In an interview with the lifestyle website Refinery29, Hillary Clinton discussed the issue of campus sexual assault — and predictably trotted out the tired old myth that one in five women will be sexually assaulted during college.
This is not true, and no matter how many times Clinton or the media parrot that number, it will not become true. It will also not become true when allegedly unbiased researchers replicate the same flawed study that led to the false number in the first place.
It’s more accurate to say that one in five women who volunteered to participate in a campus sexual assault survey said they had experienced some form of sexual contact that the authors of the study later decided was a form of sexual assault — contact ranging from a stolen kiss to forcible rape.
But that doesn’t make for a nice soundbite or a fearmongering headline.
“One in five women are affected by sexual assault on campuses and, as you know, throughout our society this is a serious problem for everyone,” Clinton said in the interview, published Sept. 18. “It’s something that I am personally committed to trying to address.”
In what appears to be a glimpse into just how much Clinton cares about women — or cares about wooing back women — Refinery29 asked the Democratic frontrunner why she was putting campus sexual assault “front-and-center” in her campaign. Clinton responded by … talking about foreign policy.
“That’s a really fair question, because usually when you run for president you talk about the economy, you talk about national security, you talk about some additional issues like healthcare and education, all of which, of course, I’m talking about and have very specific ideas about,” Clinton said. “I want to be the president who takes on these big issues — whether it’s climate change, or Syrian refugees, or ISIS, or anything else — but I also want to be the president who really helps people with the problems that they worry about in their own lives; the problems that keep you up at night.”
She then devoted one sentence to issues that included sexual assault: “That might be a lack of child care; or a friend’s mental health issues; or your own substance abuse issues; or certainly, in the case of so many young women, sexual assault, which is real and which affects them, if not them personally, then someone they know and care about.” After that, she returned to speaking broadly about issues (mentioning climate change and clean energy) and bringing the country together.
To me this doesn’t sound like the answer of someone who has truly put the issue “front-and-center” in her campaign. It doesn’t sound like the answer of someone who knows anything more about the issue beyond the headlines — in this case, headlines based on a myth. The questioner also appeared to have not been following the issue very closely, as the example she raised was the mattress-toter Emma Sulkowicz, who has been largely ignored by the media since she released a pornographic reenactment of her alleged rape and her story fell apart.
The Refinery29 interviewer didn’t mention that Sulkowicz’s story fell apart when friendly — even loving — Facebook messages between her and the man she accused of sexual assault were discovered. The interviewer didn’t mention that the accused student was found not responsible for the crime Sulkowicz accused him of — or, for that matter, that he was found not responsible after he was accused of sexual assault by three of Sulkowicz’s friends.
The interviewer didn’t mention that police interviewed the accused student for hours and found no reason to believe her accusation. The interviewer also didn’t mention that the accused student is suing Columbia University, where he and Sulkowicz attended, because she harassed him with her “mattress project” after he was exonerated.
Clinton also appeared unaware of any of those things when she responded “that any women who reports an assault should be heard and believed.” She also suggested that schools should have a process in place that doesn’t change with every accusation. Columbia did have a process in place that it used each time it found the accused student “not responsible” for various claims made by Sulkowicz and her friends.
Clinton then revealed her hand on the issue, saying she has “talked with survivors,” but not with due process advocates. Clinton should know about due process, as she defended a man she believed was a rapist. She must have never defended a man who was not a rapist but merely accused of rape.
She also discussed the apparent need for colleges to create their own quasi-judicial system by saying the accusers she spoke with “don’t want to go into the criminal-justice system” because they “don’t feel that they will be heard or believed there, and it’s a difficult process for many.”
The answer to that is not to create a judicial system where accusers are free to accuse anyone of anything and have that person’s life ruined without any evidence or due process. But that is what is being done at universities across the country, and that is also what Clinton appears to be advocating.
I agree with Clinton that accusers who go to the criminal justice system should be supported by the university. But right now colleges are offering a choice: “Go through us and we’ll make sure this guy is expelled no matter what, or you can go through the criminal courts, and they’ll probably treat you bad and nothing will happen.”
Which option do you think they’ll choose?
Clinton is advocating a very dangerous approach, one that has already led to several innocent men being expelled in the pursuit of “looking tough” on sexual assault.
