ORIGINAL ARTICLE

By ASHE SCHOW (@ASHESCHOW) 

A campus crime report from the University of Miami has found that 1-in-5 reported rapes are "unfounded," a finding similar to that of a recent Harvard University report.

Colleges across the country are releasing campus crime statistics, and it turns out campus sexual assault might not be as rampant as recent "studies" claim. Even worse for advocates of draconian sexual assault policies that eviscerate due process is the notion that a good chunk of the accusations are false.

"Forcible sex offenses on campus went up from four in 2013 to five in 2014, with one case being reported as 'unfounded,'" reported the Miami Hurricane student newspaper. "Four of the five cases were reported in student residencies, where the one 'unfounded' case occurred."

One might notice that literally 1-in-5 reports were "unfounded," meaning there was no basis for the report, as there were only 5 reported rapes in 2014. That's far fewer than at Harvard, which saw 33 reported rapes.

Again, if this statistic is repeated anywhere in the media, proper caveats will be attached, something lacking from reports of studies purporting to show that 1-in-5 women are sexually assaulted in college.

The first caveat is that the 1-in-5 false rape report came from the university's Coral Gables campus, which is the main university campus. There were no reports of forcible rape at the university's Rosentiel School campus, but there were three reports (none of which were determined to be unfounded) at the Miller School of Medicine. Adding in the Miller School numbers (even though it's not the main campus) would lower the percentage of unfounded reports.

The other caveat is that, as with Harvard, this is just one school. Other schools might have higher or lower rates of false or unfounded reports.

Another thing we don't know from these statistics is any details about the reports. We've seen before that some accusations are wrong, stemming from regretted drunken hook-ups, but wouldn't fall into the "unfounded" category because at the very least, some form of sex took place. And in some of those instances, the universities were under pressure to find students responsible, even if the evidence didn't support the finding.

There has so far been radio silence from the mainstream media when it comes to the inconvenient statistics being revealed in these campus reports. Reports of sexual assault are up (slightly), but those numbers don't coincide with the hysterical claims that 1-in-5 women are being sexually assaulted while in college.

Harvard, reports amounted to just 0.15 percent of the student population claiming to experience a rape, and of that, a quarter of the reports were false or unfounded. At Miami, with just 5 reports, only 0.03 percent of students experienced a rape and reported it. And again, a fifth of them were unfounded.

In contrast, there were 133 drug law violations and 277 liquor law violations at Miami in 2014, a steep drop from 2013, but still far, far higher than reports of sexual assault. Yet those issues don't receive anywhere near as much attention, perhaps because they don't include the "war on women" narrative those in the media prefer to report.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

By Kevin D. Williamson

Rape is a vicious crime, one that disproportionately affects poor women and incarcerated men, but Barack Obama knows his voters, and so his recent remarks on the subject were focused not on penitentiaries, broken families, or Indian reservations but on college campuses, where the despicable crime is bound up in a broader feminist Kulturkampf only tangentially related to the very real problem of sexual violence against women.

The subject is a maddening one. President Obama repeated the endlessly reiterated but thoroughly debunked claim that one in five women will be sexually assaulted in her college years. The actual rate is . . . sort of an interesting problem, the information being so inconsistent and contradictory that one almost suspects that it is so by design.

President Obama, who gives every indication of being committed to the bitter end to his belief in the omnipotence of his merest utterance, gave a speech in which he affirmed his position that rape is wicked and that we should discourage it. Instead of giving a content-free speech, he should have directed his Department of Justice to put together some definitive data on the question.

Much of the scholarly literature estimates that the actual rate is more like a tenth of that one-in-five rate, 2.16 percent, or 21.6 per 1,000 to use the conventional formulation. But that number is problematic, too, as are most of the numbers related to sexual assault, as the National Institute of Justice, the DoJ’s research arm, documents. For example, two surveys conducted practically in tandem produced victimization rates of 0.16 percent and 1.7 percent, respectively – i.e., the latter estimate was eleven times the former. The NIJ blames defective wording on survey questions.

This is a matter of concern because a comparison between the NIJ’s estimates of college-campus rape and the estimates of rape in the general population compiled by the DoJ’s National Crime Victimization Survey implies that the rate of rape among college students is more than ten times that of the general population.

It is not impossible that this is the case, but there is significant cause for skepticism. For example, in the general population college-age women have significantly lower rates of sexual assault than do girls twelve to seventeen, while a fifth of all rape victims are younger than twelve. Most of the familiar demographic trends in violent crime are reflected in the rape statistics: Poor women are sexually assaulted at twice the rate of women in households earning $50,000 a year or more; African American women are victimized at higher rates than are white women, while Native American women are assaulted at twice the rate of white women; divorced and never-married women are assaulted at seven times the rate of married women; women in urban communities are assaulted at higher rates than those in the suburbs, and those in rural areas are assaulted at dramatically higher rates. But there is at least one significant departure from the usual trends in violent crime: Only about 9 percent of those raped are men.

It is probably the case that the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses is wildly exaggerated—not necessarily in absolute terms, but relative to the rate of sexual assault among college-aged women with similar demographic characteristics who are not attending institutions of higher learning. The DoJ hints at this in its criticism of survey questions, some of which define “sexual assault” so loosely as to include actions that “are not criminal.” This might explain why so many women who answer survey questions in a way consistent with their being counted victims of sexual assault frequently display such a blasé attitude toward the events in question and so rarely report them. As the DoJ study puts it: “The most commonly reported response — offered by more than half the students — was that they did not think the incident was serious enough to report. More than 35 percent said they did not report the incident because they were unclear as to whether a crime was committed or that harm was intended.”

If you are having a little trouble getting your head around a definition of “sexual assault” so liberal that it includes everything from forcible rape at gunpoint to acts that not only fail to constitute crimes under the law but leave the victims “unclear as to whether harm was intended,” then you are, unlike much of our culture, still sane.

Of all the statistics and evidence that are prevalent in the discussion of sexual assault, there is one datum conspicuous in its absence: the fact that sexual assault has been cut by nearly two-thirds since 1995. Under the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ apples-to-apples year-over-year comparison, sexual assault has declined 64 percent since the Clinton years. That is excellent news, indeed, but it does not feed the rape-epidemic narrative, and so it must be set aside.

The fictitious rape epidemic is necessary to support the fiction of “rape culture,” by which feminists mean anything other than an actual rape culture, for example the culture of the Pakistani immigrant community in Rotherham in the United Kingdom. “Rape culture” simply means speech or thought that feminists disapprove of and wish to suppress, and the concept has been deployed in the cause of, inter alia, bringing disciplinary action against a Harvard student who wrote a satire of feminist rhetoric, forbidding politically unpopular speakers from speaking on campuses, and encouraging what often has turned out to be headlong and grotesquely unjust rushes to judgment, as in the case of the Duke lacrosse team. Feminism is about political power, and not the Susan B. Anthony (“positively voted the Republican ticket — straight”) full-citizenship model of political power but rather one dominated by a very small band of narrow ideologues still operating under the daft influence of such theorists as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, each of whom in her way equated political opposition to feminism with rape.

This has some worrisome practical results, not the least of which is muddying the water on the issue of sexual assault itself. For example, feminists energetically protest that advising women to take such precautionary measures as moderating their alcohol intake at college parties is a species of rape-culture victim-blaming (rather than reasonable advice), and so it is no surprise that, as the DoJ notes, many surveys inquire of rape victims whether they believed their attackers to have been under the influence of drugs or alcohol but decline to ask the victims whether they were under the influence. Evidence very strongly suggests that rapists frequently use intoxicants, openly or surreptitiously, as part of a strategy conceived with malice aforethought to render their victims vulnerable. It might be useful to know how often this is the case and how often it works or fails to work, but we will not know if we refuse to ask the question.

Our policy debates are dominated by relatively narrow-minded and self-interested elites, and so it is natural that our discussion of sexual assault focuses on what might be happening at Villanova University rather than what’s happening on Riker’s Island or on Ojibwe reservations. But the way we talk about rape suggests that we do not much care about the facts of the case. If understanding and preventing rape were our motive, we’d know whether the victimization rate was x or 11x, and whether elite college campuses are in fact rather than in rhetoric more dangerous than crime-ridden ghettos and isolated villages in Alaska, a state in which the rate of rape is three times the national average. We’d never accept that the National Bureau of Economic Research  didn’t know whether the inflation rate were 1.6 percent or 17 percent. We’d give the issue properly rigorous consideration.

But if your interest were in making opposition to feminist political priorities a quasi-criminal offense and using the horrific crime of rape as a cultural and political cudgel, then you’d be doing about what we’re doing right now.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Posted by William A. Jacobson  

Some privileges are permissible topics for discussion on campus and in the media.

For example, White Privilege is the obsession of some faculty and students.

George Will pointed out that there is another privilege on campuses — false or contrived claims of victim status.  Will did not argue that real victims, be it of actual racism or sexual assault, share some special privilege, but rather, that there are people who contrive or encourage others to falsely create victimhood where none exists.

We see it in theories such as microaggression, where in the absence of proof of actual racism, critical race theorists find racism in routine everyday interactions where the participants do not even realize they are being “racist,” much less have any racist intent.

We see it in repeated instances of fake, self-inflicted “hate crimes” in which the victim is, in fact, the perpetrator.

We also see it in the lowering of the standards of proof and definitions of what constitutes sexual assault.

I think everyone agrees that sexual assault as used in the criminal law deserves condemnation and punishment. But colleges, under pressure from the Justice Department and supposedly feminist groups, have started using definitions of sexual assault that can reach absurd results.

When I was in college, the standard for sexual assault basically was the title of Susan Brownmiller’s book — used during Freshman orientation — Against Our Will — Men, Women and Rape.  That made sense — No means No, whether expressed verbally or by conduct.  Or if the victim were incapable either by reason of age or physical condition of giving consent, that also made sense.  And those standards roughly equate to the criminal law’s understanding of sexual assault and rape.

Now, however, “against our will” on campus has become murky, using standards in which two completely willing participants who evidence no indication that the sexual activity is against either of their wills, will have committed a campus offense.  But only men are prosecuted.

The campus movement — reflected in proposed California legislation — to require affirmative verbal statements of consent at each and every stage of sexual relations creates crimes where no crimes exist in any real sense.  And those contrived crimes, in which both parties in fact willingly participated in conformity with their will at the time, allow after-the-fact claims of sexual assault months or even years after the event, sometimes after consultation with others.

Mere intoxication at a non-disabling level also may create a campus violation, as K.C. Johnson describes at Minding the Campus, If She Had Drinks, You May Be a Rapist:

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has been waging a war on campus due process, ordering colleges to change their disciplinary processes to make it more likely that students accused of sexual assault will be found culpable. Many schools, however, have gone beyond the OCR’s demands in various ways, both in terms of due process changes and in terms of dramatically expanding what constitutes a sexual assault. So the chances of an innocent male being branded a rapist are growing.

Not suprisingly, we are seeing an increasing number of lawsuits by men convicted in campus tribunals of sexual assault under vague standards and loose if any burdens of proof.  Kangaroo campus courts are what await men accused of sexual assault, where lives can be ruined even though no criminal charges were filed much less prosecuted.

George Will pointed some of this out. And for that wrongly was accused by propagandists of sanctioning sexual assault and rape.

Will now is experiencing the campus Shut-Up Culture, in which the statistics or standards used to make claim to a “rape culture” cannot even be subject to debate.

Except that Will is not being shut up by a college newspaper, but by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Editor’s note: Michael Gerson replaces George Will:

Starting today, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson replaces George Will on Thursdays and Sundays….

We believe that Mr. Gerson’s commitment to “compassionate conservatism” and his roots in St. Louis will better connect with our readers, regardless of their political bent.

The change has been under consideration for several months, but a column published June 5, in which Mr. Will suggested that sexual assault victims on college campuses enjoy a privileged status, made the decision easier. The column was offensive and inaccurate; we apologize for publishing it.

We have heard from both conservative and liberal readers asking for new conservative voices. We believe Mr. Gerson’s addition to our op-ed page will be a refreshing and revitalizing change.

In coming weeks, we plan to bring more diverse voices to this page, and to connect our print readers with some of the other vibrant conversations taking place in the digital universe.

If you have any comments about the change, please email me at tmessenger@post-dispatch.com or call at 314-340-8382.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch didn’t need to write such a long explanation. It could have just written, “Shut up, George.”