The Campus Rape Myth

cnredd · #1 (**permalink**) 02-25-2008, 05:22 AM

Quote:

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 the campus sexual-assault industry, 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.

The campus rape movement highlights the current condition of radical feminism, from its self-indulgent bathos to its embrace of ever more vulnerable female victimhood. But the movement is an even more important barometer of academia itself. In a delicious historical irony, the baby boomers who dismantled the university’s intellectual architecture in favor of unbridled sex and protest have now bureaucratized both. While women’s studies professors bang pots and blow whistles at antirape rallies, in the dorm next door, freshman counselors and deans pass out tips for better orgasms and the use of sex toys. The academic bureaucracy is roomy enough to sponsor both the dour antimale feminism of the college rape movement and the promiscuous hookup culture of student life. The only thing that doesn’t fit into the university’s new commitments is serious scholarly purpose.

The campus rape industry’s central tenet is that one-quarter of all college girls will be raped or be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years (completed rapes outnumbering attempted rapes by a ratio of about three to two). The girls’ assailants are not terrifying strangers grabbing them in dark alleys but the guys sitting next to them in class or at the cafeteria.

This claim, first published in Ms. magazine in 1987, took the universities by storm. By the early 1990s, campus rape centers and 24-hour hotlines were opening across the country, aided by tens of millions of dollars of federal funding. Victimhood rituals sprang up: first the Take Back the Night rallies, in which alleged rape victims reveal their stories to gathered crowds of candle-holding supporters; then the Clothesline Project, in which T-shirts made by self-proclaimed rape survivors are strung on campus, while recorded sounds of gongs and drums mark minute-by-minute casualties of the “rape culture.” A special rhetoric emerged: victims’ family and friends were “co-survivors”; “survivors” existed in a larger “community of survivors.”...

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

...None of the obvious weaknesses in the research has had the slightest drag on the campus rape movement, because the movement is political, not empirical. In a rape culture, which “condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as a norm,” sexual assault will wind up underreported, argued the director of Yale’s Sexual Harassment and Assault Resources and Education Center in a March 2007 newsletter. You don’t need evidence for the rape culture; you simply know that it exists. But if you do need evidence, the underreporting of rape is the best proof there is.

Campus rape researchers may feel that they know better than female students themselves about the students’ sexual experiences, but the students are voting with their feet and staying away in droves from the massive rape apparatus built up since the Ms. article. Referring to rape hotlines, rape 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 under-utilization of these resources.”

EXCELLENT write-up!...

There seems to be a "victim card" being held over the heads of women who don't even consider themselves victims...

Obviously, every rape is heinous and I personally wouldn't be against a snip-snip as punishment...But take the ACTUAL cases instead of twisting allegations so the square fits into the round hole which feeds a false perception...

foundit66 · #2 (**permalink**) 02-25-2008, 08:21 PM

I am annoyed the article didn't share what her questions were that made her assume there was "rape". (While the people being questioned did not share that summation.)

Also, I have sometimes wondered about the "rape statistics".
There are some "assumptions" that go in them with regards to UNREPORTED rape. These assumptions should be stated, along with the difference between REPORTED rape and the derived "unreported rape" numbers.

And one has to wonder about all these "rapes".
Does that mean that one in four guys is supposedly a rapist?
Suppose that the guys are just twice as busy, making it one in eight guys.
Just seems a little extremist.

Furthermore, the whole "if you were drunk, it was rape" approach is rather mindless. Basically a guy is left with the situation that if he knows the girl has had a couple, he shouldn't touch her at all regardless of past association and regardless of whether or not she shows interest.
Alcohol lowers inhibitions. Lowered inhibition is not the same thing as saying "no".

Finally, obviously this whole thing should not detract from the REAL issue of rape. Date rape drugs exist. Some guys out there have no problem screwing a passed out girl.
People like the article discuss makes it WORSE for rape victims because it cheapens the concept. A bit like "crying wolf" makes people less wary when the real wolf comes around.

forester814 · #3 (**permalink**) 03-01-2008, 04:40 PM

Screw you, Heather McDonald.

The idea that rape crisis centers are an industry or a culture or a scam is disgusting to me. This is a needed service, regardless of how much or little it is used. If it helps ONE woman, it's a good thing.

Why do I feel so strongly about this?
Because it happened to me.
And I didn't report it to my university's authorities.
(Though a friend called the cops for me, not that it did any good.)

Does that mean I felt that rape crisis centers should not exist?
OF COURSE NOT.

Most rapes go unreported, regardless of whether there is a rape crisis center available or not. Asking women if they have been raped is a lot like publicly asking men if they masturbate, or alleged murderers if they did it.

Of COURSE the statistics do not match the reality, because most of the target audience will not answer the question honestly, for reasons that should be obvious.

(And I would not admit this if I could see you all face to face, but to a message board of anonymous screen names, that I can do.)

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