White House Works In One Last Rape Culture Summit

In case your awareness hadn’t been sufficiently raised, the Obama White House, once more in its final weeks, elevated the campus rape narrative that it has helped spin into a panicky national conversation. The “It’s On Us” campaign, launched in 2014 to combat “rape culture,” bid farewell to its White House headquarters at a final summit on Thursday.

The thought campaign, which insists we call campus sexual assault an “epidemic,” was principally the brainchild of Vice President Joe Biden. Guidance crafters from the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights and task-enforcers from the White House joined the outgoing veep in celebration of their collective commitment to “changing culture.”

It helps for a culture change to start from the White House. As Biden told his audience Thursday afternoon, “There’s a difference when the authority is inside the White House. Because no one questions it.”

Still, the “It’s On Us” campaign maintains its status as a grassroots organizational effort—just one that “trickled down” from the office of the president straight into the office of an especially well-connected Hollywood agent. “It started with a celebrity spot to gain attention, which led to a pledge, that became a viral badge,” recounts to the White House initiative’s dramatic promotional trailer. Joe Biden and Lady Gaga brought the campaign to the Academy Awards last year, and then, well, the rest was viral media history.

While the incoming administration has no stated position on campus sexual assault as such, Biden says fear not. “I am not allowed to announce what I’m doing,” after the vice presidency, he teased a crowd predisposed to his cause, “But I’m going to be asking for your help.” “It’s On Us,” Biden all but revealed, will live on as a focus of his foundation. “On January 21st we’re going to start, we’re going to continue.”

Clearing up this folksy close-talking career politician’s retirement plans was not the immediate purpose of the summit. A send-off to mark the occasion, the White House task force on campus sexual assault published a fresh report and new guidelines for college presidents. College and university administrators needed a simplified set of rules for implementing earlier guidance documents.

The first federal guidance to address campus sexual assault was passed down from the Department of Education in 2011; it packed a punch and, as with many an overreaching federal guidance masquerading as law, it created confusion. The infamous Dear Colleague letter required every college that receives federal funding to investigate sexual assault allegations independently from law enforcement and to adjudicate claims according to a diminished standard of proof. Its an activistic reinterpretation of Title IX of the Nixon-era higher education amendments—the clause that outlaws discrimination on the basis of sex in federally funded schools.

Catherine Lhamon, the assistant education secretary for civil rights, argued in defense of the powerful policy lever her office created at Thursday’s summit. The Office of Civil Rights has always enforced Title IX thusly, she insisted: “We have been using the same definition of sexual assault, at least since the Reagan administration.”

A guidance merely “clarifies” existing law, the department would say. The diminished standard of proof and on-campus adjudication requirements were already folded into the 44 year old amendment. These aspects simply needed clarification, apparently.

Like Biden’s, Lhamon’s work against campus rape culture will continue. She was one of Obama’s two picks to serve six years on the commission on civil rights, a prime perch from which to spout further clarifications. While Lhamon may be poised to counter an anti-regulatory administration, agency guidances are no stabler than White House initiatives. They can be undone by subsequent guidance.

Still, the changed culture will not revert—at least not right away, according to the White House’s Tina Tchen. Tchen, executive director of the White House council on women and girls, credits the work of “creating ‘It’s On Us’ communities [out of which] we will create an ‘It’s On Us’ country.”

Nothing catches on quite like an alarming, and inaccurate, statistic. Rather than internally consistent data collection or diligent cooperation with law enforcement, the federally-ordained “It’s On Us” pledge demands foremost fealty to a disturbing cultural narrative and its guiding star: the oft-cited statistic dominates the “conversation,” that one in five college students are victims of sexual assault. A Justice Department survey of 23,000 college students, mostly young women, over two years allegedly confirmed it—setting the number at more than one-in-five, 21 percent as of early last year.

But their survey’s definition of sexual assault includes an array of unwanted advances, in which case 21 percent is indeed a startling number. It’s less startling in light of recent sociological findings that young millennials and their juniors, know as “iGeners,” are less, ahem, active. (When I was in college—not too long ago—anything less than the Justice Department’s definition of sexual assault meant he was just not that into you.)

Without the star-studded White House’s cover, combatting campus rape will carry on under the former vice president and a career bureaucrat whose latest appointment will outlast Trump’s first term. And the “It’s On Us” campaign couched this costly federal power grab and controversial violation of due process in a sticky phrase—”one of the best names we’ve ever come up with,” per Valerie Jarrett.

Take the Justice Department’s unrealistically relaxed definition and the campaign admittedly focused on storytelling, at the expense of facts—and it’s easy to forget rape is a physical crime first. Because it’s a vague and pernicious cultural phenomenon, if you believe.

“We needed to reframe the conversation,” according to the “It’s On Us” video that filled the lull before Biden’s warm-up band went on. Every time Mad Men actor Jon Hamm looked soulfully into the camera and pledged that he, too, was accountable for campus sexual assault, the American people, we’re to understand, became more “aware” of their cultural ailment.

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