In addition to widespread underreporting and defective procedures for handling campus rape, another fundamental problem is confusion over the very definition of rape. Yale redefined sexual assault among students as any "nonconsensual sexual contact," where consent must be a prior "unambiguous" "agreement" to each "specific" touching, whether or not consented to in the past. This sounds great until you think about it. If two Yale students are kissing and one of them touches the other sexually, that person has apparently committed sexual assault even if they've done it before. Other colleges tell students that sex with someone intoxicated is always assault. And in the past, schools have warned that sex could be deemed coercive if there were "power differentials" between students, "real or perceived," like if an undergrad slept with a graduate teaching assistant, or if a student felt "psychologically pressured."
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