My firm represents a number of college students who have been accused of sexual assault on campus. One thing that’s happening with these cases highlights a lazy, lamentable tradition in how Americans look at punishment.

A little background: For the last two years, campus sexual assault has commanded a tremendous amount of national attention. The Department of Education has launched a massive campaign to make sure colleges and universities protect women who have been sexually assaulted and prevent sexual assault from happening.

This is, of course, laudable. Sexual assault is a terrible crime, and we should do everything we can to prevent it and punish it on campus — and everywhere else.

The cases we see at our firm are not, though, what you imagine when you think of campus sexual assault.

The common image is of sexual assault is of a woman saying “no” as a man overpowers her. Vice President Biden told the country that “no means no,” and he’s right. But the cases we see aren’t that easy. We don’t see cases where a guy at a fraternity is accused of drugging a woman — or forcing her to drink until she’s inert — then gratifying himself as she lies unmoving.

Instead, the cases we see are much more ambiguous.

Many schools have “affirmative consent” policies, which require that a person receive an affirmative statement of consent before each escalation in sexual activity. While these are easy to write, they’re difficult to implement fairly — particularly against a background of what we, as a society, communicate about how sex and consent work.

Schools are, in essence, establishing new ground rules of sexual engagement. The sexual assault cases we see are not ones where broader societal norms of how sex should work are violated; they’re cases where a school’s new rules are broken.

Feminists — and I count myself as one, for what it’s worth (like Justin Trudeau) — have rightly criticized rape culture. For centuries, our culture has told us that men are to be the sexual aggressors and women to be the pursued. From Shakespeare’s Helena’s lament that “we cannot fight for love as men may do, we should be wooed and were not meant to woo” to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” to this holiday season’s Bloomingdale’s ad suggesting that a man should “Spike his best friend’s eggnog” we, as a culture, are neck deep in cultural messages that men should pursue women and bed them through charm, force, or booze.

Women, according to these messages, are “not meant to woo,” they are to resist, even when they’d like things to move forward. (On that, here’s a great piece from Jezebel on the difficulties of consent — “Was I raped?“).

Boys see these images as they turn into young men. In the absence of decent — or, often, any — sex ed, young men learn what they are supposed to do when they’re with a woman from these persistent cultural messages. (Or, even worse, they learn from Internet porn, where gender equality goes to die.)

Much in the same way that our society has changed many of the most pernicious forms of gender discrimination, we’re challenging the old cultural understandings of what a man and a woman’s roles should be around sex. Bloomingdale’s was rightly shamed for running its eggnog ad. Rejecting the idea that men should seek sex through cunning or force while women resist it is good — both for men and women.

The problem is how this change happens. Instead of launching a campaign of educating people about what the norms are — difficult work to be sure — schools are punishing men by playing by the rules they’ve learned from cultural messages on consent and sex since birth.

The Washington Post recently did a survey about sexual assault on campus. Among other findings, they asked students whether it was sexual assault when neither party had given clear agreement to have sex — basically, whether a college’s affirmative consent policy had been violated. 47% said yes and 46% said it was unclear.

Other questions in the poll had similar results. Students were asked if the following things established consent: nodding in agreement to sexual activity, taking off one’s clothes, or getting a condom. There were wide splits on whether these things established consent — getting a condom, for example, indicated consent to 40% of the students, but not to 54%.

In that vacuum, schools are simply picking off men who act amid that uncertainty based on what they’ve been told from books, movies, TV, and the Internet (and, the federal government is putting enormous pressure on schools to pick these men off).

I have no objection to punishing people who do things they know are bad. But punishing people who don’t know that they’re breaking the rules — especially for something as serious as sexual assault — is wrong. It’s a cowardly way for schools to punish men who they’ve failed to educate.

Schools have a canned response to this. They’ll say that at first-year orientation, the school gives a presentation to the students about affirmative consent and the school’s policies. That may be an effective way for schools to minimize liability, but if you believe the Post survey, it clearly isn’t having the intended effect.

Cultural messaging isn’t going to be removed with a one-hour seminar, or even a one-day seminar.

Yes, we should change how we understand consent. But we shouldn’t do that through expulsion, which is how schools are often doing it now.

Or, put another way, if there’s any institution that should do the hard work of educating, instead of the relatively easy work of scapegoating, one would think it would be a University.

Matt Kaiser is a white-collar defense attorney at Kaiser, LeGrand & Dillon PLLC. He’s represented stockbrokers, tax preparers, doctors, drug dealers, and political appointees in federal investigations and indicted cases. Most of his clients come to the government’s attention because of some kind of misunderstanding. Matt writes the Federal Criminal Appeals Blog and has put together a webpage that’s meant to be the WebMD of federal criminal defense. His twitter handle is @mattkaiser. His email is mkaiser@kaiserlegrand.com He’d love to hear from you if you’re inclined to say something nice.