The Rape Epidemic Is a Fiction: Sexual assaults are a third of what they were twenty years ago.

Rape is a vicious crime, one that disproportionately affects poor women and incarcerated men, but Barack Obama knows his voters, and so his recent remarks on the subject were focused not on penitentiaries, broken families, or Indian reservations but on college campuses, where the despicable crime is bound up in a broader feminist Kulturkampf only tangentially related to the very real problem of sexual violence against women.

The subject is a maddening one. President Obama repeated the endlessly reiterated but thoroughly debunked claim that one in five women will be sexually assaulted in her college years. The actual rate is . . . sort of an interesting problem, the information being so inconsistent and contradictory that one almost suspects that it is so by design.

President Obama, who gives every indication of being committed to the bitter end to his belief in the omnipotence of his merest utterance, gave a speech in which he affirmed his position that rape is wicked and that we should discourage it. Instead of giving a content-free speech, he should have directed his Department of Justice to put together some definitive data on the question.

Much of the scholarly literature estimates that the actual rate is more like a tenth of that one-in-five rate, 2.16 percent, or 21.6 per 1,000 to use the conventional formulation. But that number is problematic, too, as are most of the numbers related to sexual assault, as the National Institute of Justice, the DoJ’s research arm, documents. For example, two surveys conducted practically in tandem produced victimization rates of 0.16 percent and 1.7 percent, respectively – i.e., the latter estimate was eleven times the former. The NIJ blames defective wording on survey questions.

This is a matter of concern because a comparison between the NIJ’s estimates of college-campus rape and the estimates of rape in the general population compiled by the DoJ’s National Crime Victimization Survey implies that the rate of rape among college students is more than ten times that of the general population.

It is not impossible that this is the case, but there is significant cause for skepticism. For example, in the general population college-age women have significantly lower rates of sexual assault than do girls twelve to seventeen, while a fifth of all rape victims are younger than twelve. Most of the familiar demographic trends in violent crime are reflected in the rape statistics: Poor women are sexually assaulted at twice the rate of women in households earning $50,000 a year or more; African American women are victimized at higher rates than are white women, while Native American women are assaulted at twice the rate of white women; divorced and never-married women are assaulted at seven times the rate of married women; women in urban communities are assaulted at higher rates than those in the suburbs, and those in rural areas are assaulted at dramatically higher rates. But there is at least one significant departure from the usual trends in violent crime: Only about 9 percent of those raped are men.

It is probably the case that the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses is wildly exaggerated—not necessarily in absolute terms, but relative to the rate of sexual assault among college-aged women with similar demographic characteristics who are not attending institutions of higher learning. The DoJ hints at this in its criticism of survey questions, some of which define “sexual assault” so loosely as to include actions that “are not criminal.” This might explain why so many women who answer survey questions in a way consistent with their being counted victims of sexual assault frequently display such a blasé attitude toward the events in question and so rarely report them. As the DoJ study puts it: “The most commonly reported response — offered by more than half the students — was that they did not think the incident was serious enough to report. More than 35 percent said they did not report the incident because they were unclear as to whether a crime was committed or that harm was intended.”

If you are having a little trouble getting your head around a definition of “sexual assault” so liberal that it includes everything from forcible rape at gunpoint to acts that not only fail to constitute crimes under the law but leave the victims “unclear as to whether harm was intended,” then you are, unlike much of our culture, still sane.

Of all the statistics and evidence that are prevalent in the discussion of sexual assault, there is one datum conspicuous in its absence: the fact that sexual assault has been cut by nearly two-thirds since 1995. Under the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ apples-to-apples year-over-year comparison, sexual assault has declined 64 percent since the Clinton years. That is excellent news, indeed, but it does not feed the rape-epidemic narrative, and so it must be set aside.

The fictitious rape epidemic is necessary to support the fiction of “rape culture,” by which feminists mean anything other than an actual rape culture, for example the culture of the Pakistani immigrant community in Rotherham in the United Kingdom. “Rape culture” simply means speech or thought that feminists disapprove of and wish to suppress, and the concept has been deployed in the cause of, inter alia, bringing disciplinary action against a Harvard student who wrote a satire of feminist rhetoric, forbidding politically unpopular speakers from speaking on campuses, and encouraging what often has turned out to be headlong and grotesquely unjust rushes to judgment, as in the case of the Duke lacrosse team. Feminism is about political power, and not the Susan B. Anthony (“positively voted the Republican ticket — straight”) full-citizenship model of political power but rather one dominated by a very small band of narrow ideologues still operating under the daft influence of such theorists as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, each of whom in her way equated political opposition to feminism with rape.

This has some worrisome practical results, not the least of which is muddying the water on the issue of sexual assault itself. For example, feminists energetically protest that advising women to take such precautionary measures as moderating their alcohol intake at college parties is a species of rape-culture victim-blaming (rather than reasonable advice), and so it is no surprise that, as the DoJ notes, many surveys inquire of rape victims whether they believed their attackers to have been under the influence of drugs or alcohol but decline to ask the victims whether they were under the influence. Evidence very strongly suggests that rapists frequently use intoxicants, openly or surreptitiously, as part of a strategy conceived with malice aforethought to render their victims vulnerable. It might be useful to know how often this is the case and how often it works or fails to work, but we will not know if we refuse to ask the question.

Our policy debates are dominated by relatively narrow-minded and self-interested elites, and so it is natural that our discussion of sexual assault focuses on what might be happening at Villanova University rather than what’s happening on Riker’s Island or on Ojibwe reservations. But the way we talk about rape suggests that we do not much care about the facts of the case. If understanding and preventing rape were our motive, we’d know whether the victimization rate was x or 11x, and whether elite college campuses are in fact rather than in rhetoric more dangerous than crime-ridden ghettos and isolated villages in Alaska, a state in which the rate of rape is three times the national average. We’d never accept that the National Bureau of Economic Research didn’t know whether the inflation rate were 1.6 percent or 17 percent. We’d give the issue properly rigorous consideration.

But if your interest were in making opposition to feminist political priorities a quasi-criminal offense and using the horrific crime of rape as a cultural and political cudgel, then you’d be doing about what we’re doing right now.

Remember the phony black church bombings in the Clinton era?

Church Fire Prevention Act 1996 under Clinton, in response to rash of Black church burnings, all a KGB hoax, as documented in Ion Pacepa’s landmark book “Disinformation.”

Certainly this is a disinformation campaign - we need to think carefully about by whom and for what purpose.

On the plus side, it will probably enhance the appeal of off campus education and could cause a few colleges and universities to close and bring down the cost for all.

So mere disagreement on anything now constitutes the new definition of rape? Actually yes. In the early 90’s I worked around one woman (Berserkley graduate) at one engineering company who would scream rape if any male disagreed with her on an engineering matter.

WHAT a charming co-worker.

She is doing herself in. She won't be promoted and WILL blame the people in charge...even if the president of the company happened to be female.

She is MISERABLE. She's unhappy with herself and life and intends on making everyone around her as miserable as she is.
She will go away eventually and wind up ALL ALONE and miserable.

Her only hope is to find God and His peace.

I OFTEN misspell "peace" and write "peach." Lol. She may find God's peach too. :o)

The other reason rape seems pandemic on college campuses - you can charge someone with rape and get them disciplined if not banned from a whole college system per a lower standard of evidence than police use. Men have been kicked out of school, lost scholarships and have a black mark on their records for supposed rapes that the police decided not to pursue, and even in cases when the police punished the woman for lying about it.

Proof and Campus Rape: Standards for Campus Disciplinary Proceedings
http://www.thefire.org/proof-and-campus-rape-standards-for-campus-disciplinary-proceedings/

I worked with a woman who apparently had a long-standing rule: if you swear, you have to put $20 in a jar on her desk. I was new to the group. I said "Damn". She demanded $20. I said "No". She said, "It's either $20 or we go straight to Human Resources and I file a sexual harassment complaint."

I stood up and said, "Let's go."

We went. She got in a s***load of trouble for extorting money from employees. I transferred to a new department as soon as I could.

That’s funny. I remember at one of our plants one of the “fast track to plant manager chicks because she was a chick chick” was a super hard core holier than thou, everything must be super proper, and god forbid anybody use a swear word in her presence (this included all of the construction people, iron workers, electricians, yada yada yada). Turns out this super proper married with children fast track girl, was having a hot steamy affair with one of the young star engineers (who also had a wife and kids)...and it turned out that this had happened before at another plant, and another state, and was hushed hushed because she was a fast track, and it would look bad if it got out, which is how she got moved in the first place.

It's my understanding that a butt pinch, arm around the shoulders, or unwanted hugs can be categorized and prosecuted as "sexual assault."

Really? I hope I am wrong but given today's feminazi culture I doubt it.

One key source of information on the number of campus rapes is almost never mentioned...

How many Police reports were filed?

How many arrests were made?

How many suspects were successfully prosecuted?

How many suspects were successfully sued in civil court?

Deut 22
23 If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her;
24 Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city; and the man, because he hath humbled his neighbour’s wife: so thou shalt put away evil from among you.
25 But if a man find a betrothed damsel in the field, and the man force her, and lie with her: then the man only that lay with her shall die.
26 But unto the damsel thou shalt do nothing; there is in the damsel no sin worthy of death: for as when a man riseth against his neighbour, and slayeth him, even so is this matter:
27 For he found her in the field, and the betrothed damsel cried, and there was none to save her.

In other words, in the biblical definition of rape the woman must “Cry out”, i.e. scream, yell, etc.

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