"Can't consent" is different than "lack of consent", which is different than "consenting", etc. Consent is a highly varied and complex subject. There's explicit consent, implicit consent, informed consent, implied consent, non-consent, consent agreement violation, consensual non-consent, re-established consent, etc etc. Legally speaking (Note that I am not a lawyer) in America, there's very few laws that determine what is consensual or not. Usually it has to be determined by a jury when it goes to trial. It's because of this that, legally speaking, having alcohol does not alone remove the ability to consent in all cases.
Non-legally-speaking, I think you missed my original point. Nowhere in my commentary, nor in the study, does it say that anyone was actually intoxicated past the point of being able to consent. It merely says that within the legal framework someone could have been held liable for non-consensual sex. All this requires is that the person was intoxicated (about .08 BAC, or 1 beer, in the US).
If you feel like condemning people for this, so be it. All i'm saying is a study that generalizes based on guidelines like this is flawed, amongst other things.
But that definition is ridiculously broad, criminalizing a large part of normal sexual behavior, and also one-sided, in that two drunk people having sex means the guy is at fault.
"While it can be difficult to determine guilt in a single case, my intuition is that a person independently accused of assault by multiple people is quite unlikely to be innocent."
Just so we're clear here: intuition is a heuristic, which is incredibly flawed and only intended to be used as a potential risk indicator for split-second decisions. Any time you hear of something risky you are more inclined to believe it because to not believe it would potentially open yourself up to risk. The only way to mitigate it is to have additional information or motive that overrides the unknown risk.
Back to the model: they cite one study on sexual assault. Do you know how many actual studies there have been on sexual assault? Not many. Do you know how many of them had widely varying results? Most of them. Do you know how many had different methodologies which changed the nature of the model? All of them. So I guess let's ignore that someone could probably pick a different study that would change the results.
So what does this particular study say? The study involved asking 2,000 men at one college in one state about their sex lives. (Random sampling? Who needs that?) Of those men, about six percent admitted to sex that fell under the legal definition of rape without consent of the woman, which includes force or alcohol.
Consider for a moment that the legal guidelines basically say that if you have a bottle of wine with your girlfriend and you end up in bed together, it's rape if there wasn't a consent agreement. In this case they're only asking the men and making a judgement based on the legal framework, and not asking the women about their relationship or if there was consent, which could possibly change the results. But anyway,
"I think the UVA episode illustrates precisely why statistics are so important -- because anything can happen in a single story, making it a risky thing to hang a cause on."
So why would you create a model based on a single limited study, and not at the very least recreate your model based on the data from other studies?
"Regardless of what really happened at UVA, the broader trend is clear: the rate of campus sexual assaults is high (20%, says CDC, although better data should be collected); the rate of false accusations is low (this review cites 6 studies which all yield estimates between 2% and 8%, lower than the rate of false reports for car theft)."
Another study said the campus assaults were 90%. The CSA final report put it at 13.7%. And (all) the false accusation studies were collected and analyzed by Philip N.S. Rumney and determined that due to the unreliable research methodologies used, along with unreliable judgements by law enforcement, it was impossible to give a plausible statistic.
I've always found that people rely on statistics when they want a nice simple number to sum up their opinions, and don't want to deal with the fact that there is no simple, clean way to summarize complicated, wide-ranging circumstances, events and behaviors.