File this under “headlines I can’t believe I had to write.”
Ms. Magazine, a feminist media outlet, posted an article (archived here so you don’t have to give them traffic) by Global Rights for Women attorney Amy Lauricella on Tuesday titled “Institutionalized Rape; It’s Not just an ISIS Problem.” The article claimed that, just as the Islamic State endorses rape, “college administrations similarly facilitate and perpetuate the rape of women on campuses.”
Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2575923
Lauricella’s evidence for the claim that college campuses are just like the Islamic State is a deeply flawed survey of students who responded affirmatively to situations the surveyors decided were rape, even though the vast majority of those students didn’t believe they had been raped. She uses the study to claim that as many as 1 in 4 college women have been sexually assaulted but doesn’t acknowledge that what the study deems as sexual assault is everything from a stolen kiss to forcible rape.
Lauricella claims the study shows that “a significant percentage” of students who said the reason they didn’t report was that they felt “…embarrassed, ashamed or that it would be too emotionally difficult” or that they “…did not think anything would be done about it.” About one-third of participants gave that as the reason they didn’t report. But the vast majority of participants said they didn’t report because they didn’t think the situation was serious enough (these studies never ask directly whether the student didn’t report because they didn’t think they were assaulted; that would diminish the scary findings).
About 60 percent of students gave the “not serious enough” reason for not reporting. For individual instances of sexual assault, the rates may have been higher. Even 58.6 percent of those who answered affirmative to the question of penetration involving force said they didn’t think it was serious enough to report.
Taking that into account, the “1 in 4” claim Lauricella makes doesn’t hold up. If two thirds didn’t think they were sexually assaulted (which is implied by thinking it was not serious enough to report) then the number would be closer to 1 in 12. Obviously still terrible, but hardly worthy of an Islamic State comparison.
Lauricella claims school administrators are complicit in this allegedly widespread rape problem. Schools may not have jumped to create quasi-judicial systems to adjudicate felonies years ago, but they have them now, as required by the federal government. And the tide is shifting. Accusations are taken at face value, and exculpatory evidence is rarely allowed into campus hearings, and if it is, it is spun to be used as evidence against the accused.
Campuses aren’t law enforcement or courts. They didn’t want to expel students based on shaky accusations that contained no evidence. Now they have to do just that.
What activists have wanted is the “listen and believe” strategy, where accusations are all that matter; facts and context are irrelevant. And the federal government gave in to their demands.
The most troubling aspect of this, and indeed of Lauricella’s article, is the obvious disconnect between what is happening in the U.S. and overseas with the Islamic State.
Would Lauricella ever suggest that her daughter or her female friends go to an Islamic State-controlled region? Most certainly not, but it is absurd to believe she would tell other women not to go to college in America.
Conversely, the response to campus sexual assault in America has not been to call in the police or the National Guard, but instead to turn the accusations over to untrained or poorly-trained campus administrators. I wonder if Lauricella believes we should send these administrators over to the Middle East to fix its rape culture.
Comparing things to the Islamic State seems to have replaced Hitler comparisons from the Left. And it is exactly this kind of ridiculous rhetoric that keeps people from taking the alleged problem seriously (well, that and the false accusations).
