The Campus Rape Myth

The reality: bogus statistics, feminist victimology, and university-approved sex toys

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."

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. Organizations like One in Four and Men Can Stop Rape tried to persuade college boys to redefine their masculinity away from the "rape culture." The college rape infrastructure shows no signs of a slowdown. In 2006, for example, Yale created a new Sexual Harassment and Assault Resources and Education Center, despite numerous resources for rape victims already on campus.

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.

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.

Just as a reality check, consider an actual student-related rape: in 2006, Labrente Robinson and Jacoby Robinson broke into the Philadelphia home of a Temple University student and a Temple graduate, and anally, vaginally, and orally penetrated the women, including with a gun. The chance that the victims would not consider this event "serious enough to report," or physically and emotionally injurious, is exactly nil. In short, believing in the campus rape epidemic depends on ignoring women's own interpretations of their experiences-supposedly the most grievous sin in the feminist political code.

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."

Federal law requires colleges to publish reported crimes affecting their students. The numbers of reported sexual assaults-the law does not require their confirmation-usually run under half a dozen a year on private campuses and maybe two to three times that at large public universities. You might think that having so few reports of sexual assault a year would be a point of pride; in fact, it's a source of gall for students and administrators alike. Yale's associate general counsel and vice president were clearly on the defensive when asked by the Yale alumni magazine in 2004 about Harvard's higher numbers of reported assaults; the reporter might as well have been needling them about a Harvard-Yale football rout. "Harvard must have double-counted or included incidents not required by federal law," groused the officials. The University of Virginia does not publish the number of its sexual-assault hearings because it is so low. "We're reticent to publicize it when we have such a small `n' number," says Nicole Eramu, Virginia's associate dean of students.

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Blacks bypassing law school

Law firms, especially large ones, are feeling pressure to become more diverse in terms of minority hires, though they're finding it easier said than done. Bigger firms, particularly, are finding it in their best interest to recruit more minorities. Those firms tend to service extremely large clients-the Chevrons, the Dow Chemicals, even the Shaw Groups-and these corporate jumbos have super-sized diversity as a priority. They've already taken the diversity pledge, so to speak, and insist firms they hire do the same. More and more, these large clients are demanding proof of results.

It's hard to argue that making the professional work force more closely resemble the face of society is anything but positive, and progress is being made. All the same, local law firms serious about raising the ranks of minority hires face tough recruiting competition from legal leviathans in big markets like Atlanta, Dallas and Houston, not to mention Chicago and New York. "We have a burning desire to be diverse," says Linda Perez Clark, a partner with Kean, Miller, Hawthorne, D'Armond, McCowan & Jarman. "The problem is we struggle to find the candidates. There is such competition to recruit minority graduates out of law school." Kean Miller is Baton Rouge's largest firm, with competitive pay packages and a tradition of luring the best and brightest. Still, the firm is "struggling to get as diverse as we'd like to be," Clark says.

She researched the problem and found minority enrollment in law schools is declining across the United States. One reason is a minority student with a bachelor's degree has no shortage of employment opportunities. Diversity, meanwhile, has become a front-burner issue for so many companies. A minority graduate with a business degree and several job offers might think twice about spending three more years in law school, especially if it's not necessary to get a good job.

That leaves law firms' diversity pipelines with merely a trickle. Clark discovered a pre-law program for minorities at St. John's University in New York. Kean Miller used it as a model for the Kean Miller Connection, a two-day law school prep course for minority college students. The first one was held in May, with 17 student participants. It will be an annual event, says Clark, who runs the show. It's about showing college kids what a career in law entails and assuring them that it is something they can do. "If they do go to law school, we have a very good chance of landing them as summer clerks," Clark says. And who knows? That summer clerk could wind up at Kean Miller as a seasoned practicing attorney one day.

Maureen Harbourt, a partner with Kean Miller who chairs the firm's Diversity Council, which promotes diversity from inside the organization, says Kean Miller also recruits aggressively from Louisiana's four law schools: LSU, Southern, Tulane and Loyola. Kean Miller also attends minority job fairs in Dallas and Atlanta, including the important Sun Belt Minority Recruitment Program held each fall in Dallas. For years, Kean Miller has tried to emphasize diversity at all levels-staff and paralegals as well as attorneys, Harbourt says. "We've always had our hearts in right place, but it hasn't always been as organized an effort," she says.

David Miceli, a managing partner with Breazeale, Sachse & Wilson, says it's been about eight years since he got his first diversity request from a large client. "It was not a common thing," he says. "But every single request for proposals we've participated in since has included requests for statistics about diversity." It's especially prevalent "at the very top of the food chain," Miceli says. Not only do big clients want to know about things like depth, experience and financial plan, now every RFP asks for details about diversity-not just how many minorities does the firm employ but how many are in leadership positions? How many are partners? How many minorities will be working on our particular matter?

Miceli suspects those companies have come to the conclusion that a diversity of perspective serves their own organizations well, thus they demand it from the firms they hire. And it's not easy-especially in Louisiana, where it can be tough to attract and retain the right people regardless of race or gender, Miceli says. Add to that the fact law, as a profession, doesn't have quite the cachet it once did. "Our profession is not necessarily as attractive as it may have been perceived in the past," he says. "It's a lot of hard work, with a lot of high expectations." ....

Freddie Pitcher, chancellor of the Southern University Law Center, agrees that fewer minority students are applying to law schools around the country in large part because they can get good jobs with just a bachelor's degree. Southern's law school applicant pool peaked at 1,400 right before Hurricane Katrina, which knocked it through the floor. It's back up to around 900. Pitcher says he doesn't know if it'll ever reach pre-storm levels. It's also true that Louisiana's pool of law school applicants-Caucasian as well as African-American-is pretty thin. Still, there's plenty of interest in the law as a career among minority students, says Pitcher, a retired judge who spent six years as a partner at Phelps Dunbar before becoming law chancellor at Southern. The law center just held its annual pre-law program, which attracts students from across the state and even Texas.

Pitcher guesses about half his top 20 grads take jobs out of state each year and the other half stay in Louisiana. Three of his grads were just hired by Sidley Austin in New York, starting at $160,000 a year. The Chicago office employs several more. All told, about 15 Southern law grads work for Sidley Austin, which has more than 1,800 lawyers worldwide....

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Charter School Enrollment Higher in States and Districts With Large black and Hispanic Populations

States with large Hispanic populations and high numbers of college-educated adults are more likely to pass supportive charter school legislation, as are states with weak academic performance as measured by students' SAT scores, find economists Christiana Stoddard of Montana State University and Sean Corcoran of New York University in the new issue of Education Next (spring 2008). They also find that the size of a state's African-American population and high school dropout rates are strongly associated with increased enrollment in charter schools.

According to Stoddard and Corcoran's research, states with an Hispanic population that is 14 percent higher than the average are about 10 percent more likely to pass a strong charter law (as measured by the Center for Education Reform's charter school law strength index). In addition, they found that a 12.1 percent increase in a state's African American population is associated with roughly a 2 percent increase in charter school enrollment, in effect, double the charter school enrollment in the average state. Strong charter laws also appear earlier in those states in which the percentage of adults with at least a college education is higher than average.

Stoddard and Corcoran looked at legislation and patterns in the presence of charter schools and in their enrollments at both the state and local levels using demographic, financial, political, and school performance data from 1990 to 2004, including the most recent information from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data.

In examining changes in demographic characteristics between 1980 and 1990, Stoddard and Corcoran found that districts with a rising fraction of black or college-educated individuals saw greater participation in charter schools. In addition, they found that districts in which income inequality was rising saw greater participation in charter schools in the 1990s.

Stoddard and Corcoran find a positive relationship between the fraction of students enrolled in private schools before the passage of charter laws and law passage and strength. The researchers suggest that this may be due to private school parents supporting public charter schools as a substitute for private schools or that it may be related to broad dissatisfaction with public schools and a generally higher demand for alternatives.

Interestingly, the authors also find that teachers' unions, leading opponents of charter schools, appear to contribute indirectly to their expansion. In states that have both strong unions and strong charter laws, more families seek out charter schools as an educational alternative for their children. [How surprising! (NOT)]

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