I don't think mandated reporters don't have to report 3rd party accounts, and the answer is obvious. The cops don't run the case.

I don't think the mandated reporting is a good idea but ffs the posting itt is epically bad because you guys have decided dib is 'bad' or whatever.

I mean, I'm not intentionally snarky here, I'm genuinely curious how this whole mandated reporting thing works. If the girl doesn't want to say anything about it, is the police investigation called off?

Asking questions of substance about the vaguely proposed policy is bad posting, Trolly. ikes already said so.

This is precisely the problem you and the #dudeliterally contingent ITT are having. All the "OMG vague!" is really "OMG IDK how mandated reporting works!"

You know how you and your buds LOVE telling people you disagree with that they #dudeliterally have no idea what they're talking about? How it's not your job to educate them?

Well...you literally don't know what you're talking about, and it's not my job to educate you. The answers can be easily found through a Google search. Knock yourself out.

DIB, I'm no big-city lawyer, but I'm pretty sure if I go to the cops and say "Suzie told me she was raped by Bill," that's hearsay. The cops can't prosecute a case based on that.

I think it's clearly impossible to prosecute a case of sexual assault where the victim is entirely uncooperative, but even accepting that there could still be some benefit to mandatory reporting. Maybe not enough to justify the costs/downsides, but at least it's not obvious to me either way. There is the possibility that mandatory reporting will encourage more victims to prosecute and to come forward, that it could reduce the possibility of the kind of transfer-and-re-offend problem mentioned earlier, etc etc.

I don't know how to find out the effects of a requirement short of trying it, which is problematic in itself, but I think the outline of a mandatory reporting policy is obvious enough that the objections from the proposals being too vague is silly.

I see.

Totally dude, they would just shrug, say, "That's hearsay bro," and move on with their day. Ditto if you tell them Suzie said Bill fired his gun at her or beat her with a baseball bat.

Again, get informed. It's almost as if you're proud of your ignorance and are trying to show it off.

The typical standard applied is "has reason to believe" or (where stronger statutes exist) "ought to have reason to believe." A third party account would be sufficient to be turned over to the legal authorities.

What the cops are supposed to do is a slightly different issue, but I would propose that they are required to not ask the victim whether they want to press charges and to turn over the results of their investigation to the prosecutors.

Victims don't prosecute - prosecutors prosecute. Victims would be more likely to cooperate if they weren't asked if they want to press charges (see every study ever on opt-in vs. opt-out framing of decision making).

I fail to see any costs/downsides of consequence.

I think the concern is that mandatory reporting could discourage some victims from coming forward in the first place. Clearly its important that as many people come forward as possible, not only to punish offenders, but also to offer victims needed support.

Yes I know. I just condensed down "encourage more victims to cooperate with police investigations and prosecutors" because I'm too long-winded anyway

As far as costs, presumably for there to be a benefit there has to be an increased number of investigations by police, which certainly has a cost to it. If the investigations lead to reasonable arrests and convictions, then good. If they have a very low success rate then you could question whether it's worth it

That is a valid concern. In real life we know that it didn't affect child abuse and domestic violence victims likelihood of seeking help.

The cost of increased investigations is negligible. The cops presumably are already on the payroll. Giving them something to do other than shooting random black people would be a net good.

I'm not super interested in increasing arrests and convictions. I am interested in reducing the incidence of rape. If I were interested in reducing speeding, I'd not ask motorists whether they wanted to press charges on their fellow motorists.

I'm also interested in reducing self-blaming by victims, which is a nice side effect of not asking them if they want to press charges.

I fully support not asking victims if they want to press charges, and also the cops shooting less black dudes.

I'm assuming that if mandatory reporting reduces the incidence of rape that this would be correlated to the investigations that stem from those reports leading to more charges being filed, and convictions handed down, but I'll allow that just the threat of reporting and investigation may be a (marginally distinct) deterrent.

This is a valid concern, and it's been discussed in related threads for awhile now.

In my (very relevant) experience, letting victims know that you're obligated to report instances of abuse/neglect to the authorities doesn't discourage reporting. In fact, there have been many times when a teenager has told me they had something to tell me but that it needed to be kept a secret. I give my shpeal about the nature of my job and the reasons for that being not possible, and sure enough - either in that moment or at some later time - the client divulges their story anyway. Now, will this happen with older adolescents and young adults in a college setting? Maybe not as frequently, maybe so. I'm honestly not sure. But will it be some drastic decrease? I highly doubt it.

On the flip side, consider the benefits.

Over the course of 4 years in the United States, there's approximately a 1 in 140 chance any given female over 12 will experience a sexual assault, and there's a 40% chance that these assaults will be reported to the police. This is based on quick calcs using US population and sexual assault frequency and might be off. At college? 1 in 5. And of these victims, only 12% get reported to the police! Making the picture even uglier, 90% of these assaults are committed by serial offenders. 90%.

So we've got a context where sexual assaults are more prevalent than the general population by many orders of magnitude, where the majority of the assaults are by serial rapists, and where there is like 300 or 400% less chance that the assault will be reported to law enforcement.

I mean think about it: How much less reporting would there need to be to offset the benefits outlined above? You'd be sacrificing the immediate benefits of raising the report-to-LEOs rate from 12% to 100%, as well as the natural consequences associated with this. I mean seriously now, don't you think the 12% vs 40% has something to do with the fact that so much rape occurs at college? The prevalence of rape in the general population has dropped SUBSTANTIALLY (~50%) right alongside the changing attitudes about rape and approach law enforcement has taken over the past 20 years. There's no reason to believe this wouldn't happen if/when schools began taking a different approach as well.

The answers to the specifics about your proposal can be found through a Google search? What should I search for?

Seriously, Brian, you're not a lawyer either, right? Like you don't really understand what this:
Is gibberish. I don't think you understand the basics of criminal procedure in this country. Now, granted, that puts your miles ahead of DIB who doesn't know we have civil and criminal court, but... what?

Brian, if we were to fill in some gaps in your argument here and assume that you are actually advocating for a new policy but are just wording it slightly off, I think the actual policy you want here is punishing victims who don't testify against their own rapists. That's the meaningful change you're advocating, again, if we give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you're actually advocating for a meaningful change rather than just doing random legal-ish word association.

Why does Fly even respond. He offers no content but baseless criticism of people's knowledge and experience paired with an unsubstantiated accusation of harm to victims. He speaks of "justice" and behaves unjust. Such behavior is a discredit to the just cause.

Well, yes, those are all examples of hearsay. Without any other evidence, there's nothing the cops can do in any of those situations.

There is a difference between hearsay as being admissible in court and being able to investigate based on hearsay. Police absolutely have to investigate based on hearsay or otherwise only crimes directly seen by the officer would ever be investigated.

Is the deterrent factor that small?

Not sure if there are decent stats on this sort of thing as it's hard to measure but I suspect a lot of men will think twice if they are aware of a contemporary who got into serious trouble for doing something similar. Too many think it's some trivial act and/or they wont get into trouble for it. As each offender commits more than 1 such assault on average, there's a multiplier effect for anyone who is deterred.

In college it's almost 6 assaults per offender.

"if they are aware of a contemporary who got into serious trouble" seems to imply arrest at minimum and maybe conviction? If so, it doesn't really say anything about whether the mere threat of arrest and conviction is a deterrent in and of itself regardless of how often reports lead to arrests/convictions, or how large that extra deterrent effect is.

The original context was about the costs and benefits of mandatory reporting. I think the 30k foot view is that, given we think there is a problem of sexual assault on campuses that reporting is supposed to address, if it leads to an increase in arrests and convictions that would almost certainly justify the extra burdens placed on reporters. And it's hopefully obvious that I'm not suggesting that the "burden" of a police investigation is a cost that shouldn't be borne in that case.

But imagine you implement mandatory reporting, a lot of reports are made, but they rarely ever lead to prosecutable cases. In that case, it would be reasonable to question whether the policy led to any benefit that justified its cost, and it would also be reasonable to expect the deterrent effect to be much smaller. By saying there may be a marginal deterrent effect anyway I'm acknowledging that the deterrent effect of unsuccessful investigations is not zero, but presumably it would be small, and in this case the description of a contemporary who got "into serious trouble" would be far less likely.

The idea works based on people being educated that reporting is going to happen. As DIB pointed out, the way a reporter is trained to engage a victim is part of the methodology of insuring their trust and comfort in facing their attacker. Students would know from day one, in the school handbook and orientation activities, who the mandatory sexual assault reporters are and how it works.

Is the argument rapist are more likely to kill their victims to insure silence due to an increase of people obligated to speak out a factor or just an imaginary, outlier risk?

Currently, 12% of sexual assaults on campus' are reported to law enforcement. That's 3.33 times less than the national average.

Mandated reporting would make that number 100%, meaning approximately 8 times more rapists would be arrested and convicted all things being equal (reporting frequency, conviction rate, etc).

So, wouldn't reporting have to decrease by over 800% under the proposed system for it to not be +EV? To say that this would be highly unlikely would be a dramatic understatement.