False Rape Accusations Are Common

From WTNH TV, the story of a woman who made a false rape accusation:

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - A young woman accused of making up rape allegations against two college football players to gain the sympathy of another student she wanted to date is going on trial this week, and claims that she was pressured into confessing are expected to play a key role.

Jury selection in the case of Nikki Yovino, 19, of South Setauket, New York, is to begin Tuesday in Bridgeport Superior Court in Connecticut, and testimony is expected to start June 18. Prosecutors and defense lawyers will be in court Monday to argue over whether some evidence and testimony should be excluded from the trial.

Yovino was a student at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield when police say she reported being raped by two Sacred Heart football players at an off-campus party in Bridgeport in October 2016.

Authorities say she later admitted that she had consensual sex with the players and told them her motive. She was charged with evidence tampering, a felony, and falsely reporting an incident, a misdemeanor. The evidence tampering charge carries as many as five years in prison.

So her fake story fell apart, and she was charged. Justice was done, right? Not really. The story continues:

Yovino withdrew from Sacred Heart. The football players were never criminally charged, but both withdrew from the school as they faced possible disciplinary action based. One player lost a football scholarship, his lawyer said.

The football players’ names have not been released by police but are expected to be disclosed when they testify at the trial, their lawyer said.

“Her actions have seriously affected them,” attorney Frank Riccio II said. “They’re no longer in school. The loss of their education and the college experience has certainly affected them greatly. And this is all because of a very serious lie.”

One case, of course, doesn’t prove much of anything, but it does underline the problem with the feminist notion that women would never (well, they have to admit, hardly ever) lie about rape.

How Common are False Rape Accusations?

Quoting from Stuart Taylor, Jr. and KC Johnson, Until Proven Innocent, 2007, pp. 374-375.

The standard assertion by feminists that only 2 percent of rape claims are false, which traces to Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 book Against Our Will, is without empirical foundation and belied by a wealth of empirical data. These data suggest that at least 9 percent and probably closer to half of all rape claims are false:

1. FBI statistics say conservatively that about 9 percent of rape reports are “unfounded” in the sense of being dismissed without charges filed, usually because the accuser recants or because her account is contradicted by other evidence.
2. Forty-one percent of 109 rape complainants eventually admitted to police that no rape had occurred, according to a careful, highly regarded 1994 study of all rape reports in a midwestern town of about 70,000 between 1978 and 1987, by Purdue sociologist Eugene J. Kanin, Ph. D. The recantations made irrelevant the claims of many feminists that police often discount valid rape claims. And because there is no reason to suppose that all false accusers recanted, the total number of false reports probably exceeded 41 percent. The police in the study made serious efforts to polygraph both the accused and the accuser; it is now much more rare for police to polygraph rape accusers, due to pressure from feminist and victims’ rights groups more interested in convictions than in truth.
   
   Kanin also concluded that “these false charges were able to serve three major functions for the complainants: providing an alibi, a means of gaining revenge, and a platform for seeking attention/sympathy. This tripartite model resulted from the complainants’ own verbalizations during recantation and does not constitute conjecture.” Other experts note other motives for false rape claims; they include remorse after an impulsive sexual fling and escaping accountability when caught in an embarrassing consensual encounter.
3. Fifty percent (32) of accusers recanted their rape charges in a study by Kanin of campus police reports on sixty four rape claims at two large, unnamed Midwestern universities. In both universities, the taking of the complaint and the follow-up investigation were done by a ranking female officer. “Quite unexpectedly then” Kanin wrote, “we find that these university women, when filing a rape complaint, were as likely to file a false as a valid charge. Other reports from university police agencies support these findings.”
4. False rape accusations occur with scary frequency and “any honest veteran sex assault investigator will tell you that rape is one of the most falsely reported crimes,” Craig Silverman, a former Colorado prosecutor known for his zealous pursuit of alleged rapists, said in 2004 as a commentator on the Kobe Bryant case for Denver’s ABC affiliate. Silverman added that a Denver sex-assault unit commander had estimated that nearly 50 percent of reported rape claims are false.
5. Fraudulent rape complaints were perceived as a problem by 73 percent of the women and 72 percent of the men in a survey of students at the Air Force Academy, West Point, and the Naval Academy, according to a March 2005 Defense Department report.
6. One in four rape reports was unfounded in a 1990-1991 Washington Post investigation in seven Virginia and Maryland counties. When contacted by the Post, many of the alleged victims admitted that they had lied.

The presumption, driven by the political power of feminists on college campuses, that any accusation of rape must be true is a classic case of ideologically driven “justice.”

The campus leftists would loudly support the presumption of innocence, and full due process rights, for a black defendant accused of robbery, or a Muslim accused of conspiring with terrorists. But since the stereotypical campus rapist is a white male, these principles go out the window.

Plaintiff in Title IX Marquette Lawsuit Complained to Office for Civil Rights

We have blogged about former Marquette student Jane Doe (a pseudonym) who is suing Marquette for the treatment she received following her alleged rape (and also for Marquette’s failure to properly punish the accused rapist before the alleged rape).

We declined to draw any firm conclusions about the case, since many of the people involved refused to talk about it. We did note the implausibility of a concerted conspiracy against her in the College of Nursing, where she claims she was badly mistreated and eventually forced to leave Marquette.

In addition to filing a lawsuit, Doe filed a complaint with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which that office received on July 7.

Here is the statement that Doe provided the OCR.

On a form asking what she wanted from Marquette, Doe responded:

I request censure for MU and acknowledgement that corrective action has occurred preventing other students from enduring this treatment. Because I was forced to withdraw from MU, I would like help in entering other schools. I should also receive reimbursement for tuition and related expenses (including legal expenses).

The narrative she supplied OCR mostly recounts the same claims she made in the Complaint in the Title IX lawsuit, with an exception or two. A key claim in the Complaint is that Marquette’s Department of Public Safety discouraged her reporting the alleged rape to Milwaukee police. A fuller account of her claims is given in the narrative.

I told my parents, who went with me to report the assault to MU department of public safety (MU DPS). The MU DPS told me and my parents to think long and hard about reporting to Milwaukee Police because if they don’t charge him, he would find out and possibly act out against me; Did I really want him to know that I have reported him; I should think long and hard about this before calling the police. At this time, the DPS officers were aware of [redacted] and status with Marquette.

Even though MU discouraged us from [redacted] my parents and I did not think that was the right to to do. We reported to Milwaukee Police Department.

If this account is accurate, officers at Public Safety blundered badly. Note, however, that had they encouraged her to report the rape, the outcome would have been the same. She would have faced the investigation of her case by the Milwaukee Police, the long-delayed trial of her accused rapist, rape charges against her filed by her accused rapist (in apparently reprisal) and so on. So it will be difficult, in her lawsuit, to prove that any damages followed from this alleged blunder by DPS officers.

Office for Civil Rights Responds

The Office for Civil Rights judged her complaint under two rubrics: (1) Discrimination, and (2) Retaliation.

The complain based on discrimination was dismissed, based on the fact that she was late filing the complaint. The letter from Dawn Matthias (OCR team leader) said:

You informed OCR that you did not file your complaint within 180 days because you were afraid the University would retaliate against you. However, this is not an acceptable basis for a waiver of the 180-day filing requirement.

Because your allegation of discrimination is not timely and OCR finds no basis for granting a waiver, OCR is dismissing this allegation effective the date of this letter.

Retaliation

The Office for Civil Rights likewise dismissed the claim of retaliation, saying:

Although you contend that the Associate Dean who denied your grade appeals was aware of your report of sexual assault, you did not provide information suggesting that the Associate Dean’s stated reasons for denying the grade appeals were false or illegitimate. In light of the protracted amount of time between the protected activity and adverse action, and the lack of any indications of possible retaliation, OCR finds that you have not stated a prima facie case of retaliation and is dismissing this allegation.

Conclusion

It might seem that all this is damning for Jane Doe’s lawsuit against Marquette. But it’s not quite so simple. There is no evidence the Office for Civil Rights actually investigated the case. The passage quoted above implies that Doe’s complaint about retaliation was dismissed based merely on the fact that she herself presented no convincing evidence. Several documents from the OCR file were withheld from this blogger (based on privacy concerns) and Lauren Skerrett of the Office for Civil Rights declined to say whether any of them contained more evidence or investigative reports. But the meticulously written letter from Dawn Matthias indicates no additional evidence or investigation, and the redactions in that letter are too minor to conceal such.

But the bottom line has to be that Doe’s case is rather weak. The notion that her alleged rapist should have been suspended or expelled before he raped her only makes sense if his treatment was egregiously lenient, and we don’t know that it was. Further, even guys who are terrible jerks and deserve some punishment aren’t typically likely rapists.

The actions of DPS officers, if they really did discourage reporting a rape, were grossly unprofessional. But it’s hard to see how that changed anything in her subsequent experiences. And evidence of intentional mistreatment by multiple people in the Nursing College is missing.

Title IX Lawsuit Against Marquette

It’s been in the media, but not covered in any depth: the fact that a former student is suing Marquette for the treatment she received after reporting to University officials that she had been raped by a Marquette student.

We have obtained the Complaint, filed with the Federal District Court of the Eastern District of Wisconsin by “Jane Doe.” This is, of course, a pseudonym, since both the legal system and the norms of journalism protect the identity of rape victims, so far as is possible.

And we have identified the alleged rapist as “the accused,” since he was acquitted of rape charges in a Milwaukee court.

We have reproduced most of the Complaint below, stripping out legalese, paragraph numbers, and some redundant material.

If everything here is true, Marquette has been guilty of rather severe misconduct. But is everything (or even most of it) true? We have inserted our comments where we have information or a perspective to add. But much of the material in the Complaint is, at the moment, mere assertion that will need to be backed up (or refuted) by sworn testimony.

The Complaint

Defendant MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY recklessly allowed a male student who had already threatened and harmed another female student to return to campus. When the male student then raped JANE DOE, MARQUETTE knew it had done wrong. Rather than help and support DOE, MARQUETTE tried to sweep its mistake under the rug, discouraging DOE from reporting the rape to law enforcement and seeking to discredit DOE as a student.

DOE began attending MARQUETTE as a freshman in or about August 2013. DOE was enrolled in MARQUETTE’s College of Nursing. Once students are admitted to the College of Nursing, they are guaranteed all required classes and clinical hours, enabling students not only to graduate with a college degree but also, upon graduation, to assimilate into the nursing profession.

DOE had a normal, uneventful first year at MARQUETTE. She made friends, earned good grades (with approximately a B average), and enjoyed the nursing program.

During her first year at MARQUETTE, DOE met another MARQUETTE student [the accused]. Although [the accused] repeatedly expressed a sexual interest in DOE, and they once attended a dance together, they were not in a romantic relationship.

In or about August 2014, after summer vacation, DOE returned to MARQUETTE for her sophomore year. Throughout August, [the accused] sent DOE text messages that were at times rude, crude, demeaning, and hostile. DOE repeatedly told [the accused] that she had a boyfriend and asked [the accused] to communicate with her civilly or leave her alone.

On or about August 21, 2014, [the accused] threatened DOE by text message, “If I wanted to I could’ve railed you any night of my choosing ever since I met you. And there’s no doubt in my mind I’m going to rail you sometime this semester. Nothing like you’ve ever experienced before. I would be doing you the favor.” DOE responded, “That’s not going to happen.”

The quoted message is a pale reflection of vulgar messages the accused sent to Doe. Another soon after said:

I know big dicks are a scary thing, but you will grow to like it.

Which was immediately followed by:

I swear to god if one of those freshman sluts bleeds on my new sheets I’m going to lose it.

But it’s downright false to claim that Doe demanded that the accused be more civil or stop texting her. In spite of the vulgarity of the messages, Doe continued a congenial exchange with him, as this list of texts shows.

For example, about a half hour after the “rail you” text quoted above, the accused texted:

What if I told you I liked you and wanted something more. Obviously I don’t give a shit about sex if I’m still talking to you after 6 months of knowing you. . . . You could not let have sex [sic] with you and be your friend. I really enjoy talking to you.

To which Jane Doe replied:

That’s what I’m going for. I’m just looking for friends right now.

The accused then bragged about how he was “doing really good right now with the ladies,” and then shortly thereafter texted:

Just met a girl named Mary walking down the sidewalk and her friend Grace it’s their first night here and they got back from some square dancing thing.

Doe then replied:

Well have fun kid. Remember, safe sex is great sex.

So rather than being sorely offended by what seems to us as patiently offensive language, Doe continued with a congenial exchange.

A few days later, in the early morning hours of August 24, 2014, DOE met with [the accused] when she was intoxicated, and he raped her.

This is stated as fact, although a jury acquitted the alleged rapist.

The Rape Case

It seems that the testimony of Jane Doe had several problems. In the first place, she claimed to have simply happened upon the accused on the street the night of the rape. But in fact, she had exchanged several text messages with him and they planned to meet, as a list of their texts shows.

Here is the first page of the texts, and here is the second.

Beginning at 9:53 p.m. on the evening of the alleged rape (August 23-24) a series of texts between Doe and the accused detailed their respective movements. At 2:32 a.m. the accused texted:

Come to Ivy or meet me down in the lobby at [truncated]

To which Doe responded:

Why do you want to meet me?

The accused replied:

To see you’re beautiful face and say hi

To which Doe responded:

OK (:

Another nine messages followed and concluded with the accused being at Schroeder Hall. According to Doe, the accused then invited her to come see his apartment, which was right across the street.

Doe, speaking to police, misrepresented what happened, implying that the two had simply happened upon each other when both were out roaming around.

Milwaukee Police Officer Cindy Carlson interviewed her. Carlson describes her testimony.

A. . . . the victim stated that she was outside of her dorm on Marquette’s campus looking for some friends when she was approached by a known acquaintance of hers [the accused]. She said they hugged each other, then talked, and they began walking to his apartment because he wanted to show her his new apartment.

Examined by the accused’s lawyer, Carlson was asked:

Q. Officer, you indicated that when you interviewed [Jane Doe], she indicated that she was outside of Schroeder Hall on August 24th in the evening when she saw [the accused]?

A. It was the early morning hours, yes.

Q. Okay. And did she tell you that [the accused] and her had planned to meet up outside of Schroeder Hall?

A. She did not say that those were her plans, no.

Q. Okay. She told you she was waiting for other friends. Not [the accused]. Correct?

A. She was looking for her other friends, yes.

Why would Jane Doe give a false account about this? Perhaps she knew that the truth might look like a hook-up for sexual purposes, even if it was not. Still, it doubtless harmed her credibility in the eyes of the jury.

Back to the Complaint:

The next day, DOE sent [the accused] multiple text messages, telling him that they needed to speak. He told DOE, “text me what you want to say.” DOE wrote, “Its about Saturday night. What you did was absolutely horrible....” [the accused] then agreed to speak with DOE, who told him that she was going to report the sexual assault. [The accused] admitted he had raped DOE but told her that if she went to the police, no one would believe her.

In fact, the texts sent the next day to not show any urgency on the part of Doe to meet her supposed rapist, as the exchange of texts shows.

Further, on the day after the supposed rape, Doe told friend Ann Lally that she “did not know” whether she had had sex the night before. An odd statement, which might make sense if Doe was drunk to the point of unconsciousness. But she does not claim to have been unconscious during the rape, and video surveillance footage from her return to her dorm (Schroeder Hall) does not show any perceptible impairment in her actions.

Probably worse, in the eyes of the jury, was the fact that Doe admitted, at the rape trial of the accused, to extremely aggressive sexual behavior toward him during the spring of 2014. Specifically, she admitted making out with him, to taking off his clothes and hers, and getting on top of him, grinding her pubic area against his.

The accused claims his penis briefly penetrated Doe’s vagina. Indeed, he brought sexual assault charges against Doe, but only after she had accused him of rape, in what was apparent retaliation.

(How a misguided tactic of the prosecutor allowed this into evidence notwithstanding the rape shield law is an interesting story.)

Verdict

After a much-delayed trial, the jury acquitted the accused on July 14, 2016. Anomalies in Doe’s account, and (doubtless) her earlier sexual aggressiveness toward the accused, appear to have produced a “reasonable doubt” in their minds. A less strict standard of proof – for example the “preponderance of the evidence” standard used in many campus tribunals – might lead to a different result. Especially, it is hard to see a motive for a false rape claim here. But then, not all such claims have a perceptible motive.

Back to the Complaint:

At the Time of DOE’s Assault, MARQUETTE Was Already Under Scrutiny for Title IX Non-Compliance

In 2011 – a few years before DOE was assaulted – MARQUETTE officials acknowledged that they made mistakes in handling student reports of sexual assaults, including by failing to report incidents to Milwaukee police as required by state law. In order to remedy those failures, MARQUETTE said it was improving how the university reported incidents of sexual assault to the Milwaukee police. These changes came only after a former student said that MARQUETTE dismissed her allegations that a student-athlete had sexually assaulted her.

At that time, MARQUETTE officials told the press: “There were a lot of things I think we found that we were not proud of, as you can imagine. We have initiated a lot of conversations since then on campus as well as with local law enforcement . . . to really help us learn from that. It will not happen again.”

This is quite accurate. Misconduct was exposed by articles in the Chicago Tribune that show, in two separate incidents, Marquette failed to inform police of sexual assaults that the university knew about and meted out absurdly lenient punishments to athletes who committed assaults.

Moreover, in and around 2015, around the same time as incidents described in this Complaint, MARQUETTE was under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education for possibly mishandling an incident involving sexual harassment.

After the sexual assault, DOE was scared and upset. She called her parents, who immediately came to the MARQUETTE campus. Together, DOE and her parents went to MARQUETTE’s Department of Public Safety to report the attack.

Despite the fact that [the accused] had committed a serious violent crime – and despite MARQUETTE’s prior mishandling of situations like this one – MARQUETTE’s Department of Public Safety discouraged DOE and her parents from reporting the crime to the Milwaukee Police Department. Moreover, despite the fact that DOE specifically asked what her options were, no one informed DOE or her parents about Title IX or her option to pursue a complaint under MARQUETTE’s complaint procedures.

We have been unable to reach any of the parties to the exchange between Marquette Public Safety and Doe and her parents. A call to Doe’s parents was not returned, and neither was a call to Marquette Police Chief Paul Mascari. We did reach Megan DeVries, apparently one of the officers present, and her only response was “I have nothing to say about that.”

In response to the earlier scandal, reported by the Chicago Tribune, Mascari said “I can tell you that, having talked to the officers afterward, it was never the intention of anyone in this department to discourage … victims from contacting the Milwaukee Police Department.”

It would be striking, in light of the previous scandal, if Public Safety officers in fact did discourage a report to police.

Notwithstanding MARQUETTE’s repeated efforts to dissuade DOE from contacting police, DOE insisted that she wished to report the rape to the Milwaukee Police Department. At DOE’s request, the police responded and took DOE’s statement.

The police secured an arrest warrant for [the accused]. DOE feared encountering [the accused], who lived across from DOE’s dormitory. Even though MARQUETTE knew the danger that [the accused] posed to DOE and other students, MARQUETTE refused to allow the police to arrest [the accused] on campus. During the days that it took for the police to track [the accused] down off campus, DOE was frightened and stayed in a hotel with her parents until police notified her that [the accused] was in custody.

On or about August 29, 2014, [the accused] was arrested and charged with third-degree sexual assault.

We don’t know what to make of the “refused to allow the police to arrest [the accused] on campus” comment. Perhaps Marquette resisted having him arrested when he was in class. But he lived at Ivy on 14th, right on Wells Street, and would not have been hard to find.

Restraining the Accused

On September 3rd, the accused appeared before Court Commissioner Barillas and was granted bail, and also was put on GPS monitoring, and forbidden to be within 1,000 feet of Schroeder Hall. A complication arose when it was discovered that his apartment was only about 600 feet from Schroeder Hall, and many of the buildings in which he would have classes were less than 1,000 feet from that building.

Later on the 3rd, this was brought to the attention of Barillas, who modified the order to give the defendant 48 hours to collect his belongings and leave campus. At this time, Barillas was informed that the defendant had withdrawn from Marquette.

The defendant then returned to his parents home in Illinois, and remained under surveillance by Justice Point, although the GPS monitoring was eventually removed.

On or about September 3, 2014, while [the accused] was still in custody, DOE and her parents met with MARQUETTE’s Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs and asked what the school was going to do. The Assistant Vice President, who failed to inform DOE about Title IX or DOE’s ability to lodge a complaint with the school, was non-committal concerning what action MARQUETTE would take concerning the rape. The Assistant Vice President said only that people at MARQUETTE would discuss the issues.

A source at Marquette tells us that the Marquette official in question was probably Marya Leatherwood, of the Student Affairs office.

Reached at her home in Georgia, Leatherwood could not confirm that she was the official (citing confidentiality rules), but she did make it clear that, at this point, “lodging a complaint with the school” was a moot issue. The rape complaint lodged with Department of Public Safety on August 27th would have automatically been reported to Student Affairs (which was then handling Title IX complaints under the Student Conduct process).

Of course, Student Affairs might not move on such a complaint if the criminal justice system was pursuing it aggressively. Why institute a process that might lead to the student’s expulsion when cops and prosecutors are trying to put him in prison? And why make any promises about what Marquette is “going to do” when the issue is in the hands of the justice system? Marquette would not be precluded from pursuing a disciplinary process if charges were dropped, or if the accused was acquitted. But by the time the accused was finally acquitted (nearly two years later) he was long gone from Marquette.

DOE’s parents also specifically asked the Assistant Vice President whether [the accused] had any disciplinary history. In response, the Assistant Vice President said that [the accused] was a MARQUETTE student. DOE’s parents followed up, asking if [the accused] had any issues. The Assistant Vice President just repeated that [the accused] was a MARQUETTE student.

Of course, rules about confidentiality would have prevented any Marquette official from revealing this information. While the Marquette official may have come across as frustratingly evasive, the evasiveness was prudent (don’t promise something that might not happen) and in some cases was required (don’t reveal confidential information).

DOE’s parents met with the Assistant Vice President again on or about September 5, 2014, and notified the Assistant Vice President that the Milwaukee County District Attorney was bringing formal charges against [the accused]. DOE’s parents provided a copy of the charges and asked what MARQUETTE was going to do. Again, the Assistant Vice President provided no information about Title IX and gave no assurances that the school would take any action.

On or about September 5, 2014, [the accused] withdrew from MARQUETTE. When DOE’s parents followed up with the Assistant Vice President, the Assistant Vice President stated that because [the accused] withdrew, the school would take no action.

To DOE’s knowledge, MARQUETTE never commenced a Title IX investigation or took other action concerning [the accused] with respect to the sexual assault.

Marquette’s Actions

In fact, Marquette was taking action on the case. On September 4th, Erin Lazzar, Associate Dean of Students, wrote to the accused student noting that the charges against him had been reported to her office by Public Safety, and that he was not enrolled in classes for the fall semester. Thus, a “Student Conduct Hold” had been placed on his record. Further, “Should you wish to return to Marquette as a student, a student conduct hearing will need to be scheduled first.”

Finally, he was told that “Effectively immediately, you are prohibited from being on the Marquette University campus at any time for any reason.”

So while Doe’s parents were faced with what they considered stonewalling, Marquette was indeed acting against their daughter’s alleged rapist.

With respect to DOE, MARQUETTE assigned a counselor who, upon information and belief, was serving in an interim capacity and had no training working with sexual-assault victims. DOE received calls from the counselor at random times, asking questions like, “Hi, how are you feeling about being raped?” The calls were insensitive and very upsetting to DOE.

DOE also discussed the sexual assault with her Academic Advisor, who instructed DOE to notify her teachers about what had happened. DOE told each of her teachers at MARQUETTE that she had been sexually assaulted by another student at the beginning of the school year.

DOE Learns about [the accused’s] Past

Another MARQUETTE undergraduate student approached DOE in or about January 2015. The student informed DOE that in or around early 2014 – when DOE was a freshman at MARQUETTE – [the accused] had stalked and intimidated the student. [the accused] sent the student angry, harassing, and degrading text messages; posted hostile slurs about her on social media; and aggressively approached and followed her on campus. The student was extremely frightened by [the accused], fearing for her safety and repeatedly seeking recourse with MARQUETTE’s Department of Public Safety.

Also, just as [the accused] had done with DOE – trying to turn the tables and accusing DOE of raping him – [the accused] had used the same tactic the previous year, when under investigation for stalking the student. That is, [the accused] had attempted to shift blame to the student, telling MARQUETTE that the student had previously stalked him.

Because of [the accused’s] misconduct toward the student, MARQUETTE suspended [the accused] from the school, in or about spring 2014. There was also a no-contact order in place at MARQUETTE, prohibiting [the accused] from having contact with the student.

Inexplicably, though, [the accused’s] suspension did not stand. MARQUETTE’s Vice President for Student Affairs overruled that decision, and [the accused] was permitted to return to MARQUETTE in fall 2014 on the conditions that he, among other things: (1) write a reflection letter to the student, and (2) receive counseling.

Of course, without knowing the full details of the case, and also the precedents (how had similar previous cases been handled?) is it impossible to know whether this sanction was unduly lenient.

Back to the Complaint:

According to the student, [the accused] never provided her with a reflection letter.

Moreover, on information and belief, [the accused] never provided MARQUETTE with evidence that he received counseling or wrote the required reflection letter to the student before returning to MARQUETTE’s campus.

MARQUETTE Retaliates Against DOE

Once DOE learned this information about [the accused], DOE and her parents confronted MARQUETTE, trying to understand why [the accused] had been permitted back on campus. It also became clear to DOE that the information about the other MARQUETTE student was very important to the criminal case against [the accused] and should be turned over to the prosecution. Although MARQUETTE knew all of this information before and could have shared it with the District Attorney’s Office, MARQUETTE did so only at DOE’s urging, and only after the student alerted DOE.

DOE tried to remain focused on succeeding in MARQUETTE’s nursing program. Rather than recognizing the trauma that DOE had experienced and helping her overcome the new obstacles facing her, however, MARQUETTE embarked on a campaign to discredit DOE and ultimately to run her out of the school. Throughout 2015 and 2016, in particular – after [the accused] filed a complaint with MARQUETTE about DOE – MARQUETTE appeared to have two motivations: (1) to deter future sexual-assault victims from pursuing charges, as DOE had done, and (2) to intimidate DOE, in an effort to cause her to leave MARQUETTE, protect MARQUETTE against legal action, and discredit DOE as a complainant.

Note that this supposed “campaign” would have had to involve multiple administrators in both the Student Affairs office and (as we shall see below) the College of Nursing, as well as several instructors in the College of Nursing. But any campaign against Doe would seem to involve much greater risks than merely letting her alone to finish her education.

This retaliation took multiple forms. First, despite knowing that DOE was a witness in the ongoing criminal proceedings against [the accused], requiring frequent interviews and meetings with police and prosecutors, which were stressful and difficult for DOE, MARQUETTE failed to support DOE’s participation in those proceedings and failed to provide reasonable academic accommodations.

When [the accused] accused DOE of assaulting him, in late 2014, the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office informed DOE that she would be interviewed, either by MARQUETTE’s Department of Public Safety (because [the accused] had made the complaint directly to MARQUETTE) or by the Milwaukee Police Department. A representative for DOE contacted MARQUETTE’s Associate General Counsel and informed him about [the accused’s] accusation and the circumstances.

Throughout this time, DOE did not know who would be reaching out to her or when the request would occur. This hung over DOE’s head.

In or about January 2015, the Milwaukee police called DOE to come in to the police department that day to be interviewed about [the accused’s] complaint. DOE was scheduled to take a critical test in her Pathophysiology 1 class just a couple of hours after the call from police. The test was important. DOE had completed Pathophysiology 1 the previous semester, but DOE’s instructor had given DOE the option to take this particular test in January, after the semester’s end.

Nervous, but not wanting to rock the boat, DOE took the test. She got a C/D (meaning: under 78%), which – in the MARQUETTE nursing school’s grading scheme – constituted a failing grade.

The Pathophysiology 1 class was a prerequisite for the other classes DOE was taking during the spring semester. DOE’s Academic Advisor told DOE that because of her C/D grade, she would not be permitted to proceed with her spring classes and needed to leave MARQUETTE immediately. The Advisor said that DOE could no longer attend the classes she had already started and that she could not remain in the dorms.

DOE’s mother contacted the Advisor, explained that DOE had been contacted by police right before the test to be interviewed about [the accused’s] accusation against DOE, and asked that DOE be given an opportunity to retake the test. The Advisor said no. The Advisor said that DOE would be required to take a full withdrawal on medical leave, or MARQUETTE would not refund the tuition that DOE had already paid for the semester.

DOE’s mother engaged the Advisor in discussions about alternatives. DOE’s parents were willing to do anything to keep DOE in school, as much on schedule and with as much normalcy as possible. The Advisor shot down every suggestion. Despite the fact that MARQUETTE routinely allowed other nursing students who did not pass a prerequisite class to remain at school and take electives or other classes, MARQUETTE repeatedly told DOE’s parents that they would not accommodate DOE.

Only after DOE’s mother specifically called out MARQUETTE for trying to get rid of DOE the month before [the accused’s] criminal trial did MARQUETTE relent in part, allowing DOE to stay in the dorms and take just one class for spring of her sophomore year. MARQUETTE also – after initially refusing, repeatedly, to do so – refunded a portion of tuition for the classes that DOE was not being permitted to take. Although this arrangement allowed DOE to remain enrolled at MARQUETTE and maintain the regularity of living on campus, it still constituted a significant setback for DOE, who wanted to be and should have been a full-time student taking a full course load.

A representative of the Milwaukee County Office of the District Attorney reached out to MARQUETTE on DOE’s behalf, describing in detail the many demands on DOE as part of the investigation. The letter stated in part, “It is very common for victims of sexual assault to struggle with concentration, sleep disturbances, anxiety, and hypervigilance in the wake of this type of incident. Not only does [DOE] bear the weight of those types of challenges, she is experiencing additional pressures related to the Criminal Justice System.” The District Attorney’s Office urged MARQUETTE to support DOE and her efforts to continue her education.

Despite this advocacy by DOE’s parents and law enforcement, MARQUETTE continued to refuse to provide reasonable academic accommodations to DOE. For instance, in spring semester 2016, DOE was enrolled in Nursing 2002. Twenty percent of her course grade was based on an online quiz that students were permitted to take throughout the semester. Students were permitted to retake the quiz as many times as needed to earn 100% on the quiz. DOE timely took what she believed was the correct quiz and earned 100%. DOE noticed, though, that the teacher had not posted her quiz grade in the online gradebook. This was not out of the ordinary, because the teacher was routinely slow in posting grades. Toward the end of the semester, when the quiz grade still had not been posted, DOE met with the teacher to inquire.

During the meeting, the teacher informed DOE that DOE had taken the wrong online quiz. The teacher refused to allow DOE to take the correct quiz, stating that it was too late. DOE told the teacher, who knew about DOE’s sexual assault, that she was willing to do any extra assignments necessary to make up for the quiz, but the teacher refused. Instead, the teacher asked what DOE was doing this summer to help herself. DOE told the teacher about her internship. The teacher said words to the effect of, “No, what are you doing about therapy?” DOE explained that she continued to attend therapy. The teacher then stated, in substance, that she did not think DOE was mentally stable enough to be at MARQUETTE because of the sexual assault, and that she was worried about DOE’s current and future performance in the clinical program.

Any suggestion that DOE was struggling in the clinical program was false. DOE was succeeding in clinicals, and her clinical teacher had even praised DOE as a standout student. But more to the point – even though DOE had already experienced clear retaliation as a result of reporting and pursuing the sexual-assault charge against [the accused] – the comment made DOE more aware that teachers in the nursing school were holding the sexual assault, and DOE’s pursuit of accountability for her attacker, against her.

DOE followed up with the Dean of the nursing school to address her Nursing 2002 grade and the teacher’s refusal to allow her to take the online quiz. The Dean agreed to provide DOE the opportunity to take the quiz, stating that there was no hurry, DOE’s grade would be marked as incomplete, and that DOE had until October to take the quiz and complete the course.

Despite the Dean’s giving her until October, DOE did the quiz right away in May and earned 100%. Because it was an online quiz, DOE’s grade was immediately posted to her teacher. With the inclusion of the online quiz, DOE was set to earn an A in the class.

But just hours after she completed the quiz – and within weeks of [the accused’s] scheduled trial (which had been postponed) – MARQUETTE notified DOE that she was being placed on academic probation. With the Nursing 2002 course marked incomplete – and, therefore, without the benefit of the A that would ultimately be posted as DOE’s grade – DOE’s grade point average was 2.62. Under MARQUETTE’s usual policy, academic probation was imposed for students with a grade point average below 2.5.

This did not make sense, both because DOE’s grade point average exceeded 2.5 and also because the Dean had specifically told DOE that she would be able to have her quiz counted as part of her Nursing 2002 grade. When DOE pointed out this out, the only explanation DOE was given was words to the effect of, “We sometimes do that.”

While suffering under the stress of the imminent [the accused] trial, DOE filed a formal appeal, protesting her academic probation. MARQUETTE demanded access to DOE’s medical records, including records concerning mental-health treatment. This was an unreasonable and invasive request, part of MARQUETTE’s continuing effort to damage and intimidate DOE. Ultimately, DOE’s treating physician provided a letter stating, in substance, that DOE should be in school and certainly was stable enough to be at MARQUETTE.

Only after DOE pushed back on MARQUETTE’s unfair and unreasonable treatment did MARQUETTE agree, in or about June 2016, to lift the academic probation and allow DOE to return for the fall semester.

Over the summer, DOE was determined to return to MARQUETTE and put the past behind her. When she returned for the fall semester, though, she encountered resistance from MARQUETTE. In or about October 2016, MARQUETTE administrators informed DOE that she could not attend clinicals – required courses for the nursing program – because DOE’s mandatory drug test had not been properly uploaded. DOE was informed about this snafu at around 4:30 pm on a Wednesday, when the clinicals were scheduled for Thursday and Friday. Although DOE offered to provide the results from a drug test administered by her doctor, MARQUETTE refused to accept the test. As a result, DOE missed the Thursday and Friday clinicals, taking her otherwise-A grade down to a C.

By contrast, at least one other student who was missing a critical requirement – proof of a current flu shot – was assisted by the nursing department and did not have to miss clinicals. DOE was not given such accommodation.

In or about December 2016, DOE was notified that she was slated to receive a C/D (by .038%) in her maternity class. Although DOE knew she did not have an A going in to the final exam, she had not known that she was in jeopardy of finishing without a passing grade. DOE believed that she had completed assignments correctly and performed well in the class. After seeing the C/D final grade, DOE tried to discuss the grade with her professor, but the professor refused, stating only that DOE’s group paper – on the topic of sexual assault – did not meet standards. It did meet standards, however.

Around this time, one of DOE’s clinical instructors in the nursing program informed DOE that the instructor was resigning from MARQUETTE because of the way the school treated students.

Harassed by the Nursing College?

There is no reason to doubt that Doe was psychologically distressed, and it’s possible that a Nursing instructor or two might be a jerk. But the idea of a coordinated campaign begins to look like tin foil hat theorizing.

We don’t know the details of each of these situations, and the present and two immediate past Deans of the College of Nursing failed to respond to our multiple requests for comment.

But a knowledgeable source close to the College of Nursing told us “I have a hard time believing that the college of nursing would mistreat a student after reporting a rape. Just the opposite. The College of Nursing administration and the faculty have a track record of supporting students in difficult situations.”

Harm to DOE

Ultimately, DOE could no longer endure MARQUETTE’s conduct toward her. In 2017, DOE left MARQUETTE and transferred to a community college where she could get back on her feet and prepare to transition to a different nursing program. DOE has been earning straight As since leaving MARQUETTE.

MARQUETTE’s actions caused DOE significant harm. First, DOE has suffered trauma and emotional distress as a result of being raped by [the accused] and a result of the way MARQUETTE treated her. Since the attack, DOE has needed regular therapy and psychiatric treatment. Her physicians prescribed and DOE now takes medication for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder-related anxiety and depression, as well as sleep medication to block recurring nightmares about the rape. Had MARQUETTE followed through with its expulsion of [the accused] and exercised due care for its students, [the accused] would not have been permitted to return to campus, would not have been there to rape DOE, and DOE would not now be suffering these harms. MARQUETTE’s treatment of DOE in the aftermath of the attack further exacerbated these problems.

Second, although DOE earned some school credits while at MARQUETTE, she now has to start over, almost entirely. Credits in nursing classes from MARQUETTE will not transfer to a new nursing program; DOE has to repeat those classes. DOE must now pay tuition for three more years of nursing school – despite having already paid well over $75,000 in connection with DOE’s schooling at MARQUETTE. These three additional years of nursing school are expected to cost at least $90,000, and as much as $150,000.

Third, but for the events described in this Complaint, DOE would have graduated with her class in spring 2017. She then would have entered the workforce as a nurse, earning approximately $65,000 per year. Now, DOE’s work as a nurse will be delayed for three years while she repeats the nursing program and earns her degree.

In addition to the direct harm to DOE, MARQUETTE’s actions have harmed others. DOE is aware of at least one other MARQUETTE student who was sexually assaulted by another MARQUETTE student. The student victim told DOE that she decided not to report the rape because she saw how MARQUETTE retaliated against DOE for making a report and standing by the charge.

Conclusion

So what does one make of all this? As we have shown, some of the claims in the Complaint are pretty implausible. But not all of them are, and until and unless we get depositions and other sworn testimony from several of the principals, some of these issues will be hard to judge.

The Plaintiff is demanding a jury trial. Will it come to that, or will Marquette simply pay some money in a settlement to make the problem go away? Lawyers from Michael Best & Friedrich are representing Marquette, and they don’t come cheap.

Campus Rape: Scholars Accused of Misconduct for Politically Incorrect Findings

Of course, the claim of “misconduct” will eventually be found to be baseless. But until that happens, the authors will have to endure a tedious “investigation.” The process is the punishment.

Ironically, Mary Koss is one of the people responsible for the current hysteria about campus sexual assault. Her pioneering study in the 1980s, financed by Ms. Magazine, claimed that one in four college women have been victims of date rape. The number was entirely bogus.

Koss’s study had serious flaws. Her survey instrument was highly ambiguous, as University of California at Berkeley social-welfare professor Neil Gilbert has pointed out. But the most powerful refutation of Koss’s research came from her own subjects: 73 percent of the women whom she characterized as rape victims said that they hadn’t been raped. Further—though it is inconceivable that a raped woman would voluntarily have sex again with the fiend who attacked her—42 percent of Koss’s supposed victims had intercourse again with their alleged assailants.

So one could view her current troubles as poetic justice. We think this would be unfair, and credit her with being honest about the data in spite of the current politically correct dogmatism.

Debunking Myths About Campus Sexual Assault

Hypocrisy: Marquette on Sexual Assault Awareness

It’s now “Sexual Assault Awareness Month” at Marquette, and here is the video that talks about it:


As is always the case on college campuses, the issue is framed in terms of needing to “raise awareness.” Presumably, if everybody is “aware” that some guys would like to rape (or otherwise sexually assault) a woman, the problem will go away.

The people promoting this campaign, of course, continue to simply lie about the incidence of campus rape. For example, they cite a 2000 Department of Justice Report to support the claim that “It is estimated that nearly 25 percent of college women have been victims of rape or attempted rape since the age of 14.” We have analyzed this report, and it in fact shows no such thing.

Other studies of the issue show a vastly lower incidence of sexual assault among college women.

But of course, if you are trying to “raise awareness” why not get everybody as overwrought about the issue as possible?

Then there is Marquette’s rhetoric about how sex without “consent” is sexual assault.  That sounds reasonable on its face, but unfortunately, the definition of “consent” is warped.   Some of what the university says about consent is sensible (“Giving in or going along with someone . . . to avoid being hurt is not consent”). But some of it is absurd. For example: “Giving in or going along with someone to gain approval . . . is not consent.” So if a girl allows a guy to have sex with her because she wants his approval he has raped her.

Then there is “Silence and passivity do not equal consent.” So if a woman allows a guy to fondle her, or have sex with her, without any protest or resistance, he has raped her.  This may be true in the fever swamp that is feminist academia, but it’s not true in the real world.

Such absurdly broad definitions of rape cheapen the meaning of the term “rape” and trivialize real rape.  This feminist tendency to call every unfortunate sexual encounter that a woman may, in the morning, feel unhappy about “rape” is the reason that a vastly lower number of college women say they have been raped than are classified as rape victims by feminist researchers.

But at least, Marquette is taking a forthright stand against date rape, right?

But what happens when women on campus are the victims of actual sexual assault? Especially, what happens when the assailants are members of the basketball team? Marquette covers it up. One case involved a woman who began consensual intercourse with a male student, and then told him to stop. Not only did he refuse, but he roughed her up badly in the process.

The woman met with Student Affairs staffer Stephanie Quade. According to the Chicago Tribune:

The woman said she met with Quade, who encouraged her to focus on her schoolwork and mental health rather than pursuing charges, the woman said. Quade also asked if she had thought about praying about the situation, the woman said. She said she left the meeting in tears.

“I felt like they were trying to get me to be quiet and disappear,” she said. “I’ve never been made to feel so dumb, so stupid and so much like I didn’t matter.”

Marquette, which was legally required to report the incident to local police, failed to do so.

Another article in the Chicago Tribune described a separate incident:

One of the woman’s friends told police she became uncomfortable as the night wore on. The friend said an athlete poured alcohol into cups for the women and called them “big girl shots.” She told police that athletes were “dancing inappropriately” and that she overheard one say, “We’re (going to have sex with) these bitches tonight.”

At some point that night, the 19-year-old woman said, one athlete trapped her in a bedroom before grabbing her by the ears and forcing her to perform a sex act, police records show. The athlete told police the sex was consensual.

After leaving the room, the woman encountered another athlete who gave her two more shots of alcohol and started dancing with her. Minutes later, the woman went to a different bedroom with three other athletes. She recalled one slamming the door shut in the face of a friend who was worried about her safety. A second athlete put her hand in his pants, and another put his hand inside her pants, according to her statement to police and school officials.

She recalled that the encounter ended when a friend found another athlete to unlock the door, records show. The 19-year-old woman said she was slumped down in a chair with her pants undone and an athlete standing over her when her friend entered the room.

When the woman shared her account with campus security officers, they discouraged her from going to Milwaukee police by telling her the allegations would draw news media attention, she said.

This is what we would expect from the modern, politically correct university. Marquette bureaucrats will recite all the politically correct cant about sexual assault, will display ribbons and subject undergraduates to all sorts of indoctrination. But when faced with real sexual assault, they cover it up.

The problem, quite simply, is that Marquette has too many bureaucrats. They specialize in mouthing fashionable clichés, setting up “offices” for this and that, having workshops, subjecting students to all kinds of exercises to “raise awareness,” and declaring that this is “Sexual Assault Awareness Month.” Yet all this is fundamentally irrelevant, bureaucratic busywork, essentially. A genuine response to sexual assault would involve reporting it to the police and actually punishing the offenders.

Bureaucratic make-work, in other words, can’t substitute for actual moral integrity. The latter has been sorely lacking at Marquette.

More on Bogus Statistics on Campus Date Rape

We have, with some frequency, discussed the fact that feminist activists produce radically inflated and completely bogus statistics about the number of college women who fall victim to date rape.

Indeed, we were once charged with sexual harassment for telling a class of ours this. (The complaint was dismissed by Marquette, and we continue to say exactly the same thing in all our classes where the fact is relevant.)

The number usually bandied around is that 20 or 25 percent of college women are victims of date rape. Sometimes it’s not “rape” but “rape or attempted rape” or sometimes merely “sexual assault.” But the usual tactic is to scare women with inflated statistics.

Of course, this also serves the feminist agenda of demonizing men.

But what happens when the Department of Justice, and not feminist university professors, ask about rape? And what happens when their concern is not just with rape, but with all violent crime?

The numbers come back vastly lower.

Consider the following table, taken from an official report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (you’ll need to click on the image to see it clearly):

You’ll see that the incidence of rape among college women is 6.0 cases per thousand students. That’s .60 percent per year. Multiply that by four years in college and you have between two and three percent.

But then you have the fact that this is not merely rape, but rape and sexual assault. How is this defined?

Rape/sexual assault

This category includes forced sexual intercourse including psychological coercion as well as physical force.

Forced sexual intercourse means vaginal, anal or oral penetration by the offender(s). This category also includes incidents where the penetration is from a foreign object. It includes attempted rapes, male as well as female victims and both heterosexual and homosexual rape. Attempted rape includes verbal threats of rape.

Sexual assault is also included in this category which includes a wide range of victimizations, separate from rape or attempted rape. These crimes include attacks or attempted attacks generally involving unwanted sexual contact between victim and offender. Sexual assaults may or may not involve force and include such things as grabbing or fondling. Sexual assault also includes verbal threats.

In other words, a lot of things that are gross and vulgar, but are vastly less serious than rape (because they are vastly less psychologically damaging to the victim) count as sexual assault.

Even ignoring this, there is no way to get to the 20 to 25 percent figure bandied around by feminist activists.

Note that the Bureau of Justice Statistics numbers are derived from a victimization survey, and are in no way dependent on the victim having reported the crime to the police.

So the things that politically correct faculty, and politically correct administrators, tell students about the incidence of rape are simply untrue. They serve the ideological interests of feminists, and the career interests of campus bureaucrats. But they are lies.

Marquette in the Spotlight for Handling of Rape Cases

From yesterday’s Chicago Tribune, a longish article about the way Marquette has handled rape cases. We will excerpt key parts of it here, but you probably want to read the whole thing.

MILWAUKEE — On a chilly Sunday morning, a 19-year-old Marquette University student walked into the campus security office and tearfully reported being raped by an athlete just hours earlier.

She says two of the officers on duty that February day dismissed her claim, telling her they didn’t know whether it was a crime because she alleged the encounter began as consensual sex and ended as an assault.

No report was taken, and Milwaukee police were not notified by the university, which insists the woman said she did not want authorities involved.

The university now acknowledges that failing to notify police was a violation of state law, which requires campus security departments to report any possible crimes to local authorities. School officials also did not tell police about a sexual attack allegation involving four athletes in October.

In fact, Marquette administrators told the Tribune that they have violated their reporting obligations for the past 10 years. And in at least the two most recent cases, the lapse played a role in prosecutors declining to press charges.

The admission comes amid media inquiries into the Catholic college’s handling of those two cases and serves as a backdrop for the woman’s account of what happened after she reported being raped on Feb. 27.

Breaking her public silence, the woman described a university determined to bury her allegations and eager to insulate itself from criticism once her accusations became known. She has shared the same account with law enforcement, school officials and medical professionals, according to documents and multiple Tribune interviews.

And further:

Last week, a Tribune analysis of several major Midwestern universities found that few students who report sexual violence see their attackers arrested and almost none see them convicted.

The survey of six schools in Illinois and Indiana found that police investigated 171 reported sex crimes since fall 2005, with 12 resulting in arrests and four in convictions. Only one of the convictions stemmed from a student-on-student attack, the most common type of assault claim.

Marquette reported 16 forcible sex offenses on campus from 2001 through 2009 to the U.S. Department of Education, according to the university. The school declined to provide the Tribune with the disposition of those cases.

Fresh injuries

In repeated statements to authorities, the woman in the Feb. 27 incident described accepting an invitation to the athlete’s campus apartment that day. Though the two had a sexual relationship in the past, he suddenly had stopped calling or spending time with her, she said.

Once there, they began to have consensual sex, she said. However, the woman said, she tried to get off the bed and leave after he made disparaging comments to her and wouldn’t explain why he had stopped contacting her.

She said she told him to stop but that he refused. She said she fought back but that he was too strong for her and held her down.

The woman agreed to speak to the Tribune on the condition that her name not be used.

Neither the athlete nor his Milwaukee-based lawyer returned calls seeking comment. The athlete, whom the Tribune is not identifying because he has not been charged with a crime, has told authorities and school administrators that the sex was consensual, according to multiple sources.

After leaving the athlete’s apartment, the woman said, she returned to her dorm and tried to sleep. After a fitful few hours, she confided in a resident assistant about the previous night’s events. The RA sent her directly to the security department, where, the woman says, two on-duty officers told her they were not sure that the encounter could be classified as a crime.

So far, it looks like “he said, she said,” although it’s hard to see why she would lie about this. But there is further evidence.

Still, they promised that a security officer would call her within an hour, she said.

The woman then went to the hospital at the resident assistant’s urging. Medical reports from that visit show the woman had vaginal abrasions, in addition to fresh injuries on her face, hip, foot, knee and both thighs, according to documents obtained by the Tribune.

The following day, a security officer finally contacted her and asked her to come back to the department and give another statement, the woman said. She did, only to be told that police wouldn’t want to investigate her case and that the university’s internal discipline process would likely cause her more harm than good, she said. The officer did not take an official report, she said.

And more:

Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm told the Tribune that the woman has given authorities the same account on several occasions. Once she shared the allegation with Marquette security, the officers were legally bound to call police — regardless of their interpretation of the incident, he said.

“Once they have reason to believe that a crime like a sexual assault has occurred, they have a mandatory obligation to report that to police, and that didn’t happen,” Chisholm said. “Everyone acknowledges that.”

Lt. Paul Mascari of the university’s security department disputed the woman’s account, saying officers always began their conversations with alleged victims by asking if they wanted police involved.

“I can tell you that, having talked to the officers afterward, it was never the intention of anyone in this department to discourage … victims from contacting the Milwaukee Police Department,” Mascari said.

No one, however, disputes that the university broke the law when it failed to report the woman’s allegation to city police.

Marquette’s security department has been required under Wisconsin law to report all allegations of campus sex crimes to Milwaukee police since it was licensed by the state in 2001, but university administrators acknowledge they historically have forwarded a case only at the complainant’s request. They declined to say how many cases went unreported to local law enforcement but said the majority of cases were sent to police at the women’s requests.

Marquette officials also contend they did not realize that they were in violation of the law until the woman in the October case went to police on her own.

Marquette officials first came under fire for their handling of sexual assault cases in late March, when a female student told Milwaukee police she had been sexually attacked by four athletes in a dorm room on Oct. 30. She reported the incident within hours to campus security officers, who informed the athletic department of the accusation but did not tell local law enforcement after she indicated she did not want police involved, officials said.

As reporters and television crews descended on the urban campus to cover that story, the woman in the February case received calls from Milwaukee police and school administrators inquiring about her allegation. It was the first she had heard from school officials in weeks.

The woman said she met with Quade, who encouraged her to focus on her schoolwork and mental health rather than pursuing charges, the woman said. Quade also asked if she had thought about praying about the situation, the woman said. She said she left the meeting in tears.

“I felt like they were trying to get me to be quiet and disappear,” she said. “I’ve never been made to feel so dumb, so stupid and so much like I didn’t matter.”

The woman in the October case could not be reached for comment. The Tribune is not naming the athletes because they have not been charged, and the newspaper is not disclosing their sport to avoid identifying them.

The four athletes accused in the October case were subject to team discipline, Deputy Athletic Director Mike Broeker said. He declined to provide further information about any punishment.

In the February case, the woman filed an official complaint with the university in March and participated in the athlete’s conduct hearing in April. She withdrew from classes shortly before the proceeding and plans to attend another college in the fall.

In an e-mail statement today, Marquette admitted to mishandling these cases.

Subject: Marquette University Message from President Robert A. Wild, S.J.
JUNE 22, 2011

Dear Marquette Faculty and Staff:

As you know, in the past month there has been much on-campus conversation and a number of media stories about two sexual assault cases on the Marquette campus involving student athletes. These are difficult, sensitive situations for all involved. We want all our students to feel cared for and supported; when that is not the case, we need to take action.

I have had blunt and very direct conversations with colleagues across the university as we work to improve our responses to these types of incidents, and I can assure you that everyone is committed to ensuring our campus culture emphasizes care and respect for each other. We have been working to address the issues raised, and I now have some substantive progress to report.

Any incident of sexual violence is reprehensible and in complete opposition to the values of Marquette University. While federal law protecting the privacy of students prohibits sharing the details of these incidents and the outcomes of any disciplinary proceedings, they were investigated by the university with action taken in accordance with our student conduct code. They were also investigated by Milwaukee law enforcement officials, and no charges were filed.

The university has publicly acknowledged that we made mistakes in dealing with these incidents. We worked quickly and proactively to correct those procedures, both to be sensitive to victims and to comply with Wisconsin state law. We now refer any reported incident of sexual assault to the Sensitive Crimes Unit of the Milwaukee Police Department. We have also added a victim advocate to the staff of our Student Health Service and have more tightly restricted who on campus has access to reports from the Department of Public Safety.

As you know, we have many resources on campus to both educate our students and to support those who are the victims of sexual violence. These include HAVEN, VOICES and the services of the Department of Public Safety, Campus Ministry, the Counseling Center and Student Health Service. In addition, we have very positive relationships with a number of community agencies. The Gender Resource Center, once operational, will also provide support in this area.

Upon hearing of the concerns involving these cases, I wanted to proactively address the issues and, thus, asked Janine Geske, distinguished professor of law and former
justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, to convene a group of campus and community representatives dealing with sexual violence. They have had conversations that have been very helpful to the university, and I am happy to report that considerable progress has been made, including:

• As noted above, the Department of Public Safety has worked with the MPD Sensitive Crimes Unit to ensure that the reporting of any sexual assault both complies with state law and is sensitive to the needs of victims. DPS officers also participated in victim-centered training this summer.
• The Office of Student Affairs, working with representatives from the district attorney’s office and our own law faculty, is re-writing our policies and procedures regarding sexual assault in light of what we’ve learned in these cases and the recently issued guidelines from the U.S. Department of Education. These policies and procedures will be in place for the 2011-12 academic year.
• Marquette’s Counseling Center and Student Health Service are working with academic and other colleagues on a number of prevention and education programs. Every incoming freshman will receive sexual violence and prevention training. An online program on sexual assault awareness and prevention, Student Success, will be piloted with targeted groups of students and staff this fall. There is also training planned in Bystander Intervention, i.e., how to help ensure the safety of a friend in vulnerable situations.

Surely, there is more to be done, and this is a focus of concentration this summer. We will get this right, because we want any student who is a victim of sexual assault to be supported and to come forward so she or he can make use of the many resources the university and our community partners have to offer. You can be helpful in this regard – by encouraging any student who is a victim of sexual assault to report it, by taking the Bystander Intervention training once offered and by continuing to be a source of support and caring for our students on a daily basis.

I want you to know that student and staff safety and security have been and remain my number one concern. While I am retiring in just a few weeks, I have talked with my successor, Rev. Scott R. Pilarz, S.J., and know that he shares these concerns and will continue to move the university forward. In the meantime, if you have questions, please contact Dr. Chris Miller, vice president for student affairs.

I will continue to ask God’s abundant blessings on you and our entire Marquette community.

Sincerely,

Robert A. Wild, S.J.
President
Marquette University

The Feminists’ Bogus Rape Statistics

We recently took the “anti-rape” activists on campus to task for the general lameness of demonstrating against something that everybody is against, and especially for their use of bogus statistics about the incidence of rape.

The activists cite a 2000 Justice Department report as showing that a quarter of American college women have been victims of rape. The study, of course, is online, and can be easily analyzed — at least by somebody used to the labyrinthine structure of reports like this.

The authors struggle mightily to jack up the numbers of women who have been victimized by rape, but end up far short of the numbers they need.

The report claims, for example, that 1.7% of college women had (as of the time of the survey) been victims of rape since the beginning of the school year. They then add another 1.1% who had been victims of attempted rape. Of course, attempted rape is a bad thing, but not nearly so bad as a completed rape. We would not like to be the victim of an attempted murder, but . . . well, you get the point. (See page 11 of the report.)

So the authors, by combining the two numbers, get 2.8%. They then note that this is for a period of (on average) 6.9 months and the extrapolate and say that this is really 4.9% per year, and that with five years (on average) needed to finish college, “the percentage of completed or attempted rape victimization among women in higher educational institutions might climb to between one-fifth and one-quarter.” (p. 10)

But of course, their own report admits that women in college are more likely to be raped than women who are not, and it seems questionable to assume that over the summer months, when many women are working, living with parents, away from the party atmosphere of the campus, etc. that they would face nearly the same threat of rape (or attempted rape, remember). The report concedes:

College campuses host large concentrations of young women who are at greater risk for rape and other forms of sexual assault than women in the general population or in a comparable age group. (p. iii)

Yet another problem is that multiplying the yearly victimization numbers by five makes sense only if no woman is a victim more than once. If particular women are victimized in the first year, and again in the following years, you have fewer new victims, and the total number of women who have been victimized is not so high as it would be if each woman had been victimized only once. Indeed, the study admits:

Consistent across the models, it was found that four main factors consistently increased the risk of sexual victimization: (1) frequently drinking enough to get drunk, (2) being unmarried, (3) having been a victim of a sexual assault before the start of the current school year, and (4) living on campus (for on-campus victimization only). (see page 23)

We might add dating frequently, dating scummy guys, and going to venues where the guys view the women as sexual prey.

But even worse, the authors do a comparison study, based on the National Crime Victimization Survey, and find that the rate of rape to be only 0.16% for completed rape, and 0.18% for attempted rape (see page 14).

The massive discrepancy between the two studies should create huge skepticism.

In the main study, women where asked why they did not report the rape (95% did not report it). A broad range of possible answers were suggested, most of them plausible and reasonably socially acceptable — for example “did not want other people to know” or “afraid of reprisal by assailant or others.” Yet 65.4% of the victims of “completed rape” and 76.5% of the victims of “attempted rape” said that they “did not think it was serious enough to report” (pp. 24-26).

Among the 86 incidents that the researchers classified as “completed rape,” the women, when asked “Do you consider this incident to be a rape?” answered “no” 48.8% of the time (p. 15).

Worse, the authors report that “Victims in the sample generally did not state that their victimization resulted in physical or emotional injuries.” (p. 22)

These findings suggest that the definition of rape used by the researchers was too broad. We can’t imagine results like this among women victimized by real rapes.

Findings like this ought to make any social scientist hesitate to make any strong assertions about the exact incidence of rape. But latching onto an outlier that produces the highest possible incidence of rape (but still not high enough to support feminist claims) is not responsible.

Protesting Against Something That Everybody’s Against

[Updated to correct identity of organizers.]

Yes, just a couple of hours ago, we walked across campus and found a demonstration against rape. It was organized by students. On the scene: Prof. Nancy Snow, the lesbian philosopher with the bullhorn very much in view a year ago, protesting Marquette’s refusal to hire lesbian Arts & Science Dean candidate Jodi O’Brien.

A few photos (not our best work, since we were using a cell phone):





Why protest against something that everybody is against?

It’s a kind of superstition on the politically-correct left: all problems can be solved by “raising awareness.” If any social problems persist, it’s just because not enough people have had their “awareness” raised.

Of course, sometimes the simple fact is that there are evil people who will do evil things, and the way to deal with them is to deter them with the threat of punishment if possible, and if that doesn’t work lock them up for an extended period.

There is another reality that campus leftists don’t want to face, but before we get to that we need a reality check about the supposed 25% of college women who have been raped.

During the 1980s, feminist researchers committed to the rape-culture theory had discovered that asking women directly if they had been raped yielded disappointing results—very few women said that they had been. So Ms. [Magazine] commissioned University of Arizona public health professor Mary Koss to develop a different way of measuring the prevalence of rape. Rather than asking female students about rape per se, Koss asked them if they had experienced actions that she then classified as rape. Koss’s method produced the 25 percent rate, which Ms. then published.

Koss’s study had serious flaws. Her survey instrument was highly ambiguous, as University of California at Berkeley social-welfare professor Neil Gilbert has pointed out. But the most powerful refutation of Koss’s research came from her own subjects: 73 percent of the women whom she characterized as rape victims said that they hadn’t been raped. Further—though it is inconceivable that a raped woman would voluntarily have sex again with the fiend who attacked her—42 percent of Koss’s supposed victims had intercourse again with their alleged assailants.

All subsequent feminist rape studies have resulted in this discrepancy between the researchers’ conclusions and the subjects’ own views. A survey of sorority girls at the University of Virginia found that only 23 percent of the subjects whom the survey characterized as rape victims felt that they had been raped—a result that the university’s director of Sexual and Domestic Violence Services calls “discouraging.” Equally damning was a 2000 campus rape study conducted under the aegis of the Department of Justice. Sixty-five percent of what the feminist researchers called “completed rape” victims and three-quarters of “attempted rape” victims said that they did not think that their experiences were “serious enough to report.” The “victims” in the study, moreover, “generally did not state that their victimization resulted in physical or emotional injuries,” report the researchers.

So what is going on here? Why the discrepancy between what the feminists consider rape and real, clear cases of rape? According to Heather McDonald of the Urban Institute:

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 sixties 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, sluttish behavior that gets cruder each year. Do the boys, riding the testosterone wave, act thuggishly toward the girls? You bet! Do the girls try to match their insensitivity? Indisputably.

But of course, one is not supposed to pass judgment on any sexual behavior. Unless you call it “rape.” Saying that one should exercise some sexual restraint is just so old-fashioned. But that attitude doesn’t help women who were not raped, but did things they were profoundly unhappy about in the morning.

Women vs. Feminists: Blame For Rape

Via the Marquette feminist blog, Word Warrior, the fact that women are more likely to say that women are at least sometimes at least partially at fault when they are raped.

A majority of women believe some rape victims should take responsibility for what happened, a survey suggests.

Almost three quarters of the women who believed this said if a victim got into bed with the assailant before an attack they should accept some responsibility.

So only three quarters said a woman can get into bed with a man and not be at least partially responsible when she is raped?

One-third blamed victims who had dressed provocatively or gone back to the attacker’s house for a drink.

The survey of more than 1,000 people in London marked the 10th anniversary of the Haven service for rape victims.

More than half of those of both sexes questioned said there were some circumstances when a rape victim should accept responsibility for an attack.

Less forgiving

The study found that women were less forgiving of the victim than men.

Of the women who believed some victims should take responsibility, 71% thought a person should accept responsibility when getting into bed with someone, compared with 57% of men.

This, of course, flatly contradicts the feminist notion that rape is an issue that pits evil males against poor innocent females.

Indeed, Marquette Professor Theresa Tobin has insisted that rape is a strategy that all men use to subordinate all women.

It seems that real-world women didn’t get the memo from academic feminists.

Our theory about this is that women know far better than men how devious and scheming women can be.

And men know better than women how brutal and immoral men can be.

Whatever the reason this is an issue (abortion is another) on which real-world women don’t think like feminists think they should.

Feminist Blather About Rape

We’ve blogged about how politically correct types at Marquette discuss rape in their dissent-free “critical thinking forbidden” events.

Theresa Tobin, for example, proclaimed that all men are are implicated as rapists. As we described it:

Tobin rejected the notion that rapes should be seen as “acts of morally corrupt individuals.” Yes, guys, the fact that you have never raped any women and would never rape any woman doesn’t let you off the hook. You are still part of the “deep social and political causes” of rape.

Why? Because you are part of a system that involves the “use of violence to keep systems of oppression in place.”

In fact, according to Tobin, you are part of a “protection racket.” Because of the threat of rape, a woman “needs to be protected by men against other men.”

And what is wrong with men protecting women against rape? For Tobin, the system “forces compliance with traditional norms.” And further, “the penalty for being protected is to conform.”

At that same event, R. Clifton Spargo, representing another hyper-politically correct department (English) said some equally silly things.

While he didn’t exactly accuse all men of being rapists, like Tobin he got pretty close.

He rejected the notion that rape is “merely aberrant, deviant behavior,” and told the male members of the audience “you are living in the rape culture.” Where? “On Campus. In the bars.”

Happily, not everybody in the world buys into the rape hysteria. An interesting column in the Los Angeles Times challenged some of the blather.

It’s a lonely job, working the phones at a college rape crisis center. Day after day, you wait for the casualties to show up from the alleged campus rape epidemic -- but no one calls. Could this mean that the crisis is overblown? No. It means, according to campus sexual-assault organizations, that the abuse of coeds is worse than anyone had ever imagined. It means that consultants and counselors need more funding to persuade student rape victims to break the silence of their suffering.

It is a central claim of these organizations that between a fifth and a quarter of all college women will be raped or will be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years. Harvard’s Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response uses the 20% to 25% statistic. Websites at New York University, Syracuse University, Penn State and the University of Virginia, among many other places, use the figures as well.

If the one-in-four statistic is correct, campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. No felony, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20% or 25%, even over many years. The 2006 violent crime rate in Detroit, one of the most violent cities in the U.S., was 2,400 murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants -- a rate of 2.4%.

Such a crime wave -- in which millions of young women would graduate having suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience -- would require nothing less than a state of emergency. Admissions policies, which if the numbers are true are allowing in tens of thousands of vicious criminals, would require a complete revision, perhaps banning male students entirely. The nation’s nearly 10 million female undergraduates would need to take the most stringent safety precautions.

None of this crisis response occurs, of course -- because the crisis doesn’t exist.

So where do the numbers come from? During the 1980s, feminist researchers committed to the rape-culture theory discovered that asking women directly if they had been raped yielded disappointing results -- very few women said that they had been. So Ms. magazine commissioned University of Arizona public health professor Mary Koss to develop a different way to measure the prevalence of rape.

Rather than asking female students about rape per se, Koss asked them if they had ever experienced actions that she then classified as rape. One question, for example, asked, “Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?” -- a question that is ambiguous on several fronts, including the woman’s degree of incapacitation, the causal relation between being given a drink and having sexual intercourse, and the man’s intentions. Koss’ method produced the 25% rate, which Ms. then published.

It was a flawed study on a number of levels, but the most powerful refutation came from her own subjects: 73% of the women whom the study characterized as rape victims told the researchers that they hadn’t been raped. Further, 42% of the study’s supposed victims said they had had intercourse again with their alleged assailants -- though it is highly unlikely that a raped woman would have sex again with the fiend who attacked her.

Despite all this, the numbers have stuck. Today, John Foubert, an education professor at William and Mary College (and founder of a group called One-in-Four, which works on sexual assault issues and has chapters on 17 campuses), says, “The one-in-four statistic has been replicated in several studies for several decades. To the extent that social science can prove anything, which I believe it can, the one-in-four statistic has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt. My instincts tell me that the statistic is actually much higher.”

Yet subsequent campus rape studies keep turning up the pesky divergence between the victims’ and the researchers’ point of view.

A 2006 survey of sorority women at the University of Virginia, for example, found that only 23% of the subjects whom the survey characterized as rape victims felt that they had been raped -- a result that the university’s director of sexual and domestic violence services calls “discouraging.” Equally damning was a 2000 campus rape study conducted under the aegis of the Department of Justice. Sixty-five percent of those whom the researchers called “completed rape” victims and three-quarters of “attempted rape” victims said that they did not think that their experiences were “serious enough to report.”

Believing in the campus rape epidemic, it turns out, requires ignoring women’s own interpretations of their experiences.

There is a simple principle here: if a feminist political activist has to explain to you that what happened was rape, it wasn’t.

What is really behind all this campus sex, if not rape. The answer is politically incorrect.

So what reality does lie behind the rape hype? I believe that it’s the booze-fueled hookup culture of one-night, or sometimes just partial-night, stands. Students in the ‘60s demanded that college administrators stop setting rules for fraternization. The colleges meekly complied and opened a Pandora’s box of boorish, promiscuous behavior that gets cruder each year.

This culture has been written about widely. College women -- as well as men -- reportedly drink heavily before and during parties. For the women, that drinking is often goal-oriented, suggests Karin Agness, a recent University of Virginia graduate and founder of NeW, a club for conservative university women: It frees the drinker from responsibility and “provides an excuse for engaging in behavior that she ordinarily wouldn’t.” Nights can include a meaningless sexual encounter with a guy whom the girl may not even know.

In all these drunken couplings, there may be some deplorable instances of forced and truly non-consensual sex. But most campus “rape” cases exist in the gray area of seeming cooperation and tacit consent, which is why they are almost never prosecuted criminally.

“Ninety-nine percent of all college rape cases would be thrown out of court in a twinkling,” observes University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Kors.

Feminists, knowing that something is wrong, but being unwilling to condemn sexual promiscuity or ever admit that women can be at fault for the bad things that happen to them, have to avoid the issue, and fuss and fume about a “culture of rape.”

“Culture of promiscuity” just isn’t politically acceptable to them.

The LA Times article was, not surprising, met with a rather hysterical response. Marquette feminist blog “Word Warrior” fumed “This just makes me livid. I am so pissed right now, that words right order in the can’t put I.”

It went on:

MacDonald’s primary argument is that women are as much of a participant in alcohol-fueled rapes as men, and that these assaults thus take place in the “gray area” of rape. First of all, there is no “gray area” of rape. Consent is consent, and lack of consent is lack of consent. If a woman is too drunk to consent, then that is rape.

Our students, when faced with this argument, are more sensible. We ask about a situation in which a guy and gal go out and drink too much. They then go back to his apartment and both voluntarily get into bed and have sex.

Feminist doctrine says he raped her.

My students ask, “why? Wasn’t it mutual? Why can’t we say that she raped him?”

The feminist answer, and this is degrading to women, is that a woman is always be assumed to be the victim. The man can be held responsible for his actions, but the woman can’t.

“Word Warrior” goes on:

Second of all, to argue that a woman is complicit in rape will merely exacerbate the rape crisis.

Of course, this begs the question of whether what happened is “rape.”

But telling women that if they get drunk and go to bed with some schlub they don’t know and don’t particularly like they will get little sympathy sounds to us like a dandy response to the “rape crisis.” But the fundamental argument from the feminists is the typical politically correct one: “if we talk honestly about this, it will hurt our political agenda.” This is the same sort of mentality that doesn’t want to talk about the fact that blacks commit more crimes than whites (which causes disproportonate incarceration) or that child abuse typically comes from a mom’s live-in boyfriend, and happens very seldom when mom is married to and living with the child’s biological father.

The Feminist Agenda

The campus blather about the “rape crisis” reflects two very important things about academic feminists.

First, it crystallizes the feminist notion that women are the victims of evil, brutal males.

But perhaps more important is that it can be used as a tool to increase the feminist infrastructure on campus.

“Word Warrior” is adamant that Marquette needs a whole office, a Women’s and/or Gender Relations Resource Center on campus.

More jobs for feminists. And a source of activism not only “against rape” but in favor of abortion, gay marriage and pretty much every other politically correct piece of the feminist agenda.

In fact, such “centers” get little business.

Needless to say, those facilities don’t appear to get a tremendous amount of use. For example, Hillary Wing-Richards, the associate director of sexual-assault prevention at James Madison University, said the school’s campus rape “help line” gets a varying number of calls, some of which are “request-for-information calls” -- where to go, who to talk to and the like.

“Some months there are 10 and others, one or two,” she said.

Referring to rape hotlines, risk management consultant Brett Sokolow laments: “The problem is, on so many of our campuses, very few people ever call. And mostly we’ve resigned ourselves to the underutilization of these resources.”

Real rape, something vastly rarer than the feminist notion of “rape,” should be dealt with as a law enforcement issue. And not by feminist bureaucrats, but rather by tough cops, who may be women, but are unlikely to be feminists.