耶鲁强奸案引发争议：性行为中什么是“同意”？

赛义夫拉·汗被控于2015年万圣节之夜强奸在耶鲁大学的一名同学，周三，陪审团经三小时的审议后宣判他无罪。JESSICA HILL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

When a jury in the trial of a Yale college student on rape charges returned a verdict of not guilty on Wednesday, after barely three hours of deliberations, the message seemed clear: Evidence that might warrant punishment from a campus panel was insufficient for a court of law.

周三，在一场耶鲁大学学生强奸罪的审判中，陪审团经过仅三小时的审议就做出了被告无罪的裁断，他们的信息似乎很清楚：可能导致校园委员会做出惩罚的证据，不足以在法庭上证明有罪。

At the heart of the trial was the question of whether the complainant could have agreed to have sex with the defendant, Saifullah Khan, 25, on Halloween night in 2015, when the two found themselves in her dorm room after a night filled with alcohol, text messages and conflicting accounts of flirtatious behavior. The complainant was not named in the arrest warrant application.

审判的核心是，2015年万圣节之夜，原告是否可能同意与被告——25岁的赛义夫拉·汗(Saifullah Khan)发生性关系，那天晚上，两人喝了不少酒，互发短信，并发生了一系列轻佻行为（两人对此有互相矛盾的叙述），之后原告发现两人置身自己的宿舍。原告的名字没有出现在逮捕令申请之中。

Had the case gone before Yale’s own internal panel, the outcome might have been different. The panel, the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct, uses a “preponderance of the evidence” standard in determining responsibility, and its members are trained in a notion of consent where only “yes means yes.”

如果该案件在耶鲁的校内委员会做出决定之前完成审理，结果可能会有所不同。这个名为不当性行为全校委员会(University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct)的机构在确定责任时使用了一种“优势证据”标准，其成员所接受的训练认为，所谓的同意，就是“说是才是同意”。

But the jurors seemed to have come to the case with a different understanding of what it means to show consent, highlighting the divide between the standards of sexual behavior espoused in freshman orientation programs and campus brochures, and those that operate in courts of law.

但在此案中，陪审员似乎对于何谓表达同意有着不同理解，这突出了新生入学培训计划和校园宣传手册中主张的性行为标准，与法庭上的标准存在分歧。

One, speaking anonymously after the verdict out of hesitancy to speak for other jurors, said the panel members asked themselves whether there was “enough evidence to show that there could not have been consent. And we couldn’t get there.”

做出裁断后，一位因不想代表其他陪审员发言而要求匿名的陪审员说，当时陪审员们自问，是否“有足够证据表明，双方之间不可能存在同意。我们无法得出这一结论。”

James Galullo, another juror, said he did not understand the outrage that the verdict had inspired on campus, among students who wrote angry opinion pieces for the campus newspaper or took to social media to denounce the outcome.

另一名陪审员詹姆斯·加卢洛(James Galullo)说，他不理解该判决在校园内激发的愤慨——学生们为校报撰写愤怒的评论文章，或者在社交媒体上谴责这个结果。

“I just think it’s lack of experience in the world,” Mr. Galullo, 61, said. “The jurors were all basically middle-aged. They were able to see their way through all the noise.”

“我觉得这是缺乏阅历的表现，”61岁的加卢洛说。“陪审员们基本上都是中年人。他们能够排除所有的干扰，看清事实。”

Alexandra Brodsky, a lawyer at the National Women’s Law Center who graduated from Yale College and Yale Law School, said, “Schools have adopted consent as an educational tool, but that sometimes means we end up using words that mean different things in different contexts.”

全国女性法律中心(National Women’s Law Center)律师亚历山德拉·布罗德斯基(Alexandra Brodsky)毕业于耶鲁学院和耶鲁法学院，她说：“学校已将性行为中的同意作为一种教育工具，但这有时意味着，我们所使用的词，在不同语境下可能会有不同的意思。”

“There are many forms of violence that would be condemned on campus, where a prosecutor would have trouble getting a jury to convict,” she added.

“有许多形式的暴力在校园里会受到谴责，但检察官却无法说服陪审团做出定罪，”她补充说。

But even college students disagree on the language of consent. A 2015 poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and The Washington Post found that 47 percent of current and recent college students said that someone undressing themselves signaled agreement to further sexual activity; 49 percent said it did not.

但即使是大学生对性同意的语言也有不同意见。凯泽家族基金会(Kaiser Family Foundation)和《华盛顿邮报》于2015年进行的一项调查发现，47%的在读和毕业不久的大学生表示，脱衣服表示同意进一步的性活动；49%表示并非如此。

Defense lawyers did not necessarily paint a flattering picture of their client, who acknowledged having sex with the woman, despite the fact that she had been drinking to the point of vomiting several times. He also said that he had called his longtime girlfriend, with whom he had an open relationship, from the complainant’s bedroom.

此案的辩护律师并不需要美化自己的客户，他承认与该女子发生了性关系，尽管事实上她确实已经喝醉，而且呕吐了好几次。他还表示，他在原告的卧室打电话给曾与他有过开放式关系的长期女友。

But Mr. Khan’s lawyers pressed the woman on the witness stand about messages she had sent inviting Mr. Khan to dinner, or writing “lol” — short for “laugh out loud” — the morning after the alleged assault, when she woke up with bruising on her legs. Norman Pattis, one of the defense lawyers, asked if the messages indicated her interest in Mr. Khan. She replied that she spoke to everyone in that manner.

但是，汗的律师们向证人席上的那位女士出示了她邀请汗吃晚饭的短信，以及在声称的性侵发生后的上午，当她醒来发现腿上瘀伤后，还给汗发送带有“lol”字样的短信——意味“哈哈大笑”。辩护律师之一诺曼·帕蒂斯(Norman Pattis)问，这些信息是否表明她对汗感兴趣。她回答说，她和所有人说话都是这样的。

Mr. Pattis also asked about a screenshot that she had sent to Mr. Khan of a Shakespeare sonnet that seemed to imply a romantic interest. She replied that she had been joking; the screenshot was from a popular campus Facebook group, where jokes are often posted.

帕蒂斯还询问了原告发给汗的一首莎士比亚十四行诗的截图，那似乎暗示着，她对汗有性兴趣。原告回答说，她是在开玩笑。那张截图来自一个很受欢迎的校园Facebook群，经常有人在那里发布笑话。

Dan Erwin, who handled jury selection for the defense, said that they had favored “older jurors, 30 to middle-age” because “there was a seriousness about them insofar as none of them accepted, condoned or denied the existence of misconduct, harassment or assault, but they all seriously engaged with the need for due process.”

负责为辩方挑选陪审团的丹·欧文(Dan Erwin)表示，他们倾向于挑选“相对年长的陪审员，30岁至中年”，因为“他们都是很郑重的，他们都不接受、不宽恕、不否认不当行为、骚扰或性侵的存在，但他们同样严肃地认为，要走正当程序”。

The juror who spoke anonymously said that the panel had not focused on the banter or on Mr. Pattis’s suggestion that the woman’s Halloween costume had been too sexy. Instead, the jurors focused on evidence like security camera footage that showed the complainant and Mr. Khan walking back to her dorm room. The complainant had testified that the footage showed her so drunk that she was unable to support herself, her leg dragging behind her.

那位不愿透露姓名的陪审员表示，陪审团没有把注意力放在这个玩笑或帕蒂斯认为原告的万圣节服装太性感这个观点上。相反，陪审员们关注的是证据，比如安保摄像头拍到的原告和汗走回她的宿舍的录像。原告声称，录像显示，她喝得酩酊大醉，身子都撑不起来，腿拖着地。

“We looked at and we looked at and we looked at that video of them walking,” the juror said. “We could not see her leg dragging. We could not see her eyes shut. We could not see what she said.”

“他们走路的视频，我们看了一遍又一遍，”这位陪审员说。“我们没有看到她的腿是拖着的。也没有看到她闭着眼睛。我们没有看到她所说的那种情况。”

Mr. Galullo said the rigorous standard of proof required, coupled with the length of Mr. Khan’s possible prison sentence, weighed heavily upon him.

加卢洛表示，严格的证据标准，再加上汗可能被判入狱的刑期，让他感觉陪审团责任重大。

“We wanted really be sure that he was guilty,” he said. “These kids went through a lot. It was really very, very sad. You had tears in your eyes — for both of them.”

“我们真的想要确定他是否有罪，”他说，“两个孩子经历了很多。这真的特别令人难过。你的眼里含着泪水——为他们俩流的泪。”

Mr. Khan may still face a hearing at Yale. He was suspended by the university shortly before he was arrested and charged, and his lawyers said that Yale’s disciplinary hearing had been delayed pending the criminal trial. That panel would only have to determine that it was “more likely than not” that he was in the wrong to find him responsible.

汗可能仍将面临耶鲁大学的听证会。在被逮捕和指控之前不久，他被学校暂时停学了，他的律师表示，耶鲁的纪律听证会在等待刑事审判期间被推迟了。纪律委员会只需确定，他“更可能”犯了错，需要承担责任。

Mr. Khan’s lawyers are seeking to have him reinstated. A university spokesman declined to confirm or deny the existence of an internal complaint.

汗的律师在寻求让他恢复学籍。该校的一名发言人拒绝证实或否认存在内部投诉。

Several experts agreed that the distance between campus and criminal understandings of permissible sexual conduct may continue to widen, especially as conversations about sex and power continue to evolve.

几名专家认为，校园和刑事法庭对可以进行的性行为的理解分歧可能会继续扩大，特别是在关于性和权力的对话继续发展之时。

While juries must interpret legal definitions of rape, students and administrators have increasingly sought to define “ethical sex,” said Vanessa Grigoriadis, author of a book on campus consent policies and a contributing editor at The New York Times Magazine. Unlike criminal courts, Ms. Grigoriadis said, campus communities are quicker to denounce sexual encounters that are “immoral but not criminal.”

瓦妮莎·格里戈里亚季斯(Vanessa Grigoriadis)曾写过一本关于校园同意政策的书，她也是《纽约时报杂志》的特约编辑。她表示，虽然陪审团必须解释强奸的法律定义，但学生和学校的管理人员越来越多地试图定义“遵守道德的性行为”。格里戈里亚季斯表示，与刑事法庭不同，校园社区更倾向于谴责“不道德但不违法”的性行为。

Jaclyn Friedman, a consent educator and author, said that in the end, “Consent is not a legalistic construction. It gets translated into law, and should be reflected in our laws, but it is actually a moral value.”

关于如何表达同意的教育者兼作家贾克琳·弗里德曼(Jaclyn Friedman)最后表示，“同意不是一个法律概念。它被阐释成了法律——它是应该反映在我们的法律中——但它实际上是一种道德价值。”

Cheryl P. Weinstock、Kristin Hussey和Graham Ambrose对本文有报道贡献。

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