Americans wrestle with questions on accountability, gender relations

Amanda Shore, a 30year-old postdoctoral student at Rice University, is used to having the answers — or at least knowing where to find them. But as a U.S. Senate committee hearing for Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court looms amid allegations that he sexually assaulted women in high school and college, she finds herself locked in debates that feel unsolvable.

“When I talk about it with my boyfriend, we debate about what’s relevant, and what are the consequences if he gets confirmed,” Shore said Tuesday morning.

“Both of us agree there need to be more procedures for this, because it’s just kind of a big he-said, she-said in front of the Senate, so it’s hard to form an opinion,” she said. “We wish there was a more streamlined way to deal with these issues without making it just about opinion and feel arbitrary.”

She’s not alone. All

across the nation, people are grappling with big questions, like whether an adult should be held accountable for their actions as a teenager, and what the burden of proof should be for accusations of sexual assault in a job interview.

And the debates are only heating up as new developments unfold rapidly, including reports that Kavanaugh boasted about sexual conquests in his high school yearbook.

A hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled for Thursday, when both Kavanaugh and a California professor who accused the judge of assaulting her are set to testify.

“Everybody seems to be talking about it,” said Elizabeth Gregory, director of the women’s, gender and sexualities studies program at the University of Houston.

In the junior-level course Gregory teaches on gender and society, students speculated about how much weight would be given to the experience of Christine Blasey Ford, a mother of two who says that 35 years ago, when she was 15 and Kavanaugh was 17, he lay on top of her, pressing his hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming, and fumbled with her clothes in a drunken attempt to remove them.

No firm evidence

Like 63 percent of victims who have been sexually assaulted, according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, Ford never reported the incident. But she said it haunted her, and her therapist has notes about the alleged assault from sessions dating back years.

Otherwise, there is no evidence, just first-person accounts: An accusation from Ford and denials from both Kavanaugh and his high school classmate Mark Judge, who Ford said also was present.

In the second accusation, made this weekend, Kavanaugh’s former Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez said that Kavanaugh put his penis in her face while drunk at a college party, causing her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away. Some witnesses say they remember the incident; others deny that it happened. These cases are similar, in that way, to other public incidents of assault allegations in the past year, since the #MeToo movement began sweeping across the nation.

“No one is suggesting he should be put in prison for this,” said Tamler Sommers, an associate professor in the philosophy department and honors college at University of Houston. “If that was the thought, I think it would matter that the charges weren’t brought back at the time. But what people are suggesting is that he might not get a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court because of this.”

The Anita Hill case

This reminds Sommers of another messy confirmation: In 1991, attorney Anita Hill testified during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas that Thomas had sexually harassed her. Hill was grilled under oath. Her character was called into question. She was asked why she hadn’t reported it sooner, and what she stood to gain by bringing the allegations forward at that time.

Thomas was confirmed to the court.

“I think in some ways, the Clarence Thomas hearing was a precedent, and the same sort of issues that affected that case may affect this one, which is that there was no objective way of discerning to what extent the allegations were true,” Sommers said.

There is a way to determine that truth in this situation.

“I think the only instrument we have that is of any use to deciding whether something happened or not, flawed as it is, is a jury trial,” said Mark Bennett, a Houston criminal attorney. “That’s why we have jury trials: Because accusations can ruin people’s future lives, and maybe should if they’re true, but the only way we have as a society to figure that out is a jury trial.”

And while most 35-yearold claims of assault would not be prosecuted, Maryland has no statute of limitations for felony sex crimes. Last week, the police chief in Montgomery County, where the alleged incident took place, said he would open an investigation if Ford pressed charges.

Any criminal investigation likely would not affect the timeline of Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

Presidential tweeting

On Friday, President Donald Trump entered the fray, via Twitter.

“I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place,” he wrote.

The missive caught the attention of Police Chief Art Acevedo, who replied, “Sexual assault & domestic violence are (two) of the most under-reported crimes in society, this is a fact & in the past the law enforcement community has not done a good job of creating safe spaces for victims.”

In a phone interview a few hours later, Acevedo added that “we want victims to know that the starting place for them with law enforcement is that we believe you.”

It is with that benefit of the doubt that Tom Kolditz, founding director of Rice University’s Doerr Institute for New Leaders, delves into the murky question of whether the accusations are pertinent.

“Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior — not that anyone expects him to assault a woman — but in terms of us gauging what his values are, how he views men’s control over women, that’s pretty consistent over the span of a person’s life,” Kolditz said. “And we certainly saw the rejection of Judge Roy Moore when he was accused of somewhat similar behavior, when he was much younger.”

Still, bad behavior in one’s youth shouldn’t be an immediate disqualifier for public office, said Kolditz.

“In my business, in leadership development, we talk about crucible events — points in your life that are often not pleasant. And they disrupt the way that you viewed the world previously,” he said. “So in an example of a young person who used a gun in a robbery, his being held accountable for that is a crucible event.”

‘No crucible event’

Being charged with a crime and facing consequences provides a young person a chance to pivot in a new direction, Kolditz said. He points to Congressman Beto O’Rourke’s admission that he was twice arrested decades ago — for trespassing and drunken driving — as an example of someone who faced a consequence and made a demonstrable change.

“We know of no crucible event in Judge Kavanaugh’s past,” Kolditz said. “We know of no point where he said his treatment or view of women was entirely incorrect, and pushed himself to a new level of moral cognitive development.”

Our nation is often split on whether to grant someone a second chance. And the idea of forgiveness in this particular case cannot be divorced from its political context, said Bennett, the criminal attorney.

“We’re generally a very unforgiving society, and the people who are most in favor of this being ignored, coincidentally, are politically the people who would be harshest on the 17-yearold black kid caught with drugs — some crime that didn’t hurt anybody,” Bennett said. “If this signaled a change in our society’s philosophy toward people who did bad things when they were 17, I’d say that’s great. But I don’t think it is. I think this is situational.”

Further, he said, crimes with victims — like sexual assault — carry added complications.

And for victims, what happened in their teens can have lingering effects for decades.

“Someone’s behaviors as a young person matter because the experience of young people matter,” said Laura Palumbo, spokeswoman for the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. “The stigma of blame and shame that people who experience sexual abuse early on in life carry is something that really shapes their identity and their worldview. And for many of those survivors, they do wait a very long time to come forward, and in that entire time, they are carrying that burden of the abuse that has happened to them.”

The complexity of the Kavanaugh case shouldn’t stop Americans from asking tough questions that won’t always lead to a crystallized answer, said Gregory, from the University of Houston.

That’s what she preaches to her women’s studies students.

“It’s muddy. And it’s also an opportunity to make a kind of statement that moves us out of the mud,” she said.

‘Launching point’

What happens this week will set new precedents and thresholds. It will give society answers to these big, seemingly impossible questions.

At least there is hope in that, said Mahdi Fariss, a senior at Rice University, majoring in economics.

“I want to make sure we’re using this as a launching point to better understand how we hold people — regardless of politics or partisanship — accountable,” Fariss said Tuesday morning as he volunteered at a table registering students to vote.

“Holding people accountable for their actions, thinking critically about what it means to atone for those things, and being willing to empathize with those we have conversations with, and let go of ourselves when we listen — so long as we’re doing those things, progress is inevitable.”