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Avoiding this:

An estimated one in five American female college students say that they have been the victim of sexual assault. …

It is striking how underappreciated the power of myopia is.

In the Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation study, students were asked to list the measures they thought would be most effective in reducing sexual assault.

At the top of that list they put harsher punishment for aggressors, self-defense training for victims, and teaching men to respect women more.

How many thought it would be “very effective” if they drank less? Thirty-three percent.

How many thought stronger restrictions on alcohol on campus would be very effective? Fifteen percent.

These are contradictory positions.

Students think it is a good idea to be trained in self-defense, and not such a good idea to clamp down on drinking.

But what good is knowing the techniques of self-defense if you’re blind drunk?

Students think it’s a really good idea if men respect women more. But the issue is not how men behave around women when they are sober. It is how they behave around women when they are drunk, and have been transformed by alcohol into a person who makes sense of the world around them very differently.

Respect for others requires a complicated calculation in which one party agrees to moderate their own desires, to consider the longer-term consequences of their own behavior, to think about something other than the thing right in front of them. And that is exactly what the myopia that comes with drunkenness makes it so hard to do. …

At the end of the trial, Emily Doe read a letter out loud to the court, addressed to Brock Turner. Every young man and woman who goes to a bar or a fraternity party should read Emily Doe’s letter. It is brave and eloquent and a powerful reminder of the consequences of sexual assault: that what happens between two strangers, in the absence of real consent, causes genuine pain and suffering.

Source: Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell