It’s a familiar story. An after hours party at a convention or campus. Drinks are flowing and the party-goers, mostly young, college-age 18-25 year olds, are having fun. Two people meet (for the purposes of our discussion we’ll stick to the heteronormative ‘boy meets girl’ scenario) and appear to hit it off, perhaps drunkenly flirting with each other and generally becoming more intimate in their conversation. At some stage in the evening these two individuals disappear from the main party group.

It is now the following morning.

The girl awakens.

Something seems wrong. Very wrong. She can recall attending the party the previous evening, having boozy fun with her friends and even flirting with a boy. But after that her mind is blank. And yet here she is, lying naked in a bed next to the same boy, whom she realizes has had sex with her.

In her shock she dresses and leaves, perhaps even exchanging pleasantaries with the boy if he awakens while she is exiting.

However, once she is on her own she realizes the inevitable conclusion: the fact that she remembers nothing of the previous evening after the initial meeting means that something must have

happened to render her incapacitated.

Did he put a date rape drug in her drink? Or could it be the alcohol alone? She is young and not a heavy drinker but had had a few drinks that night before they met. She hadn’t eaten a lot that evening and had consumed the drinks quicker than she normally did, but she had frequently consumed more drinks than that on other occasions without this effect.

In any case, it was clear that during the previous evening she must have reached a condition of “passed-out” drunkeness during which she could not remember anything that happened to her.

But what had happened was that someone had had sex with her.

But if she was passed-out drunk she could not have given consent, and sex without consent is rape. She has been raped. Not a violent, ‘stranger-with-a-knife’ rape, but the far more common sort that is

generally labeled ‘date rape’.

The girl, realizing that she has been the victim of a rapist, contacts a friend to confide and ask for help.

News of the accusation eventually reaches the boy: ‘Is it true that you raped the girl when she was passed out drunk?’, who reacts by claiming that the girl in question was never passed out drunk. They had been drinking but both were fully conscious and capable of conversing through all the events of the evening, including the sexual encounter, which he insists was fully consensual.

He says he cannot understand why she would now accuse him of doing something as repugnant as raping her while she was passed out.

The above hypothetical scenario is by no means the only or even main type of ‘date rape’. In most instances of date rape the victim is conscious throughout the incident and remembers everything that occurs.

What I have described instead is a particular subset of ‘date rape’ (or possible ‘date rape’) in which the victim has no conscious memory of the actual rape. In this scenario there is no dispute between the two individuals that sex has taken place; the dispute is over whether consent had been given.

Because of this we are often faced with two competing alternatives: The girl was raped while ‘passed-out drunk’ – and the boy is now lying about her having been fully conscious and consenting during the sexual encounter; or the alternative hypothesis, the girl was fully conscious and consenting during the sex and it is SHE who is now lying, for reasons unknown (guilt? vindictive revenge?)

Both alternatives inevitably paint the other party as being dishonest and criminal. I hope we can all agree that both raping someone and knowingly falsely accusing someone of rape are both morally wrong actions.

If faced with only the two alternatives mentioned it is inevitable that a dispute will ensue. One of the individuals must be lying.

It must be said that there are indeed cases where one of the individuals is lying. There are certainly proven cases, such as that involving individuals in Steubenville, where men have raped women who have passed out at a party.

And likewise there have been cases where men have been knowingly falsely accused.

What I want to discuss here is therefore a subset of the date rape accusations that involve unremembered sexual encounters.

In this subset both individuals are telling the truth. The girl is telling the truth when she says she has no recollection of consenting to a sexual act and no recollection of being conscious during the act itself.

The boy, on the other hand, is telling the truth when he insists that he has a distinct memory of the girl being conscious and enthusiatically consenting during the encounter.

The purpose of the remainder of this piece is to try to square this circle; it’s an attempt, in other words, to show a plausible way in which both individuals are indeed simultaneously telling the truth.

It is, in effect, the proposal of a hypothesis that attempts to explain a factor underlying the apparent increase in rape accusations in colleges at a time when there is a decrease in overall incidences of rape in society.

Alcohol induced memory blackouts

According to a 2009 paper by, Hamin Lee, Sungwon Roh, and Dai Jin Kim, published in the journal ‘Int J Environ Res Public Health’:

“an alcoholic blackout is amnesia for the events of any part of a drinking episode without loss of consciousness. It is characterized by memory impairment during intoxication in the relative absence of other skill deficits. It is not to be confused with ‘passing out’. Early documentation from Alcoholics Anonymous describes a variety of blackout behavior, especially in the en-bloc type, which includes driving for long distances or carrying on apparently normal conversations at parties. Subjects often report waking in strange places without any memory of how they got there.”

In other words it is phenomenon that affects individuals who are not enebriated to a level that others would consider incapacitated. They are not ‘fall down drunk’ or even ‘passed out’ drunk. Their level of inebriation appears at the time to be no different to others in their vicinity who have consumed the same amount of alcohol. The individuals concerned can speak freely to others and are apparently able to make conscious decisions about what they want to do. However, in the case of an alcoholic induced blackout the individual experiences amnesia of the events in question and will wake up remembering either nothing of the previous evenings events (termed an ‘en bloc blackout’) or just a partial memory (termed a ‘fragmentary blackout’.)

“The defining characteristic of a complete blackout is that memory loss is permanent and cannot be recalled under any circumstances. Fragmentary blackouts occur more frequently. In fragmentary blackouts, recall is usually possible and can be aided by cueing. Although initially the subject may be unaware that memory is missing, reminders usually help the subject remember forgotten events [9]. It is, however, difficult for investigators to be totally accurate because people may often fail to remember having a blackout, or do not attend to all circumstances in which they might have had a blackout.”

The term ‘blackout’ in this context is therefore specifically associated with alcohol-induced disruption of memory formation and NOT associated with physical or mental incapacitation (falling down or passed out drunk.)

The process of memory formation involves three main steps, encoding, which is the initial detection of external information; storage, the process of creating physical neural pathways associated with these detected stimuli; and finally retrieval, the ability to search and recall these stored stimuli. Alcohol seems to have it’s effect on the process of encoding, resulting in an impairment of episodic memory.

According to a 2010 study in the Journal of Addiction Medicine:

“Cognitive and memory impairment occurs before motor impairment, possibly explaining how a drinker appearing fully functional can have little subsequent memory. ”

What is possibly the most surprising aspect of the phenomenon of alcohol induced blackouts, is how little it seems to be understood by the general public despite it’s frequency.

According to one study of 2076 Finnish males, 35% experienced at least one blackout in the year before the study. Another study of 772 undergraduates in the US revealed that about half of them had experienced an alcoholic blackout at some point in their lives, with 40% of them having had one in the year before the study. Another study of pedriatic trainees revealed that 35% had experienced an alcoholic blackout.

The risk factors for alcoholic blackout is not simply associated with the level of alcohol consumed as many individuals who have experienced an alcoholic blackout can recall other times when they have consumed a greater amount of alcohol but not had a blackout. According to Lee et al: “A rapid rate of increase in blood alcohol concentration (BAC) is most consistently associated with the occurrence of an alcoholic blackout. Therefore, gulping drinks, drinking on an empty stomach, or drinking liquor (opposed to beer) are risk factors of an alcoholic blackout.”

While men and women seem to have a similar incidence of alcohol induced blackout, at least one study suggests a more severe effect occurs in women.

“Women are more susceptible to blackouts and undergo a slower recovery from cognitive impairment than men, due in part to the effect of gender differences in pharmacokinetics and body composition on alcohol bioavailability.”

It should therefore come as little surprise that college campuses, places where large amounts of alcohol is ingested by young people with little experience of drinking, are where we find the highest incidences of this phenomenon.

According to a 2012 study by Mundt et al, in the journal Injury Prevention: “Approximately 5% of drinking students experienced alcohol-related amnesia in the past 7 days.” Whats more, there seems to be no difference in the rates of alcoholic induced blackouts according to gender: “On US college campuses women are as likely to have a memory blackout as men despite consuming lower quantities of alcohol”

Interestingly, the frequency of memory blackouts was strongly associated with younger age “Memory blackouts were negatively associated with age (r=−0.24, p<.001). Students 24 years or older reported the lowest baseline memory blackout rates. Students 18 to 20 years of age reported the highest memory blackout rates” – again suggesting that inexperienced drinkers may suffer blackouts more frequently. Alternatively the younger drinkers may simply consume more alcohol than those of an older age group.

The participants of this study were selected on the basis that they were drinkers – although the cutoff point (15+ drinks per week for men, 12+ drinks per week for women) is probably not particularly excessive in a college scenario. Nevertheless over 50% of the women in the study admitted to having experienced an alcoholic blackout in the year before the study began, with about 40% of these having three or more blackouts during the same time period.

These are not negligible rates. What multiple studies suggest is that young people who drink to levels that result in inebriation have about a 50% chance of experiencing alcoholic blackouts in any given year, and probably a higher percentage over their entire college life.

Whats more, the times that these individuals will be most likely to experience an alcoholic blackout will coincide with episodes of drinking quickly, most likely in a party or nightclub situation.

Two aspects of this scenario are of particular relevance here.

First, an individual who is currently experiencing an alcoholic blackout may be indistinguishable, in terms of behavior or apparent consciousness, from their non-blackout experiencing friends. It is only afterwards, when the individual suddenly realizes they have no recollection of a recent period of time, that the alcoholic blackout becomes apparent.

Second, for the individual who suddenly finds her or himself awake beside someone they realize has had sex with them, and without a memory of that experience, an alcoholic blackout can seem indistinguishable from a rape scenario involving either a date rape drug, or a scenario involving someone having sex with them while they were passed out.

Indeed, if the individual concerned is unaware of the effects and frequency of alcoholic induced blackouts, a rape scenario can appear the obvious conclusion.

The alternative scenario, that they were fully conscious during the preceding events but have failed to commit this experience to memory, can seem a bizarre and unlikely notion, and can perhaps only be truly appreciated as a distinct possibility in circumstances where clear evidence is provided to prove that this was indeed the case.

One example of this is described here by Swedish feminist Anna Ekelund:

“A New Year’s Eve many years ago I was at a party at my best friend. I danced, talked and drank while she took out the video camera and documented the evening. Alcohol intake was not particularly much, just combined with fatigue and a poor diet, so at nine o’clock, the band went by.”

She describes waking up under a man (a neighbor of hers) who was having sex with her, but without her having any memory of what led up to this.

The next day she finds out:

“I spent New Year’s Day with my best friend in bed. After breakfast, she put on the video from the party. I was afraid that I would see myself embarrassingly drunk, vomiting, and then unconscious. Instead, I saw myself happy, social, talkative and brilliant all the way to midnight. I had even celebrated the New Year. I saw that the neighbor and I had been flirting in the early evening. Actually, I had been more interested in his friend, but one can’t have everything. No one could have seen that I was so drunk that I wouldn’t remember anything. I could well have been capable of crashing the neighbor’s place and asking him to have sex with me.”

In other words, the video shows her to be lucid during a time in which she has no memories.

Ekelund goes on to address how treating men and women differently when they have been drinking is itself a sexist action.

“If a man in such a position says he’s horny and wants to fuck, no one would doubt it. But on the other hand, a girl say the same thing? I do not want to hear “Girl, I’m not going to fuck you because what if you’re drunk and unreliable. You do not want really.” In my world, this is a denigration of women. A person’s responsibility for their actions does not apply to that one is under the influence of alcohol or another. This applies very much to both sexes.

So next time a girl wakes up next to one or more, more or less unknown guys, she might not be correct to immediately conclude that she had been sexually abused. The possibility exists that she has asked for sex and that her wishes have been respected.”

While this is probably a far more extreme position than most would take on the matter, the point remains relevant. It is sexist to treat men and women differently if they have been drinking. Both may have desires and make conscious decisions to act on these desires.

The ability to make conscious decisions after drinking does not, however, mean that these conscious decisions will be remembered clearly the following morning. Because of this it can be wrong for a woman to conclude ‘rape’, if she wakes up next to a man who appears to have had sex with her the previous night.

At present it is impossible to say to what extent unremembered sexual encounters are associated with alcohol induced blackouts or with rape.

What I hope to have shown in this piece is that alcohol induced blackouts are a medically established phenomenon that occur at such a frequency as to have the potential to be a real possibility in a substantial fraction of unremembered sexual encounters. Furthermore the population group most at risk of suffering alcohol induced blackouts – young college-aged individuals – coincidentally seem to be at highest risk of sexual assault when drinking.

Since it must be our priority to ensure that incidences of rape are minimized and genuine cases of rape are prosecuted, it is important to ensure that we are not confusing situations where consent was given but misremembered due to an alcoholic blackout, with situations where consent was never provided.

This itself is not a simple matter but the first step must surely be to realize the possibility that a lot of cases cannot be divided into a strict dichotomy of one or other party lying about the incident.

They can both be telling the truth as they remember it.

But they may not remember everything.