Final Version

• The sad truth of the matter is that we are a society in which a woman somewhere is beaten, in her home, every few minutes. Husbands commit forcible rape upon their wives, every single day. Any adolescent girl who through choice or circumstance associates unsupervised with adult males--including all too often relatives such as uncles and cousins, or co-resident sexual partners of her mother or other relatives--is likely to find herself initiated in what is at best a semi-consensual setting, and long before the age of consent. Young adult women report rates of abuse from puberty on that we should take seriously and be horrified about; every year I meet law students whose lives have been harmed, whose trauma has been severe. This society tolerates levels of brutality to and sexual mistreatment of women that should be a source of militant determination to everyone who lives here. Instead, we excuse ourselves by pointing out that few parts of the world are substantially better and many are inexpressibly worse. That excuse is obnoxious crap. But by the same token, we aren't exactly being realistic when we sit wondering how to use the criminal justice process to deal with the cases of mistaken understanding of consent while all the rest of the brutality goes on unchecked around us. You are right that we have work to do in the culture. But we should be designing that work with a view of the problem as a whole, not merely any part of it.