Feminist professors and activists are having a conniption because 45 percent of all colleges with over 1,000 students -- a staggering number of colleges -- reported zero rape claims for an entire year.
According to some feminists, this report is not something to be applauded, and it does not tend to prove that these schools, or even some of these schools, might just be doing an effective job in battling sexual assault.
Just the opposite: the schools with the higher numbers of reported rapes are the safer schools, the ones dealing with rape more effectively, they tell us, because those are the schools where rape victims come forward. In contrast, at the schools with low numbers, "the administration is discouraging them from reporting or collecting misleading data, or . . . sexual assault survivors are afraid to speak out." As one feminist professor put it: "If you have really low reporting, then you know there's a problem at that institution." The best schools of all? The ones under Title IX investigation, of course. The feminists have even created a "Schools of Shame Map" that shows how many sexual assaults they claim really occur on American college campuses, versus reported numbers.
Can they be serious? No school, out of thousands of institutions of higher learning, is doing an effective job at keeping sexual assault to a minimum? If a school has no reported rapes, that means the school is doing a poor job? The mind reels at the illogic.
This inanity does no favors for rape victims. By suggesting that every school is affected by a rape "epidemic," and that no school has bothered to deal with the problem effectively, these feminists excuse those schools where sexual assault is a more serious problem while, at the same time, they use their broad brush to demonize those schools that deal with the problem effectively. Instead of insisting that the former be penalized and the latter be imitated, they want us to believe that women are most at risk on the safest campuses. Gilbert and Sullivan could not have concocted a more topsy turvy narrative.
Feminists who insist American college campuses are little more than rape pits premise this conclusion on the survey touted by the White House that showed one-in-five college women are sexually assaulted. This Web-based, self-selecting survey of anonymous women purported to gauge the experiences of senior women at just two unnamed universities. Regardless of the validity of the survey, it can't be generalized to all American campuses as these feminists suggest. The Washington-Post explained: "As the researchers acknowledged, these results clearly can be generalized to those two large four-year universities, but not necessarily elsewhere." Yet, "information that is localized to the seniors at two colleges has now been extrapolated by politicians to the universe of college experience."
The Washington Post, which is scarcely an anti-feminist publication, says there is not enough information to accept the claim that one-in-five college women are sexually assaulted.
In fact, there are sound reasons for rejecting any reliance on this survey. For one, the definition of sexual assault was engorged to include attempted sexual assault and even “sexual touching,” including rubbing up against someone in a "sexual" way over clothing.
More problematic, every sexual assault allegation reported in the survey was uncritically accepted as an actual sexual assault and none were tested against competing claims or evidence of innocence. It is indisputable that an uncritical acceptance of every allegation as sexual assault is improper and erroneous. When rape claims are reported to police or campus authorities, and the evidence about the incident is actually examined, the majority of claims simply cannot be classified as sexual assaults or non-sexual assaults, founded or unfounded, true or false. The research of Dr. David Lisak, well respected in the feminist community, supports this conclusion. Since most sexual assault claims that are actually subjected to scrutiny can't be definitively classified as rape, it is wholly irrational to assume that every unscrutinized assertion of sexual assault posited in an anonymous, self-selecting survey should be regarded as an actual sexual assault.
And let's be clear, we're not suggesting that women are lying on surveys. Murky sexual encounters often yield two different perceptions. Even the National Institute of Justice said that when it comes to these hook-ups, "Men and women may have different perceptions of the same incident." That has nothing to do with lying. Brett Sokolow recently detailed cases NCHERM has investigated that illustrate that women are reporting, and schools are punishing men for, claims that are not actually sexual assault. Sokolow said that in "case-after-case . . . sincere victims believe something has happened to them that evidence shows absolutely did not . . .." And: "We see complainants who genuinely believe they have been assaulted, despite overwhelming proof that it did not happen." The problem isn't that women lie, it's that the claims are untested against competing evidence of innocence. Every single sincere claim Sokolow referenced would be counted as a sexual assault on the one-in-five survey, even though it wasn't.
Besides, in a self-selecting survey about sexual assault with a relatively low rate of participation, a far greater percentage of victims likely would choose to participate than the general population, skewing the results. Where is it easier to say you were raped regardless of how clear the facts were -- on an anonymous survey, or to police? The answer is self-evident. Reporting to police can be traumatic; reporting on an anonymous web survey in exchange for an Amazon gift card, far less so.
This latest attempt to demonize schools with low reporting rates is nothing more than feminist activism gussied up with PhDs.
Rape is a real problem, so is underreporting, but that's not the point. The point is that these activists can't resist the urge to use a stat that even the Washington Post isn't sure about to roll back the due process rights of presumptively innocent college men accused of sexual assault. That, my friends, is a pretty damn serious thing, and that's why I write about this. If our friends in the feminist community insist on diminishing the rights of college men (virtually all college sex charges are brought against men), they had damn well better back up their claims with evidence more substantial than a self-righteous ipse dixit. This doesn't pass the smirk test.
If they would refrain from using these stats to demonize and take away the rights of the presumptively innocent, they could make up numbers all day long for all I care.
The bottom line is this: if they have evidence that schools with no reported rapes are lying, or have erected barriers that prevent women from reporting, they need to present it for scrutiny. It not, their attempt to "prove" that rape is an epidemic by pointing to schools where there are no rapes should be rejected out of hand, and these activists should be banished from the adult table on this very serious discussion.