Are One in Five College Women Sexually Assaulted? - Depends on who's talking at the Office of Civil Rights at DOE

The reality of rape on campus, when truly real, is brutal and devastating. I went to an urban campus where a couple of idealistic girls were gang raped by non-students as the co-eds were on their way to their dorms at night. My ex-wife's friend was knifed to death in a parking structure.♘

Are One in Five College Women Sexually Assaulted? - National Review Online

HEATHER MAC DONALD APRIL 5, 2011

The vice president buys into the campus-rape lie.

[Excerpts read more at above link.]

Imagine that there were a “terrible and alarming trend” of sexual violence on college campuses against female students. Imagine that 20 percent of college women were victims of rape or attempted rape — a rate of sexual assault astronomically higher than anything seen in America’s most violent cities (in Detroit, for example, there were 36.8 rapes per 100,000 inhabitants in 2009, a rate of 0.037 percent). If 18-year-old girls were in fact walking into such a grotesque maelstrom of sexual violence when they first picked up their dormitory room key, parents and students alike would have demanded a radical restructuring of college life years ago. There would have been a huge surge in all-girls colleges to protect female students from these outrageous levels of sexual violence; those colleges that did still admit boys and girls together would have been forced to prove to worried parents that the boys they were admitting were not rapists — perhaps allowing parents to interview these aspiring monks before they were accepted. Just to be on the safe side, administrators would provide round-the-clock protection for their female students.

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And yet, according to Vice President Joe Biden, the Justice Department, and the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, college is in fact a nightmarish gauntlet of sexual violence and abuse. “There is a terrible and alarming trend in the country of sexual violence [on campuses],” Russlynn H. Ali, assistant secretary of education, told the New York Times. Ali’s Office of Civil Rights is investigating Yale for maintaining a “sexually hostile environment.” Somehow that sexually hostile environment did not discourage thousands of the country’s most academically gifted females from beating down the doors to get in; the acceptance rate at Yale this year was 7.35 percent, the lowest rate ever.

The White House claims that one in five female students has been victims of sexual assault or attempted sexual assault while at college. Such bogus statistics have been the mainstay of campus-rape-epidemic propaganda for years. They are generated by a variety of clever techniques, but the most important is this: The survey-taker, rather than the female respondent, decides whether the latter has been raped or not. When you ask the girls directly whether they view themselves as victims of rape, the answer overwhelmingly comes in: No.

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Here is the reality on campuses, which the free-love baby-boomer college deans and provosts will never acknowledge: The sexual revolution and the disappearance of adult moral authority on campus have resulted in a booze-filled sexual free-for-all, in which testosterone-charged boys act boorishly, and the girls compete to match them in reckless promiscuity. (Only disrespect for “diversity” causes the deans and provosts to exercise any moral oversight over their students.) Yes, there are plenty of drunken hook-ups that result in the proverbial “roll and scream”: “You roll over the next morning so horrified at what you find next to you that you scream,” as Laura Sessions Stepp reported in Unhooked. A small percentage of those next-day regretters view themselves as having been raped; most think that they acted stupidly and irresponsibly.

There are a few, simple antidotes to the alleged campus-rape crisis: Don’t drink yourself blotto. Don’t get into bed with one of your fellow drunken revelers. Keep your clothes on. If every girl practiced those elementary rules, poor Ms. Ali might be out of a well-paying government job.

— Heather Mac Donald is the John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute and co-author of The Immigration Solution.