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Emily Yoffe is not an objective arbiter on this topic. She has been writing against first the existence of, and then the response to, campus sexual assault for
by cadlin 9y ago
Emily Yoffe is not an objective arbiter on this topic. She has been writing against first the existence of, and then the response to, campus sexual assault for five years. That doesn't prove her wrong, but she does have an agenda.
I would point to several red flags regarding this article.
1st: If she sought comment from Rebecca Campbell, it's not mentioned anywhere in the piece. An article in a magazine like The Atlantic should include, at the very least (we reached out to Rebecca Campbell, but she declined to comment). (Edit: This is incorrect. She does mention a conversation with Rebecca Campbell near the bottom of the article.)
2nd: All of the people who firmly agree with her in the article are lawyers, some for those accused of sexual assault. The scientists she interviews are more circumspect. She interviews scientists who have doubts and uses lawyers to "prove" she's right.
3rd: She doesn't interview anyone who specializes in sexual assault research or work. There is no quote from anyone defending this theory or its applicability to their work. There are no interviews with people who have claimed this has happened to them, either (or who can say that's not what happened to them).
4th: There's no comment from any of the schools saying they use this research as a major part of their sexual assault prevention strategy. Once again, there's no "no comment" response either.
5th: There's not a single outside link in the piece (who is this band of self-styled experts schools are relying on? Who knows). If you look at Ta-Nehisi Coates's recent article, which is excerpted from a book, there are links, so it's not an editorial policy at The Atlantic.
This is shoddy journalism, and I encourage anyone reading it to take it with a grain of salt.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoCampbell’s claim that a sexual-assault victim’s memory consists of completely accurate but disorganized fragments contradicts fundamental scientific knowledge of the nature of memory, McNally told me. “The brain is not a videotape machine,” he said. “All of our memories are re-constructed. All of our memories are incomplete in that sense.” Each time we recall an event, it is being reassembled, and sometimes changed by the very process of recall. What's shoddy about this? It's an important observation that has been proven time and again. Dismissing the entire piece as shoddy and circumspect is just as much of an agenda. Are we certain that the malleability of memory has nothing to do with the high rate of innocent people on death row? It's supposedly about 4%. I wonder how many of them can be traced back to witnesses relying on memory rather than hard evidence implicating them. That's not directly related to the piece, but the topic seems worth talking about.
- cadlin 9y agoI didn't call the scientists' work shoddy, nor did I call the article circumspect.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoWell, no. But the scientists' work is being highlighted by the journalism, which was. The scientists themselves were called circumspect.
- imh 9y ago>1st: If she sought comment from Rebecca Campbell, it's not mentioned anywhere in the piece. An article in a magazine like The Atlantic should include, at the very least (we reached out to Rebecca Campbell, but she declined to comment). This is straight from the article: >I spoke with Campbell about all this last fall, and in our conversation, she said... If you're not gonna read the article, you've gotta at least ctrl+f before saying that.
- cadlin 9y agoI'm sorry, I missed that. I'll leave it in, but I'm wrong about it.
- danieltillett 9y agoWhy don't you leave it in and add a footnote to your original post to acknowledge you were wrong?
- cadlin 9y agoDone.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- AlexCoventry 9y agoI've never seen an arbitration of such a vague and emotionally charged conflict which I would consider objective. Do you know of any? It would make interesting reading.