“The Hunting Ground:” Agitprop in the Service of a Moral Panic

Student Government and Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies to Show Discredited Film on Campus Rape

A story in the Marquette Tribune includes this short note at the end:

The CGSS (Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies) and MUSG (Marquette University Student Government) will show “The Hunting Ground” on April 25, followed by a panel of faculty and staff who will discuss campus sexual assault.

In fact, “The Hunting Ground” has been widely discredited in liberal and mainstream media outlets for its distortion of facts, and its attempt to convict for rape two fellows who are almost certainly innocent. See for example:

• Slate
• Harvard Law Record
• Reason
• New York
• The Harvard Crimson
• (And the conservative) National Review.

Are people who got to see the film going to be told about the controversy, or if so, will all the critics be dismissed as “rape apologists?”

When supposed scholars become activists, nothing good comes of it. And intellectual honesty is always the loser.  That’s the story of academic feminism.

More Bogus Campus Date Rape Statistics

Actually Addressing Sexual Assault on Campuses

From Commentary Magazine, some data on how to actually reduce the number of campus sexual assaults.

Any successful approach to reducing sexual assault on campus will require the reconsideration of these very notions. We have completed a study of more than 1,300 colleges and universities and have found that far fewer accusations of sexual assault are levied at the schools that ban alcohol and prohibit opposite-sex overnight guests in residence halls. Our findings suggest that students are not so much victims of a “rape culture” as they are victims of faulty institutional policies that contribute to a higher risk of sexual assault.

Not surprisingly, religious schools and single sex schools also have lower levels of sexual assault.

Stated so simply, one might raise a bunch of caveats and methodological objections. But the authors of the article (Bradford Richardson and Jon A. Shields) are well-trained social scientists who understand the objections and have dealt with them well.

By all means read the whole thing.

Of course, the people who are most vocal about campus sexual assault are also the most adamant about absolute sexual freedom. That there might be a conflict between these two values will take a long time to penetrate their minds. Until then, they will double down on things like teal ribbons and telling male students they are all guilty of rape since they are part of a rape culture and stripping due process protections from males accused of sexual assault. Those things serve their ideological biases and bureaucratic interests.

Marquette Climate Survey: Debunking Bogus Sexual Assault Hype

It’s just out (in the form of an Executive Summary): Marquette’s much touted “Climate Survey.” Given that it was mounted by an LGBT activist, we expected it to be rather politically correct, and claim that the climate on the Marquette campus is really horrid for each and every politically correct victim group.

But it didn’t turn out that way.

Which is not to say that we don’t have some quibbles with parts of it, for example the low participation rate (only 31% for undergraduate students) and the fact that the report sometimes offers generalizations based on very few respondents.

One key part involves the issue of “sexual violence” on campus. An outright hysteria has surrounded this issue during the last few years, fueled by feminist activists, a mainstream media that is both liberal and ignorant of social science, and the Obama Administration. Vastly, absurdly inflated figures about the number of college women who have been victimized have been uncritically accepted.

The report starts out citing a bogus White House document:

In 2014, Not Alone: The First Report of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault indicated that sexual assault is a significant issue for colleges and universities nationwide, affecting the physical health, mental health, and academic success of students. The report highlights that one in five women is sexually assaulted while in college. One section of the Marquette University survey requested information regarding sexual assault.

But it then goes on to note:

4% (n = 186) of respondents indicated that they had experienced unwanted sexual contact while at Marquette University.

Of course, for the demographic to whom this is stereotypically applicable, the incidence is a bit higher:

A higher percentage of Women respondents (6%, n = 164) than Men respondents (1%, n = 19) reported having experienced unwanted sexual contact.

This, of course, is radically below the “one in five” figure widely touted. Further, “unwanted sexual contact” is a broad category including a lot of things far short of forcible rape.

Oddly, the report doesn’t reveal what percentage of women who experienced unwanted sexual contact reported it to authorities or university officials. But it does reveal:

Respondents were offered the opportunity to elaborate on why they did not report unwanted sexual contact. Sixty-eight respondents provided written responses. Common themes included: (1) Not that serious, 60 respondents indicated that they did not report the unwanted sexual contact because for them it was not that serious.

There are a lot of things a guy could do that are “out of bounds,” but it’s hard to believe that actual rape would not be considered “serious.” And remember, this is 60 out of 68 women who volunteered a reason for not reporting to authorities.  It’s not 60 out of a larger number who failed to report the incident to authorities.

Universities (and the media, and the Obama Administration) need to quit lying about the incidence of campus sexual violence. Social Justice Warriors who pride themselves on being opposed to sexual violence and use bogus statistics to bolster their case deserve to lose credibility as the truth slowly seeps into public consciousness. The implosion of the University of Virginia tall tale of “Jackie,” and the exposure of “Mattress Girl” at Columbia, have put the sexual violence hustlers on the defensive. That’s a good thing.

Sexual Hysteria on Campus: Absurdly Broad Definition of “Sexual Assault”

From Reason.com:

A new survey of Rutgers University students reinforces the idea that one in four college women will be victims of sexual assault... but only if you don’t look at the study too closely. Zoom in and you’ll find the same problems that plague so much research about sex crimes on college campuses, from defining violence to include rude comments to failing to differentiate between an unwanted kiss and forcible rape.

The Rutgers survey—conducted by the school’s Center on Violence Against Women and Children at the request of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault and the Department of Justice—was carried out last academic year at the state school’s New Brunswick campus, attended by about 42,000 students. Around 10,800 students completed the online survey; the majority were undergraduates (80 percent) and women (64 percent).

Rutgers used definitions of sexual violence and sexual assault based on material from the White House task force. “‘Sexual assault’ and ‘sexual violence’ refer to a range of behaviors that are unwanted by the recipient,” notes a school summary of survey findings, “and include remarks about physical appearance, persistent sexual advances that are undesired by the recipient, threats of force to get someone to engage in sexual behavior, as well as unwanted touching and unwanted oral, anal, or vaginal penetration or attempted penetration.”

Survey respondents were presented with that definition, then asked whether they had experienced sexual violence prior to starting school at Rutgers. Nineteen percent of all respondents and 24 percent of undergraduate women said they had.

That’s right. “Remarks about physical appearance” could constitute “sexual assault.” So could “persistent sexual advances that are undesired by the recipient.” The latter are a form of harassment, and somebody in authority might need to tell the dork who does it to back off, but it’s absurd to call it violence.

Surveys like this are virtually always conducted by people with an agenda. Often, they are feminists who want to promote a narrative of men as evil oppressors. But often they come from campus bureaucrats who want an excuse for more programs and initiatives to justify more staff, a larger budget, and more power.

And of course, the two groups overlap.

Further, participation in these studies is typically entirely voluntary, and in this study fewer than 30 percent of the student population took the survey. Thus there may be a skew toward those who have been sexually assaulted (or have some grievance about some sexual encounter).

Things like this may explain why the very best survey of victimization, the National Crime Victimization Survey, shows a radically lower level of campus sexual assault, and campus rape. It mostly limits the definition of “sexual assault” to things that people in the real world (outside college campuses) consider an assault, and the response rate is quite high (88%).

This survey shows the rate of sexual assault among college women as 4.3 victimizations per thousand.

Yes, per thousand. That is the rate for six months, so for a college career, one might need to multiply it by eight. But it’s a little more complicated since college women are apparently less likely to be assaulted in the summer (when they are likely away from the party atmosphere of campus). On the other hand, some women take five years to graduate. But there is no way to get anywhere near the scary statistics the rape activists use.

Click on image to enlarge

Where actual rape is concerned, the rate is two per thousand, and the rate for attempted rape is 1.5 per thousand (see Table 1 here).

Further, rather than there being a rape crisis, the rate of campus sexual assault has been declining.

So what we have here is yet another case of college campuses being a Wonderland were hard empirical facts don’t matter, and the proper politically correct attitudes are all that counts.