When the economy fails to improve, President Obama points the finger at George W. Bush for getting us into this mess. But when reports of sexual assault on campus rise, whom can the White House blame? After all, the liberal elite — the president’s most ardent supporters — has dominated college administrations and faculty for half a century.
The White House opted to ignore that inconvenient truth when it formed its Task Force To Protect Students From Sexual Assault in January, and when that task force released its recommendations last week. When Joe Biden announced, “Colleges and universities need to face the facts about sexual assault” and there can be “no more turning a blind eye or pretending it doesn’t exist,” no one asked him to name names.
In reality, no one has been turning a blind eye at all.
For more than 30 years, colleges have had freshman-orientation programs, midnight marches, 24-hour hotlines, dedicated rape-crisis centers and even entire courses devoted to the subject of sexual assault.
All the way back in the 1980s, feminists who believed in the “rape culture” started to publicize the work of Mary Koss, a University of Arizona public-health professor.
As Heather Mac Donald documented in a seminal 2008 City Journal article, Koss developed “a different way of measuring the prevalence of rape” — allowing her to claim that a quarter of undergrad women had suffered it.
Explains Mac Donald: “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. [magazine] then published.”
The rest, as they say, is history. As Mac Donald notes, “An army of salesmen took to the road, selling advice to administrators on how to structure sexual-assault procedures and lecturing freshmen on the ‘undetected rapists’ in their midst. Rape bureaucrats exchanged notes at such gatherings as the Inter Ivy Sexual Assault Conferences and the New England College Sexual Assault Network.”
Despite all the bureaucracy and re-education, the millions of hours and millions of dollars spent, nothing has changed. The White House task force says at least one in five women will be sexually assaulted during their college careers.
Looking back, we can conclude that one of two things occurred.
In one scenario, the task force has its numbers right — in which case our campuses have been overrun by thugs. What was needed was a good dose of law and order — more likely to be doled out by, let’s face it, conservatives.
Sexual assault is a serious crime. If campuses are really seeing these rates of violence, then nothing less than an overwhelming police presence is called for.
Not the keystone campus cops, either, but gun-wielding officers protecting women as they walk to classes, parties and club meetings, even escorting them home from dates. Maybe Ray Kelly would be up to the job; then again, even New York’s worst neighborhoods don’t report these rates of violence against women.
In the second (more likely) scenario, there’s been no epidemic of assault but instead a preponderance of sexual encounters fueled by bad judgment and free-flowing alcohol.
In which case, again, things would’ve been much better handled had conservatives been in charge. We’d get single-sex dorms, more restrictions on drinking, perhaps even some classes on chivalry instead of ones about the “rape culture.”
Recall the response of the late John Silber when Boston University students objected to his policies restricting visits to the rooms of members of the opposite sex. BU’s president explained: “It is not our job to provide a ‘love nest’ for our students.”
Just think of how many unwanted sexual encounters that policy alone might have prevented.
Instead, the liberals have run the show when it comes to dealing with regrettable campus sex — and screwed things up completely.
First, they stepped back (far back) from endorsing (let along enforcing) traditional beliefs about sexual restraint.
Then they embraced the claim that every drunken hookup is rape. The idea was to stigmatize such hookups (or at least the men involved) — yet the result was at least equally to undermine the notion that rape is a serious violation whose perpetrators must be stopped and punished.
Next, the campus bureaucrats substituted college disciplinary hearings for actual prosecutions. Yet these hearings protect the rights of neither the victims nor the accused.
Finally, these administrators have perpetrated the myth that rape is some kind of political issue. No, it’s a crime. As with any other crime, when it happens, students should call the police. Not the dean, and certainly not the White House.
Twitter: @naomisriley