 'calmly telling someone they feel uncomfortable with their actions and need to step back from the friendship' is a bit inaccurate.

Agree with all those who say she couldn't possibly have known that this would be the end result, and to suggest that she was somehow Machiavellian or sophisticated enough to think it would be smacks very much of 'look what she made him do.'

We're talking about very young adults here, who haven't been living away from home for very long, who are sexually unsophisticated and just figuring things out and making a lot of mistakes along the way. I can well remember in my first couple of years at uni that there were lots and lots of sexual encounters that weren't good in all sorts of different ways. These are people with very little sexual experience. Many with none at all, beyond whatever porn they have been watching. It's not just learning the act itself, it's learning how to deal with the aftermath. And we all talked about it. Everyone wanted to know who had done what and with whom. We thought that made us adults, but we were also immature and stupid. Girls would talk about which boys were a safe bet for casual sex and which ones weren't, who didn't wash enough, who was crap, who would give oral sex and who wouldn't, who was weird and to be avoided. It's a very intense time and emotions run very high. There's a lot of drama over things that older people would deal with quietly and privately. But nothing is really private any more thanks to social media.

It's known, I think, that oxbridge unis have their own social rules that seem odd to an outsider. To kids at those unis, who have spent their lives being told how clever they are, who's parents have often invested a lot of money in getting them there and have very high expectations, they seem very important. But I don't think it was just about being ostracised. This is a young man who had been publicly shamed for being sexually inappropriate. Everyone in his social circle knew. That's a lot for a young man to figure out how to deal with, regardless of what actually happened. There's lots of information out there about dealing with being a victim of sexual assault, but there's not a lot for young men having to deal with the realisation that they may well be a perpetrator of it. There were boys when I was at uni who had that reputation and you never left a friend alone with them, especially not if there was alcohol around. They usually moved on to a new friendship group who didn't know or sometimes transferred to a different uni or took a year out.

It is a horrible situation for all involved, but happens quite often, it's just that the end isn't usually this tragic.

From The Independent - this is what the coroner said:

Oxfordshire coroner Nicholas Graham said, however, that he had not been able to establish whether any element of a culture at Corpus Christi had either caused or contributed to Mr Rogers’s distress.

Mr Graham concluded: “Of course, it is certainly possible that such a culture influenced the actions of Alexander’s peers in forming the judgements that they did; it is also possible that Alexander felt that – because of this culture – there was no way of getting back into the social group that obviously meant so much to him, once he had been excluded.

“What I cannot say is that this was probable. Nor, on the balance of probabilities, that this culture materially contributed to Alexander’s distress and his fateful decision on the morning of the 15 January.”

My bolding.

As other posters have said, attributing suicide to a specific event is not usually the right thing to do, and the coroner did not.

ETA: the link www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/oxford-alexander-rogers-death-cancel-culture-b2644785.html

There is no suggestion he denied what she said happened happened.

Absolutely - I’m in no way blaming him, I’m sure he saw no way out. The lack of societal support is a problem, if he’d known there was a place to turn to that could have given him the perspective then maybe that would have helped, but there is a male
mental health crisis that means many young men feel like they have no other option.

The mail is twisting something tragic to fit a 'cancel culture' narrative.

What happened was IN NO WAY cancel culture. Cancel culture is what happened to women like Gillian Phillip and men like Graham Linehan and what lots tried unsuccessfully to do to jkr, it's being monstered on social media by people you don't know for a really normal but not trendy opinion. Losing work and your profession as a result etc.

It's unclear what happened here - none of us can ever know - but it was the consequence of real world relationships and actions. The Mail trying to make it into a 'cancel culture' story is abhorrent and wrong and as PP have said breaches guidelines on journalistic integrity on reporting suicide.

The physical attack was out of line, but I'm very wary of the "socially ostracised by the wider community". At what point are people supposed to turn a blind eye to behaviour they find unacceptable?

It is also worth noting from that article that the woman expressed her concerns about their sexual encounter on 11 Jan and Alexander went missing on 15 Jan. This wasn’t a term long campaign. It was all very close together.

All we know is that she felt uncomfortable, which could mean anything! Maybe people could wait until facts are established. As I said upthread I know someone who was falsely accused and exonerated due to security footage. I know firsthand the reality of victim blaming and the shit that rape victims go through, but it doesn't mean I think this is right either.

The coroner did not conclude that cancel culture or bullying led to his suicide, though. It largely seems to be the Mail doing that.

Right, but what DID happen? A sexual encounter after which one person said they felt uncomfortable. That's all the information available.

And that her description of her discomfort was enough for his male friends to tell him they were taking a break from the friendship.

Bu the said himself that what he had done was unforgivable and their friends found it unacceptable. There is absolutely nothing that indicates that he didn't do anything but that the woman was just falsely accusing him of anything.

Yes, which could be warranted or could be what the coroner meant by 'cancel cuture.'

Bad-mouthing may be the only recourse. But it looks as if the young woman deliberately tried to isolate the young man. She may be justified, we cannot tell, but it is an awful warning that such behaviour may have dire consequences. She would have done better to talk to someone in an official capacity; her tutor, whatever counsellors there are at Oxford, rather than giving cryptic messages to the young man's friends. Given that, no-one jumps in the river because their friends start ostracising them if they don't already have mental health issues.
The other elephant in the room is the practice of having casual sex, which itself is likely to have consequences we don't expect. This sounds like their first encounter and they also sound a bit tipsy. Bad idea because it is likely to lead to regrets in someone. The entire thing may be that the girl felt uncomfortable having sex with someone who was in her friendship group but not in a personal relationship with her and came to the conclusion it made her feel uncomfortable around the boy - casual sex can have this effect, which is why we as a society used to warn against it.