The Diversity Delusion
Page 14
Just as a reality check, consider an actual student-related rape: In 2006, Labrente Robinson and Jacoby Robinson broke into the Philadelphia home of a Temple University student and a Temple graduate, and anally, vaginally, and orally penetrated the women, including with a gun.6 The chance that the victims would not consider this event “serious enough to report,” or physically and emotionally injurious, is exactly nil.
And consider how colleges respond to credible rape cases: They go into emergency mode. In August 2012, a rape was reported in Harvard Yard, sending shock waves throughout the campus. Police cruisers idled around college buildings; uniformed and plainclothes officers came out in force. Students were advised not to walk alone. A member of the undergraduate council called for the closing of Harvard Yard. “I thought Cambridge wasn’t a dangerous area,” a freshman told the student newspaper. “It was Harvard—it was supposed to be safe, academic.”7 (Apparently, she hadn’t read the copious materials from Harvard’s sexual-assault bureaucracy insisting that campus rape was everywhere.) In 2015, a University of Virginia freshman was abducted from a local mall, raped, and murdered. Though a suspect was already in custody and the abduction had happened off campus, university administrators beefed up campus lighting and security cameras anyway. Nervous students walked in groups or took buses and cabs.8
According to the advocates, such sexual violence is virtually a daily occurrence on campuses. Yet such intense security precautions are rare, and only follow reports of what is commonly understood as rape. Drunken coeds continue to troop eagerly into frat-house parties at UVA and elsewhere. Either the sisterhood fails to inform and protect its own or these girls know that whatever sex they encounter at those parties will be a far cry from rape.
In short, believing in the campus rape epidemic depends on ignoring women’s own interpretations of their experiences—supposedly the most grievous sin in the feminist political code.
But none of the weaknesses in the research has had the slightest drag on the campus rape movement, because the movement is political, not empirical. In a rape culture, which “condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as a norm,” sexual assault will wind up underreported, argued the director of Yale’s Sexual Harassment and Assault Resources and Education Center in a newsletter.9 You don’t need evidence for the rape culture; you simply know that it exists. But if you do need evidence, the underreporting of rape is the best proof there is.
Campus rape researchers may feel that they know better than female students themselves about the students’ sexual experiences, but the students are voting with their feet and staying away in droves from the massive rape apparatus built up since the Ms. article. Referring to rape hotlines, rape consultant Brett Sokolow lamented: “The problem is, on so many of our campuses, very few people ever call. And mostly, we’ve resigned ourselves to the under-utilization of these resources.”10
The federal Clery Act requires colleges to report the number of crimes affecting their students. From 2005 to 2016, campuses got safer. Total crimes, including burglary and crimes of violence, dropped 43.5 percent from 2005 to 2016. Such increased safety contradicts the dominant narrative and is therefore ignored. When it comes to sex crimes, both the federal government and local campuses regularly fiddle with the categorization of campus sex crimes to get the numbers up. In 2014, federal authorities changed the reporting category of “Sex offenses—Non-forcible” to the inherently vague “Fondling.” Voilà! The reports increased 6,000 percent, from 59 non-forcible sex offenses in 2013 to 3,614 fondling incidents in 2016. Even with this more expansive classification, and the efforts of campus authorities to come up with even more categories of sex offenses, the total number of Clery sex offense reports in 2016 was 10,297. Corroboration is not required; a defendant can be cleared and the accusation against him will still be entered into the Clery tally. Those 10,297 reports include all alleged improprieties against males, females, graduates, and undergraduates at 6,500 institutions. By comparison, if the one-in-five figure of campus assaults were correct, there would be between 300,000 and 400,000 sexual assaults on female undergraduates alone each year. In 2017, the American Association of University Women complained that rape numbers were still too low. Among college campuses (including branch campuses of a central institution) with enrollments of 250 students or more, 73 percent reported 0 rapes in 2015—a wholly unacceptable “picture,” as the AAUW put it.
Those meager allegations are higher than the numbers reported in the 2000s, however, thanks to a controversial directive from the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights in 2011. That guidance, known as a “Dear Colleague Letter,” warned every college and university in the country that unless they weakened their already-inadequate due-process protections in campus rape tribunals, they would lose federal funding. Colleges had to adopt a preponderance-of-evidence standard of proof for finding guilt, for example—meaning just 50.5 percent certainty that the offense had occurred—and allow accusers to appeal acquittals of the defendant. The message was clear: Get your rape reports up or face federal investigation. Colleges took the Dear Colleague Letter and ran with it, adding even flimsier categories of sexual impropriety; eliminating the greatest of all Anglo-Saxon truth-finding mechanisms—the right of cross examination; and doing everything they could to encourage accusations. The resulting procedures were “frequently so unfair as to be truly shocking,” wrote Harvard law professors Jeannie Suk Gersen, Janet Halley, Elizabeth Bartholet, and Nancy Gertner in an August 2017 white paper filed with the Office of Civil Rights.11 (In September 2017, President Trump’s Education secretary Betsy DeVos rescinded the preponderance-of-evidence requirement, but nearly all colleges have promised to continue using it—making clear that their compliance with the directive has hardly been involuntary.)
You might think that having few reports of sexual assault a year would be a point of pride; in fact, it’s a source of gall for administrators. The Harvard Crimson reported in 2016 that “some University officials do not consider a high level of reported rapes as a wholly negative statistic.” That is an understatement. Yale’s associate general counsel and vice president were clearly on the defensive when asked by the Yale alumni magazine back in 2004 about Harvard’s higher numbers of reported assaults; the reporter might as well have been needling them about a Harvard-Yale football rout. Harvard must have double-counted or included incidents not required by federal law, groused the officials.
Even after the 2011 Dear Colleague Letter, the persistent scarcity of reported sexual assaults means that the females who do report them must be treated like rare treasures. New York University’s Wellness Exchange counsels people to “believe unconditionally” in sexual-assault charges because “only 2 percent of reported rapes are false reports” (a ubiquitous claim that dates from radical feminist Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 tract Against Our Will). As Stuart Taylor and K. C. Johnson point out in their book Until Proven Innocent, however, the rate of false reports may be closer to 50 percent. Title IX investigators are usually trained in “victim-centered practices,” which reverse the presumption of innocence and treat the male as guilty unless overwhelming evidence unavoidably demands the opposite conclusion. Even the Association of Title IX Administrators warned in 2017 that “victim-centered” had come to signify “victim-favoring,” and that students were being expelled from school on uncertain evidence. The equally influential concept of “trauma-informed” analysis holds that the more unreliable and incoherent a rape complainant is, the more she should be believed, noted Harvard law professor Janet Halley in 2015.12
Just how powerful is the “believe unconditionally” credo? David Lisak, a retired University of Massachusetts psychology professor who lectures extensively on the antirape college circuit, acknowledged to a hall of Rutgers students in November 2008 that the “Duke case,” in which a black stripper falsely accused three white Duke lacrosse players of rape in 2006, had “raised the issue of false allegations.” But Lisak didn’t want to talk a
bout the Duke case, he said. “I don’t know what happened at Duke. No one knows.” Actually, we do know what happened at Duke: The prosecutor ignored clearly exculpatory evidence and alibis that cleared the defendants, and was later disbarred for his misconduct. But to the campus rape industry, a lying plaintiff remains a victim of the patriarchy, and the accused remain forever under suspicion.
So what reality does lie behind the campus rape industry? A booze-fueled hookup culture of one-night, or sometimes just partial-night, stands. Students in the 1960s demanded that college administrators stop setting rules for fraternization. “We’re adults,” the students shouted. “We can manage our own lives. If we want to have members of the opposite sex in our rooms at any hour of the day or night, that’s our right.” The colleges meekly complied and opened a Pandora’s box of boorish behavior that gets cruder each year. Do the boys, riding the testosterone wave, act thuggishly toward the girls? Yes! Do the girls try to match their insensitivity? Indisputably.
College girls drink themselves into near or actual oblivion before and during parties. That drinking is often goal-oriented, suggests University of Virginia graduate Karin Agness: It frees the drinker from responsibility and “provides an excuse for engaging in behavior that she ordinarily wouldn’t.” A Columbia University security official marveled at the scene at homecomings: “The women are shit-faced, saying, ‘Let’s get as drunk as we can,’ while the men are hovering over them.”13 As anticipated, the night can include a meaningless sexual encounter with a guy whom the girl may not even know. This less-than-romantic denouement produces the “roll and scream: you roll over the next morning so horrified at what you find next to you that you scream,” a Duke coed reports in Laura Sessions Stepp’s book Unhooked. To the extent that they’re remembered at all, these are the couplings that are occasionally transformed into “rape”—though far less often than the campus rape industry wishes.
The magazine Saturday Night: Untold Stories of Sexual Assault at Harvard, produced until recently by Harvard’s Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response, provides a first-person account of such a coupling:
What can I tell you about being raped? Very little. I remember drinking with some girlfriends and then heading to a party in the house that some seniors were throwing. I’m told that I walked in and within 5 minutes was making out with one of the guys who lived there, who I’d talked to some in the dining hall but never really hung out with. I may have initiated it. I don’t remember arriving at the party; I dimly remember waking up at some point in the early morning in this guy’s room. I remember him walking me back to my room. I couldn’t have made it alone; I still had too much alcohol in my system to even stand up straight. I made myself vulnerable and even now it’s hard to think that someone here who I have talked and laughed with could be cold-hearted enough to take advantage of that vulnerability. I’d rather, sometimes, take half the blame than believe that a profound evil can exist in mankind. But it’s easy for me to say, that, of the two of us, I’m the only one who still has nightmares, found myself panicking and detaching during sex for many months afterwards, and spent more time looking into the abyss than any one person should.
The inequalities of the consequences of the night, the actions taken unintentionally or not, have changed the course of only one of our lives, irrevocably and profoundly.
Now perhaps the male willfully exploited the narrator’s self-inflicted incapacitation; if so, he deserves censure for taking advantage of a female in distress. But to hold the narrator completely without responsibility requires stripping women of volition and moral agency. Though the Harvard victim does not remember her actions, it’s highly unlikely that she passed out upon arriving at the party and was dragged away like roadkill while other students looked on. Rather, she probably participated voluntarily in the usual prelude to intercourse, and probably even in intercourse itself, however woozily.
Even if the Harvard victim’s drunkenness cancels any responsibility that she might share for the interaction’s finale, is she equally without responsibility for all of her behavior up to that point, including getting so drunk that she can’t remember anything? Campus rape ideology holds that inebriation strips women of responsibility for their actions but preserves males’ responsibility not only for their own actions but for their partners’ as well. Thus do men again become the guardians of female well-being.
As for the story’s melodrama, perhaps the narrator’s life really has been “irrevocably” changed, for which one sympathizes. One can’t help observing, however, that the effect of this “profound evil” on at least her sex life appears to have been minimal—she found herself “detaching” during sex for “many months afterwards,” but sex she most certainly had. Real rape victims, however, can fear physical intimacy for years, along with suffering a host of other terrors. We don’t know if the narrator’s “looking into the abyss” led her to reconsider getting plastered before parties and initiating sexual contact with casual acquaintances. But if a Harvard student doesn’t understand that getting very drunk and becoming physically involved with a boy at a hookup party carries a serious probability of intercourse, she’s at the wrong university, if she should be at college at all.
Or take a case at Washington and Lee University. After a late-night party filled with the usual heavy drinking, the female accuser, Jane Doe, told her male companion: “I usually don’t have sex with someone I meet on the first night, but you are a really interesting guy.” Jane Doe began kissing John Doe, took off her clothes, and led John Doe to his bed, where she took off his clothes. They had intercourse. This was on February 8, 2014. (Jane later denied using that pickup line on the ground that she often had sex with someone she had just met.) The next day, Jane Doe told a friend that she had had sex with John Doe and that she had “had a good time last night.” Over the next month, Jane and John Doe exchanged flirty texts and had intercourse again. Jane Doe attended several more parties at John Doe’s fraternity. At one of them, Jane observed John kissing another female and left the party early, upset. John developed a publicly known relationship with that other female. Jane started psychological therapy after seeing John’s name on a list of applicants for a study-abroad program that she had also applied to. She told one of her therapists that she had “enjoyed the sexual intercourse” with John Doe, but was advised that her actions and positive feelings during their first sexual encounter “didn’t negate that it was sexual assault.” She told another therapist that “she had a strong physical reaction” to seeing John’s name on the study-abroad list. Jane had also been working at a women’s clinic and attending lectures on sexual assault. During one of those talks, Washington and Lee’s Title IX officer informed the audience of the emerging consensus that “regret equals rape.” After Jane Doe learned that John had been accepted to her study-abroad program, she decided to initiate her campus’s sexual-assault machinery against him. A travesty of a proceeding followed, in which the Title IX officer rejected John Doe’s request to consult a lawyer with the Dantesque warning that “a lawyer can’t help you here.”14 The school expelled him.
A large number of complicating factors makes such stories far more problematic cases than the term “rape” usually implies. Unlike the campus rape industry, most students are well aware of those complicating factors, which is why there are so few rape charges brought for college sex. Equally telling, alleged campus rapes have a noticeable tendency to fall apart when subjected to traditional police investigations. In 2014, the federal government started requiring that campuses disclose “unfounded”—that is, false or baseless—crime reports in their annual Clery Act criminal statistics. Colleges agonized over whether to identify the unfounded crimes by category, and many colleges did not. Harvard, to its credit, did classify the unfounded crimes by category. The results show why the issue was so difficult for the rape bureaucracy. The only unfounded crimes that Harvard reported were rapes—six of them. By contrast, none of the 492 property crimes reported to Harvar
d law enforcement in 2014 were found to be baseless. And those six unfounded rapes represented all of the rapes reported to the Harvard police in 2014—not one survived law-enforcement investigation, even though they were presumably the strongest cases out there. The other twenty-seven “rapes” listed by Harvard on its Clery Act form were reported instead to Harvard’s various non-law-enforcement sexual-assault resource centers, none of which has the authority to “unfound” a crime report. Harvard has yet to initiate a proceeding against any false accuser for violation of its honor code, presumably on the feminist theory that there are no false rape reports.
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In 2014, consultant Brett Sokolow provided another window into the promiscuous couplings that the feminist-industrial complex converts into campus rape. In an open letter to higher education, he described a series of trumped-up charges with which his firm had been involved15:
—A female student had spread rumors by social media that she had been raped by a male student. She then admitted to investigators that she had consented to their drunken hook-up. When asked why she had called the encounter rape, she replied: “You know, because we were drunk. It wasn’t rape, it was just rapey rape.” She dismissed the idea that publicly charging her companion with rape would injure his reputation: “Everyone knows it wasn’t really a rape, we just call it that when we’re drunk or high.”
—A female student was caught by her boyfriend while cheating on him with another male student. She then filed a complaint of assault against that second male. The morning after their sexual encounter they had exchanged texts: