After decades of not helping victims of campus rape, things are starting to change and men are starting to be punished. That’s a good thing
The epidemic levels of rape on university campuses has a lot of people really worried. Unfortunately, they’re worried that campuses are
going “too far”
in their effort to punish rapists; that young men will be wrongly accused;
that campus sex policies will criminalize consensual sex; that the rape epidemic is more
ideological rhetoric
than actual lived experience.
They are worried, it seems, that stopping campus rape and helping the victims of it – most of whom are women – will hurt young men.
It seems odd that, at a moment when we’re finally making headway on campus assault – with
White House-backed initiatives,
rape victims sharing their stories, and students mobilizing to make their campuses safer and more responsive to sexual violence – the response from some quarters is to worry for men’s futures rather than celebrate women’s potential safety.
No one wants to see innocent people accused of horrible crimes, but there is a distinct lack of evidence that young men on college campuses – even the ones who have raped women – are suffering any harm due to the increased focus on ending rape.
Rape remains a chronically underreported crime, and only
2% of rapists ever spend a day in jail. On college campuses, only
10 to 25% of rapists are expelled,
less than half are suspended
and many are given university-mandated “punishments” like writing a research paper or an apology letter.
So why the ramped-up concerns for men?
Maybe it’s that we’re not used to seeing gender justice in action, so it feels strange and new ... and therefore off. Alexandra Brodsky, a co-director of anti-rape organization
Know Your IX, compared the situation to someone who has unwittingly been living in an apartment with a tilted floor their whole life.
“You become used to that, so if you wake up one day and your floor is level, it’s going to feel uneven,” she told me.
Others, like Tracey Vitchers of
Students Active for Ending Rape (SAFER)
believe the renewed focus on accused rapists’ rights is simple denial. “It comes from not wanting to believe that campus sexual assault is as prevalent as survivors, advocates and, frankly, research, demonstrate it to be”, Vitchers told me.
I also believe that the disproportionate worry for accused rapists over their victims boils down to a fundamental distrust of women. It is less worry that men will be wrongly accused, and more a lasting, ill-informed “certainty” that
women lie about rape.
After all, the most controversial news story of campus rape this year – an irresponsibly-reported assault alleged by a student at the University of Virginia – didn’t even involve a young man was brought up on campus or criminal charges. The public outrage stemmed from the belief that the woman lied about her attack.
The rape truthers’ belief that any increasing efforts to stop rape and hold more accusers accountable will hurt innocent men is, at best, magical thinking. While multiple female rape victims at
89 different colleges have filed suits
citing Title IX violations and unfair treatment by school administrators, there has not been one recent public case of a wrongly-accused male student who suffered significant, permanent legal harm at the hands of a malicious accuser. That hasn’t stopped people from trying to identify one, though.
The man accused of sexually assaulting two students and then raping
Emma Sulkowictz
– the Columbia University student who started the “Carry that Weight”
performance protest – has tried appealing to anti-feminist media
to claim his life was ruined, though no mainstream media published or broadcast his name until he came forward. And Columbia found the man not responsible, allowing him to remain on campus. A Washington Post column late last year
fretted about the dangers of campus sexual assault policies for young men, yet focused on the case of a young man who was also found not responsible. How did the system fail him, exactly?
The concerns over due process in campus adjudication procedures are also misplaced.
In The New York Times, Judith Shulevitz bemoans the Department of Education guidelines that instruct schools to use a “preponderance of evidence” standard in rape cases, as if such a thing is unheard of. But this is the
same standard of evidence
that’s required when a rape victim sues her attacker in civil court. Shulevitz also warns that schools risk losing federal funds if they don’t adhere to the DOE’s rules, but no school has ever had their funding taken away because of a Title IX violation.
Too many of us are more comfortable taking on imaginary problems rather than real ones - but reflexive thought experiments don’t stop rape or address the real underlying problems. They only do a disservice to the victims.