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credit: dpss.umich.edu

As regular readers know, I’ve often written about the campus rape hoax.  I don’t suggest rapes don’t occur on college campuses.  Clearly, every crime that occurs elsewhere can occur on a campus. However, during the Obama Administration, rape, like virtually everything else, was politicized, and a “guidance” letter was issued to ensure progressive narratives would be upheld and furthered.  The basic idea was that since all men are rapists, any accusation against them must result in a conviction–of sorts–so the process was altered to ensure politically correct results.  Colleges were only too happy to cite the letter as justification for what they wanted to do anyway.  Innumerable men were found “guilty” by campus kangaroo courts, branded rapists and expelled.

Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is about to issue new guidance, demanding such things as due process for the accused, the right to confront witnesses, the right to know the changes, the right to counsel or at least some assistance, and other non-progressive notions.  As one might imagine, the Left is going berserk, accusing DeVos–and of course, President– Trump–of being for rapists and against women, and–well, you can imagine the rest, gentle readers.

A large part of the problem is most universities don’t want to involve the police; they won’t deliver reliable social justice outcomes. They insist on conducting competent, impartial investigations, and if the “victim” is a terrible witness, and there is insufficient–or often no–evidence to fulfill the elements of the crime of rape (see this article: Rape: Damned Lies And Statistics) they have the annoying tendency to refuse to arrest supposed rapists.  Campus tribunals are far more reliable.

Asche Schow
credit: facebook

Ashe Schow at the Daily Wire provides some of the left’s arguments–and slaughters them:

1-in-5 (or 1-in-4 or 1-in-3) Women Will Be Sexually Assaulted During College

‘Studies purporting to find such an astronomical amount of sexual violence on college campuses (numbers thousands of times higher than war-torn Congo or Detroit, America’s most dangerous city) suffer from many of the same flaws. They are often not nationally representative, are produced by women’s organizations determined to find women as oppressed victims in America, and are self-reported — a notoriously unreliable form of data.

The studies are often voluntary, meaning response bias could play a role as those who believe they are sexual assault victims (rightly or wrongly) may be more inclined to participate than those who don’t think the survey is about them.

The only way one can get this sort of result is by asking the wrong questions, questions that make virtually any conduct–even lack of conduct–rape.  It takes only a little common sense to debunk these claims.  If as many as 33% of college women were being raped, what woman in her right mind would go to college?  What parents would send their daughters to college?  In most of these cases, the “victim” suffered no apparent injuries.  How can this be if 33% of college women are victims of a violent, brutal crime?  Are all college rapists non-violent gentlemen, and if so, why are they raping women in the first place?

One might also wonder if rape is so prevalent, why do colleges virtually universally oppose allowing their female students to carry concealed handguns?

Commonly the “rapes” are reported long after the event–often by people other than the supposed victim–so there is no medical or physical evidence.  And often, there is evidence the victim continued to date the rapist, not that colleges are interested in such evidence.

The Majority Of Campus Rapes Are Committed By A Small Number Of Men

Sometimes known as the “serial predator” study, this one from David Lisak has been around for decades and was debunked just a few years ago. It claims that “90%” of rapes on campus are perpetrated by a few men.

For starters, Lisak didn’t conduct the study himself but used data from studies conducted by his former grad students, who didn’t limit their data to college students. As in the 1-in-5 stat above, this one was also not nationally representative, as the surveys were conducted near a commuter college with participants who didn’t live on campus and may not have even been students.

The surveys were anonymous, yet Lisak has claimed he conducted follow-up interviews with men who admitted to committing multiple rapes (one questions whether such admissions would be so freely given to a stranger in the first place). Lisak did conduct 12 interviews during his dissertation research three decades ago, but he then combined those cherry-picked interviews into a single character — called ‘Frank’ — which he used to tell school administrators how dangerous their campuses were. No such monster as Frank actually exists, nor is he a common problem across the country.

credit: cbsnews.com

Were this remotely true, stopping rape on campus would be simplicity itself.  Merely arrest the very few men committing 90% of the crimes.  Problem solved.  Why this never seems to happen remains a mystery, at least to the Left.

False Accusations Are Rare

The truth is, we don’t know how many accusations are truly false, and even if we did, one can’t walk into an investigation assuming they already know the answer.

We’re often told that ‘just’ 2% to 10% of rape accusations are false. College administrators are told this when ‘trained’ on how to handle accusations of sexual assault. The implication is clear: Women just don’t lie about rape, so nine times out of ten, you’d be safe in assuming the accused is guilty.

But that statistic is wildly misleading, as it only applies to accusations made to police that are proven false. Proving a negative is often impossible, especially in a “we had sex but it was consensual” situation. On college campuses, there is no punishment for a false accusation and thus no fear, as there is with lying to the police.

This an issue I addressed in The Trivialization of Rape.  Being part of the human race, women–like men–lie.  They lie about all manner of things for all manner of reasons, including rape.  During my last police assignment, my agency experienced a 50% false report rate for rape for women of all ages.  That’s 50% proved not because the officers were misogynistic brutes, but because the evidence–virtually always including the supposed victim’s eventual confession of a false report–proved it.  Actual rapists were prosecuted.

I’m certainly not saying that rate holds true everywhere, but during my years there, in that midwestern city, it did.  The point is not that women can’t be trusted, but that serious crimes require competent, professional investigations, and the full protections of the criminal justice system.  Colleges are simply not competent to do this, nor do most voluntarily try to be fair; they know the results before the “investigation” begins.

It’s Bad That 91% Of Colleges And Universities Said They Received No Rape Reports

I include this one because while one would think it would be a good thing that reports of sexual assault aren’t rampant on college campuses, the “scholars” at the American Association of University Women think it’s a bad thing. Because they’ve thoroughly bought into the debunked statistics above, no reports must mean that schools are somehow discouraging victims from coming forward or are sweeping reports under the rug. It’s hard to believe either of these is the case when the media, lawmakers, federal institutions, and Hollywood are constantly claiming huge swaths of the female population are sexually assaulted on college campuses and begging people to come forward.

Part of this is surely many colleges are bad publicity averse.  Many are reluctant to report any serious crimes; that could make them look bad. One might wonder then why they go along with the idea attending their schools is the fastest and most reliable way for a young woman to get raped?  No one ever said social justice warriors and their narratives had to make sense. One must keep in mind that most crimes are under reported, and there is evidence rape is less common on campus than off, but that doesn’t help the narrative either.

1-in-3 Men Would Rape If They Could Get Away With It

This statistic was quickly debunked as soon as it appeared in 2015. A woman who admitted to me at the time that she was seeking grant money (a good motive for finding alarming statistics in one’s survey) claimed her study found that a whopping one-third of surveyed men had “intentions to force a woman to sexual intercourse.”

Wow, right? Except, as I’ve pointed out with previous misleading statistics, this one suffers from many of the same flaws. It’s not nationally representative, and the answers of just 73 men were used to arrive at the 1-in-3 number blasted out by the media and women’s groups. Of those 73 men, 23 were found to have those intentions, based on the researchers own definition of what constituted bad intentions. Just nine guys said they would actually rape a woman. Nine guys do not an epidemic make.

Seventy-three respondents?  Well, that seems a sufficiently large sampling upon which to base social policy and destroy the lives of young men, doesn’t it?  One wonders if the “researcher” took steps to screen out the difference between actual desires upon which men might act, or mere fantasies, and let’s consider the reality of female rape fantasies, as Psychology Today reports:  

A recent analysis of 20 studies over the last 30 years indicates that between 31% and 57% of women have rape fantasies, and these fantasies are frequent or preferred in 9% to 17% of women. Considering that many people are ashamed to report rape fantasies, these stats are most likely lowball figures.

Granted, the article was from 2008, but I suspect human beings haven’t changed much in ten years.   Besides, shouldn’t women be empowered enough to hold any fantasy they please?  Not when it conflicts with the narrative.  And consider this from O Canada.com from 2014: 

However, the survey found that bondage fantasies were common among both male and female respondents, with 30 to 60 per cent of women reporting that they imagined scenarios in which they were tied up or otherwise forced to submit to a sexual partner.

Granted, the respondents were Canadian, but I suspect they’re not considerably different than Americans.  Am I saying women want to be tied up and raped?  Of course not.  I am saying there is a significant difference between fantasy and reality, and it appears the aforementioned researcher didn’t seem to differentiate between the two.

Two things are clear: colleges are not competent to conduct investigations into felonies, rape or otherwise, and they cannot be trusted to conduct such investigations fairly in any case.  But I suppose it’s too much to ask that colleges these days do anything without thoroughly progressively politicizing first.

To read all of my articles on the subject, type in “rape” in the search bar at the upper right hand of the home page.