Posted on 11/12/2013 5:55:26 AM PST by Ready4Freddy
"We should be seeing 12,500 cases a year."
So spoke Jennifer Hammat, Title IX coordinator for the University of Texas. As FIRE's Peter Bonilla tweeted, "That quote put differently: 'we should be seeing 250-300 rapes/sexual assaults per week.'" Does anyone (apart, it seems, from Hammat) believe that there are 300 rapes each week at UT?
To provide some statistical context, consider that FBI crime figures for the most recent year (2012) indicate that in New York state (population 19.5 million) there were 2848 instances of forcible rape. In the state of Texas--including the university, of course, and with a total population of 26.1 million--there were 7711 instances of forcible rape. Nationally, there were 84,376 rapes in the United States. So according to Hammat, her campus--all by itself--experienced an amount equivalent to around 15 percent of the alleged sexual assaults in the entire United States. Coming from a crank on the street, such a claim would be laughed off. But Hammat is a high-ranking policymaking figure. She earns just under $100,000 anually, and serves as the University of Texas employee responsible for coordinating the institution's handling of Title IX complaints.
It's distressing but not surprising that Hammat's assertion passed without challenge from Daily Texan reporter Jordan Rudner. (The article provides no statistical context, either, beyond allowing Hammat to cite unspecified "national studies" claiming 25 percent of college women--and 16.7 percent of college men--are raped.) Far too often reporters simply accept at face value such preposterous assertions from campus anti-due process activists.
Three possible explanations exist for Hammat's odd public statement:
(1) The University of Texas is the violent crime capital of the United States.
(2) Hammat is such an ideologue that she's incapable of interpreting statistical data that contradicts her preconceived worldview.
(3) Hammat--and the activists that she cites--have redefined (and broadened) the meaning of rape and sexual assault to such an extent that it bears no relationship to how these commonly referenced terms are defined either under most states' criminal law, or in most media/cultural portrayals.
For the record: I don't believe the University of Texas is the violent crime capital of the United States.
By the way, empowering Title IX coordinators is one of the key demands of the Office for Civil Rights, both in the 2011 "Dear Colleague" letter (which orders colleges to erode due process protections for students accused of sexual assault on campus) and in the Montana "blueprint" (which seeks, among other things, to institute a requirement that colleges report to the government protected speech, both inside the classroom and anyplace else on campus, if that protected speech deals with a sexual topic and prompts even one person to file a complaint).
It's not reassuring, therefore, to see that the point person at one of the nation's leading public universities is a figure who seems incapable of honestly presenting data related to the issues with which she's supposed to deal.
I live in an Austin suburb——and there’s certainly nothing in the news—or even in gossip or discussions with friends to indicate that the number of assaults on the UT campus are anywhere close to that.
I should think that if they were, most parents would pull their kids out of there, and/or most young women would not feel safe in the “gun free zone” that is the campus.
(Of course, I believe that if young women were allowed to arm themselves, the number of sexual assaults on campus would plummet.)
I attended Wayne State University in Detroit during the crack epidemic when it was an urban war zone.
My car was stolen (twice) and my apartment robbed (three times) but crime actually ON campus was nil.
Even the crack heads stayed off campus.
This is nonsense much like the 3 million homeless sited back in the 80’s which was crap.
Didn’t some feminist like Andrea Dworkin say that all sex with a man is rape?
The Left is trying to play up the looming threat of heterosexual AIDS again too.
Hysteria. Chaos. Fear. Manipultion. Misinformation.
As Will Rogers famously said, “The problem with common sense is that it isn’t very common.”
Do they include the Longhorn network and then season ticket prices?
It depends how you define rape. To get to her numbers I suppose you could define an interested stare as mental rape and get close to those numbers.
Sexual assault is defined pretty loosely in these studies. It runs anywhere from a grope, to unwelcome pressure to have sex, to next morning regrets over drunken sex, to forcible rape.
With 50,000 students on the UT Austin campus, 12,500 incidents under the very loose definition is probably not far off. In the first semester of my freshmen year long ago, I and half my high school girlfriends were sexually assaulted - physically - short of rape - no alcohol involved - and it was emotionally traumatic for all of us, as we were all “nice” girls, inexperienced, suddenly out on our own. Another friend witnessed a forcible rape in the quad.
A great deal of it had to do with not understanding the randy young male mind and what constitutes an invitation to some young men, i.e. being alone with them. After that first semester, we wised up and had less trouble.
Drinking to get drunk is pure idiocy, especially for young women. I don’t call it rape when judgment is impaired by alcohol - that’s usually a two-way street. But impairing your judgment is wrong and stupid.
When my daughter went off to college, I gave her much more explicit warnings than my mother ever gave me.
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