Shortly after the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office dropped the De Anza sex case and prompted two De Anza College girls to go public with their sickening story about what they believe had been the rape of a teenage girl, a young woman called the hotline at the YWCA rape crisis center in San Jose.

She said she had been attacked, but the De Anza horror story made her think there was no point in trying to seek justice. "We're worried that the message this case sends to the next victim is `Why bother filing a report?'" Sandy Davis, director of the YWCA center, told me.

Surely, by now you have heard the story about the girl at the booze-sodden March house party attended by De Anza baseball players. You've heard of the two De Anza students, April Grolle and Lauren Chief Elk, who told my colleague Scott Herhold about how they found the teenager half naked on a bed and barely conscious, with vomit smeared on her face, before they took her to the hospital.

And you know that not only does Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith believe that some of the party boys got away with sexual assault that day, she doesn't care if they sue her for saying so. "Bring it on," she told the Mercury News last week.

But this story also sends a more complicated message that a lot of us don't want to hear: Sexual assault cases, especially those involving so-called acquaintance-rape, still are notoriously difficult to prove in court.


Even with all the changes over the past several decades that have made it easier to prosecute these cases, the law isn't designed to consider the nuances of social interaction. Our legal system is black-and-white, not gray.

"In California law, the notion of consent is tied up with the notion of force, and it's hard to analyze what constitutes force or consent if it's not verbalized," said Robert Weisberg, a Stanford Law School professor who runs the Stanford Criminal Justice Center. "Then if there's alcohol involved, communication becomes even more blurry." Add difficulties with memory or not being able to conclusively identify attackers and you have a non-case, even if it's clear to everyone that a crime was committed.

As District Attorney Dolores Carr wrote Sunday in a Mercury News op-ed article, offering up more details of the case to explain why her office declined to prosecute could send a chilling message to others who have been attacked: "Releasing such information would also discourage victims from reporting assaults in the future."

We may never find out what led to the shocking scene described by the De Anza girls at that party on South Buena Vista Avenue. But it suggests there still is a perception out there that someone who's too drunk to know what planet she's on is capable of consenting to sex. It's not just some guys who don't get that this isn't true. Too many girls are clueless about it, too.

Wiggsy Sivertsen, head of counseling services at San Jose State, knows this only too well. "I've seen more than a few date-rape situations, usually involving alcohol, where it's the victims' sorority sisters who tell them to leave it alone: `You don't want to ruin his reputation!,'" Sivertsen said. The blame-the-victim mentality is still alive and well on college campuses and at the corner bar.

Sivertsen said it's not unusual for girls to come to her office and say they were raped by someone they know or even a guy they were drinking and flirting with. But if they have come to her days after an attack and there's little if any evidence left and no witnesses - which is often the case - she won't encourage them to press charges. The girls are likely to blame themselves, anyway.

"In this culture, we still do a lousy job of telling guys and girls about what is consensual sex and what isn't OK," Sivertsen told me. She recalled a date-rape seminar she gave at a San Jose State fraternity house two years ago when she was explaining that it's against the law to have sex with someone who is too drunk to be responsible for her actions.

"A hand went up in the back of the room and this guy asked me, `Well, if we go down to Tijuana, across the border, can we do it?'" she said. "He was serious."

Now imagine that your daughter meets this young charmer at a frat party and starts doing shots of Cuervo with him. Whatever happens next is likely to spin into a case of he said-she said.

The De Anza scandal is especially troubling because it seems like there was so much evidence of a crime, and the girls' account makes it clear that something truly despicable and depraved happened in that room. But the operative word about the evidence is "seems." As Carr wrote in her op-ed piece, the girl could not remember anything that happened soon after she came to the party.

Weisberg, for one, was quick to defend the district attorney's office. "This is a very tough office with very good credibility on strong sexual assault prosecutions," he said. "I personally know of some rape victims in this county who were very pleased by the way their cases were handled."

Again, that's not something we want to hear. We want to hear that the DA's office screwed up because there's no other way something like this could happen without accountability or punishment.

But based on the account of the heroic De Anza girls, we should be directing our outrage at the young men who were in that room. How deplorable that, according to Carr, the vomit found on the teenage girl wasn't even her own. And what are we to think of the De Anza baseball player who hosted the party and told the Mercury News, after the case was dropped, that he hoped she had "learned a lot" in the past two months?

Oh, she learned a lot, all right. So did the woman who called the YWCA rape crisis line last week. No doubt, so did many others.

They learned that if you go to a party and maybe drink way too much and maybe watch someone you thought was your friend turn into a predator, and maybe you can't remember quite what happened next but know it was very, very wrong, you shouldn't count on the community being able to protect you - despite the best of intentions.

There's a good chance that you're on your own.

Contact Sue Hutchison at