Campus Rape

The Obama administration in 2011 strangely encouraged the creation of criteria--and an extra-legal judicial system--to manage what many feminists believe is a campus rape epidemic. A lot of the animosity toward Betsy DeVos stems from her plans to reign this back.

The “epidemic” paradigm derived from a study purporting to document that 20 percent of women will suffer sexual assault while in college. That would mean 300,000 to 400,000 assaults and would make campuses very dangerous places. Nevertheless, some insist that because the campus “rape culture” actually condones violence against women, the reported numbers are in fact low, those lower numbers of campus rapes actually being proof of the epidemic as hundreds of thousands of victims suffer in silence. So the absence of reported events proves they exist.

But the numbers are, nonetheless, very bad. Brooklyn College law professor KC Johnson has an analysis of Yale University’s just-released report on the sexual dangers on its, Yale's, campus: The number--1.75 percent of undergraduate females assaulted in the first half of 2018--is, if accurate, appalling. 1.75% assault rate in one half the school year! This is Yale University with a violent crime rate nearly high as Detroit's. The report provides no details for 18 of the 50 victims because the allegations came from a third party and the accuser did not pursue the matter. Only five of the other 32 cases went before Yale’s adjudication panel. The report says Yale “uses a more expansive definition of sexual assault” than do Connecticut and federal law — Yale’s definition encompasses “broad ranges of behavior,” but does not say why, or what. And such complaints are handled in the university's own judicial system, like cheating or fraternity complaints, through an "adjudication panel." The campus adjudication panel acts outside the civil and criminal legal system like a Middle Ages ecclesiastical court or a contemporary Sharia court with its own rules. 

There is a feckless quality about all this with the university creating little subcultures and bureaucracies to manage a seemingly monstrous problem. It is as if there is some academic context here--or as if they do not take it seriously. But if a young woman going to college runs a 20% risk of a sexual assault in her four years, this system needs a lot more than fine-tuning the Title IX administrator's role, it needs an aggressive, head-cracking police force with serious consequences for offenders. And if the American college system is attracting such abusive personalities as students it needs a serious reassessment of its admission policies.