Disgusting. Victim blaming is definitely universal - we see it all the time here in Israel.

I really don't think that's what is being said here. What I think is being said is that the dangers of date rape drugs is not as big as just getting way too hammered and being assaulted due to not being able to protect oneself. I don't think he hates women.

What I do think is that, in the UK at least, the reports of having your drink spiked and then being brought somewhere and waking up having been raped are not as prevalent as the educational resources about date rape and casual sexual encounter-framed violence would suggest. He's not saying it doesn't happen; what I think he's saying is that it's often used as a bogeyman to keep people from making the choice to drink too much -- however ineffective that bogeyman is.

Disgusting. Victim blaming is universal - we see it all the time in Israel/Palestine!

Again it seems that the spin doctors rear their ugly heads in the Daily Fail and the UK media generally! The problem here isn't with the study itself (I'd say any information we can get on any violent crime towards women can help us combat it) it's the way it's been interpreted and reported.

As Samhita rightly pointed out being near a rapist tends to make someone a little more susceptible to assault than anything (note sarcasm there), but the report does make some interesting points on how the media play a role in peoples' perceptions of dangers:

"Dr Burgess said: 'There have hardly been any cases where it has been proved that sedatives such as rohypnol and GHB have been used in a rape incident. Yet it has been a storyline that has appeared in virtually every TV soap. Maybe that tells us something about the programmes these women are watching. But it is concerning that women are more concerned about something that is incredibly unlikely ever to happen to them."

Actually, what it tells me is three things: first, he's a bit of a TV snob who doesn't like soaps much (neither do I, but I wouldn't care if anybody else did); second, the media has overemphasised the numbers of women drugged and raped to the detriment of all of us - knowing that rape and studies concerning rape are already underreported what had to be left out of the newspapers and TV soaps to put so much emphasis on the wrong thing? And has this harmed anyone, maybe because they were so concerned about something that was fairly unlikely to happen that they didn't realise the danger was closer than they thought?; and third that the Daily Fail wouldn't back you either way because it must somehow be your own fault - you can see it in the headline:

"Date-rape drug? No dear, you just had too much to drink"

Simultaneously victim-blaming and also incredibly condescending - nice. It's never occurred to me to shame any victim for assault, whether they were drunk, sober or whatever - they were still assaulted!! It still happened and it was still bad!! The fact that that stupid paper still doesn't realise that is a mystery to me - no wonder their sales have been dropping (yay!! Death to the Mail!!!)

The Daily Mail is a newspaper notorious for sensationalising and misrepresenting the conclusions of scientific and sociological studies. I couldn't find the actual journal article to read, but I would suspect the Daily Mail is twisting the conclusions of the study to support their own victim-blaming purposes.

Calling spiking of drinks an urban myth is dangerous because this belief is based on lack of detection which is not the same at all as proving that someone's drink wasn't spiked. Detecting date rape drugs is very difficult because once the effects of the drug wear off the detectability wears off as well.

The expert also focuses only on 2 drugs while those who spike drinks can use drugs like cocaine or other drugs which are more associated with recreational use. They can also spike an alcoholic drug with higher octane alcohol. Yet many so-called experts seem totally unaware of these possibilities and instead call women who believe they had their drinks spiked liars or delusional.

The first half of the research is quite acceptable, the fear that you may have had you drink spiked is much higehr than the likihood that your drink was actually spiked. More education on the relative effects of alcohol needed when you're growing up.

The second half, unacceptable. It's always the perpetrators fault, blaming the victim only disguises the real problem. That some people will happily take sexual pleasure out of a non-consensual encounter.

Science is good, it shows you what's real. The editorialising is usually never as good as it often flies right in the face of what the data has actually shown.

but (please don't flame this first part, i'm speaking from my own experience here) people actually do that. roofies are a socially acceptable way to black out, alcohol isn't. i can think of two friends off the top of my head who got sent to the ER for alcohol poisoning. when asked by anyone who wasn't there, they said it must have been a roofie. anyone who had been there - like me, waiting in the bathroom at the pizza place and trying to keep my roomie from passing out as she peed and vomited all over me - knew the truth, and she admitted it. but she was brought up in a really repressive household. someone spiking her lemonade made a more palatable story, and a more pitiable one. her parents thought she didn't drink at all. if they had known it was alcohol poisoning, they'd have been pissed. because it was roofies, they fawned over her. the only person i personally know who was roofied, was a guy.
honestly, i think you're fishing for trouble here because the daily mail IS so often a piece of crap. this article is saying that the idea that it's GHB that gets you date raped is leading people to underestimate the power of alcohol in facilitating bad situations and crime of all sorts including rape. sexual assault prevention resources play up getting drugged (never leave your drink alone!) and downplay the dangers of alcohol. gee i wonder why.
rape while drunk is more common than rape while drugged. when you tear down the people who say "alcohol is a problem" by calling them victim blamers every single time, you are preventing other women from getting proper information, and therefore making an informed decision about their choices. don't get me wrong - i go out and party with the best of them. but i have no illusions about the harm to myself that my choices can - not cause, because the cause is the assaulter - but crack the door to. i know the risks, and i make my choice. i go out, i drink. less if it's a new bar or an unfamiliar city, more if i'm with a group of friends who know me well enough to know when i'm about to do something stupid. because i know that i don't have to be drugged to be vulnerable. i'm already drugging myself, and i'm vulnerable enough stone cold sober.

I don't see how he's blaming any victims here at all. Seriously. Can someone walk me through it?

Also the likihood that anything is true is inversely proportional to the numbers of words it gets in the Daily Mail.

It's a authoritarian right wing rag that's only worth reading to see what the crazies think of you.

Sadly, I know this isn't an urban myth.
A few months ago my ex was drugged when she first started dating again. She is a teetotaler and the drink in question was Orange juice, so I highly doubt that she drunk at the time. Still after a few small sips from her drink she felt suddenly drowsy, and managed to excuse herself and go to the toilet where she called me.
We spend a few hours in the emergency room, and another few hours at the police station.
Though the Police clearly could she she was drugged (pupils and such), by the time they finally managed to do the blood test, no trace of the drugs were remaining.

All That being said, It supposedly doesn't happen much. The Police here takes it seriously, but there just aren't many reports, and with modern party-drugs which are very hard to trace even a few hours afterwards, even those few reports are near impossible to prosecute as without evidence it basically turns into a he-said she-said.
And that's only when reported. How many people will assume that they got way too drunk when they don't remember anything the next day?

It's rare, it's hard to prove, and due to the use of the drugs, often not remembered by the victim; but it's no myth.

This hair-trigger approach to calling out victim blaming tends to ridiculousness. Of course the Daily Mail is a bunch of sexist jerks. The Daily Mail can go to hell.

But if you refuse to admit that drinking too much increases the risk of sexual assault, and deny that the non-existence of "date rape drugs" in the UK has any relevance to the actual lives of women, it goes beyond willful ignorance. Promotion of that ideology is actively harmful to women. If you'd actually take a fucking second to try to learn something instead of instantly dismissing and vilifying whatever you come across, you might gain something of interest, like this, from the conclusion of that article:

"If [drug-facilitated sexual assault] provides an outlet for anxiety while shifting focus away from alcohol, it also distorts the central elements of sexual assault: the intention of an assailant to exert power over and violate the victim, and the loss of autonomy that the victim experiences as a result. The entire set of claims about why a victim was intoxicated is bound to smuggle back in blame of the victim and displaces attention from the perpetrator’s violence. It is significant that perpetrators play almost no descriptive role during interviews and focus groups. In reality, sexual assault upon intoxicated victims is overwhelmingly opportunistic in nature, where the victim consumes the drugs or alcohol knowingly and the assault is thus easier for a perpetrator to carry out (Horvarth and Brown 2007)." (from that evil evil study, page 860, emphasis added)

And, incidentally, the author who "hates women or is not a woman" is actually three authors, two of whom are women: Adam Burgess, Pamela Donovan and Sarah E. H. Moore. But, no, don't bother with that, go on. Who cares about even looking up the most simple information about whatever happens to attract your ire?

Here's the university's press release, from which the Daily Mail ripped its quotes, not that I expect you to read it: http://www.kent.ac.uk/news/stories/burgessspiking/2009 Why try to listen when it's so much more fun and self-righteous to vent instead?

I would like to issue a plea. When reporting on recent scientific work that gets covered in mainstream media, I would appreciate it if the Feministing writers could read the original scientific article being discussed, get an idea of how their research was conducted, and judge the authors/scientists based on their own words. This isn't the first post I've seen here that condemns a research paper as sexist, based on a Daily Mail (or similar) article summarizing it. These newspaper articles can be very misleading (because they writers are looking for an interesting "angle," they're lazy & didn't read the research, or they have an evident ideological slant, as is the case of this Mail piece).

And this blog post increases the confusion rather than clarifying -- claiming that the researcher "hates women or is not a woman" when two of the paper's three authors are women, for instance, as Cebes pointed out above, and failing to question which, if any, of the Mail article's "women drinking themselves into a stupor" stereotypes come from Burgess, Donovan and Moore's article.

I'll quote a few passages from Burgess et al.: "Routinized DFSA [drug facilitated sexual assault] is improbable as a widespread crime: it involves a stranger extracting an individual from her social group unnoticed, administering a substance undetected, precisely controlling drug effects, and reliably erasing memory of the experience." Sounds logical to me. "Large-scale blood tests on victims in the United Kingdom and United States have found little evidence of specific ‘date rape’ drugs being used in attacks (Slaughter 2000; Hindmarch and Brinkman 1999; Scott-Ham and Burton 2005; ACPO 2006; Hughes et al. 2007). Summarizing a consensus, Hindmarch and Brinkmann (1999: 225) conclude that ‘These data clearly indicate that there is no evidence of widespread use of flunitrazepam in sexual assault. Alcohol remains the substance most frequently associated with this type of crime’."

So the claim (that roofies aren't as common as people believe) comes from blood testing of rape victims, and the authors the sources for their claims. This doesn't mean they're saying drugging can't occur, or that it's a myth that it ever happens. But there's a disconnect between how common it is & how much people worry about it, and it's valid to ask why. I'm sure most Feministing readers would agree that rape can occur even if the victim hasn't been drugged and isn't physically incapacitated -- there's nothing particularly offensive about pursuing this line of inquiry.

Reading the entire British Journal of Criminology article requires a subscription, but surely someone at Feministing has access to an academic library database (or knows someone who does) and can find a way to read the article. Otherwise, blog readers don't get much out of reading a post like this.

"No dear, you just had too much to drink"

What a condescending asshole. If he wants to be taken seriously as a professional, he needs to sound more objective. This is sloppy reporting. What the fuck is this, an editorial?

And the sexualized image of young, attractive women with drinks in their hands, looking slightly buzzed? Real classy, that.

How ridiculous. Of course women should always be aware. Since we are women, we are more at risk of being sexually assaulted. But the 'idea' that date rape drugs are "incredibly unlikely" is complete shit. It is always a possibility. Although alcohol plays a role in making women vulnerable that is NEVER an excuse and that is NEVER a reason for claiming that "they asked for it". This infuriates me because this is just another aid for those who constantly claim that if a woman is raped she is lying or she is imagining things. Ridiculous. I hope society learns to see rape as a more serious issue than it does now.

Wait a minute. This "study" concludes "from interviews and surveys" (quote from the story) that guys aren't using date rape drugs, that it's only women getting too drunk? The only valid way to know if a woman is way drunk or has been drugged is toxicological testing, not guys claiming "No way, man" or even women saying "I think I was drugged."

The article itself is very interesting and it's argument is unexpected, considering how the DM presents it. Here's one of the concluding paragraphs:

Drink-spiking “distorts the central elements of sexual assault: the intention of an assailant to exert power over and violate the victim, and the loss of autonomy the victim experiences as a result. The entire set of claims about why a victim was intoxicated is bound to smuggle back in blame of the victim and displaces attention from the perpetrator’s violence. It is significant that the perpetrators play almost no descriptive role during interviews and focus groups”

The article itself is very interesting and its argument is unexpected, considering how the DM presents it. Here's one of the concluding paragraphs:

Drink-spiking “distorts the central elements of sexual assault: the intention of an assailant to exert power over and violate the victim, and the loss of autonomy the victim experiences as a result. The entire set of claims about why a victim was intoxicated is bound to smuggle back in blame of the victim and displaces attention from the perpetrator’s violence. It is significant that the perpetrators play almost no descriptive role during interviews and focus groups”

I just love this kind of discourse, honestly. I learn so much about my point of view and how it contrasts from others. I have to say as I was reading the article I was buying into the issues about date rape drugs and alcohol and whatnot. Then I read the commentary from the lovely people here at feministing, and completely changed my mind. I went on to read some of those comments and came to an idea of my own. I haven't read them all so i apologize if this has already been offered.

I find it problematic that people offer what women SHOULD do to prevent rape. Not necessarily in the sense of how this leads to victim blaming, although that is a significant problem, but in the idea that there is something that women SHOULD do to be acceptable. Instead perhaps a solution is simply to provide to people the way in which people are victimized as well as the ramifications of victimization, (e.g. people exploiting others with lowered/altered inhibitions; the psychological, social and other ramifications on the victim), and allow women and men to make a choice for themselves what they will do with that information. This would hopefully be a learning experience for both (potential) victims and (potential) perpetrators. For instance, it could allow (potential) victims to avoid situations in which their inhibitions are lowered if they believed that was the right choice. It could also lead to teaching (potential) perpetrators what their actions really mean, and many different situations in which their actions could be sexual assault/rape. This is of course in addition to an overall societal condemnation of rape. I'm sure there's a perspective of what i've just stated that will render it somewhat less than useful, and I look forward to such responses as a learning experience.

Nick