Wednesday, February 27, 2008

 

The Rape Industry

As a prosecutor decades ago, I have brought rapists to justice. It was pretty rare, however, that we deputy DAs had the opportunity. I saw that as a good thing. I was hearing, however, statistics of a rape deluge. The wife of a loyal reader of this little site told me in all seriousness that half of all womens' first times were rape. That seemed a little high. I also heard that a quarter of all college co-eds would be victims of rape or attempted rape by the end of their years in college. I thought, from my limited experience in the criminal justice system, that the stats from campuses about the prevalence of rape there were phony. Good to see that I am right, as Heather Mac Donald clearly shows. Money quotes:

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.

[...]

If the one-in-four statistic is correct—it is sometimes modified to “one-in-five to one-in-four”—campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. No crime, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20 or 25 percent, even over many years. The 2006 violent crime rate in Detroit, one of the most violent cities in America, was 2,400 murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants—a rate of 2.4 percent. The one-in-four statistic would mean that every year, millions of young women graduate who have suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience. Such a crime wave would require nothing less than a state of emergency—Take Back the Night rallies and 24-hour hotlines would hardly be adequate to counter this tsunami of sexual violence. Admissions policies letting in tens of thousands of vicious criminals would require a complete revision, perhaps banning boys entirely. The nation’s nearly 10 million female undergrads would need to take the most stringent safety precautions. Certainly, they would have to alter their sexual behavior radically to avoid falling prey to the rape epidemic.

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.

You could only get to 25% if you redefined rape to include as a victim of it "the woman who had consensual sex but really regretted it the next day."

Here's more support of Heather Mac Donald.

Rapists are scum; women who make false reports of rape are scum too.

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