Tell Me About Your Campus Rape Culture

Is it time for an addendum to the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights 2011 Dear Colleague letter? According to Beth Mitchneck and The Chronicle Of Higher Education, college tour guides don't know enough about how their institutions handle "an issue that keeps rearing its ugly head on campuses nationwide — sexual assault."

"My daughter and I recently returned from a whirlwind tour of six colleges in the Northeast." Mitchneck's sample size is six.

"We are not just any mother-daughter team." Do tell, do tell. "I’m a professor who has been involved in gender equity for 15 years. My daughter is in the midst of creating a high-school curriculum on consensual sex for a class project and is interested in discussions of social justice." Don't hold your breath waiting on her to produce grandchildren any time soon.

"So she decided that she would ask every student tour guide how their institution handles sexual assault. It seemed especially relevant since a new study indicates that between 2001 and 2013, reports of sex crimes on college campuses have more than doubled."

Has Mitchneck avoided the "One In Five Female Students Will Experience Sexual Assault While In College" fake statistic? Maybe her critical reasoning isn't fatally compromised by fear.

Linking to her statistic goes to a PDF compiled by the National Center For Education Statistics entitled Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2015. One of the key findings of this report, "the number of reported forcible sex crimes on campus increased from 2,200 in 2001 to 5,000 in 2013."

Five thousand reported forcible sex crimes, out of a population of nearly twelve million female college students. The reason the issue seems to "keep rearing its ugly head" is the state of utter moral panic among people like Mitchneck.

And keep in mind that a "forcible sex crime" means "any sexual act directed against another person forcibly and/or against that person's will." In other words, touching a woman's breast against her will is in the same category as forcible rape.

Anyway, back to the college tour. On their first stop, their tour guide had to overcome the "constant querying of a young man about the location of the rec center." Boys, amirite? Excuse me, do you know where the weight room is? I'll check it out.



Mitchneck says that she "wanted to know that skilled and knowledgeable people were available to students and others to assist during and after crises, and should lawyers come in, they are there to protect the victims’ rights." The lawyers better not be there to protect the rights of the accused! Due Process? Rape due process! Due process was asking for it!

Later in her article, Mitchneck cited the "2015 survey by the Association of American Universities found that 23 percent of undergraduate women respondents experienced some form of sexual assault." And there it is. The survey that takes selection bias to new heights. Mitchneck just disqualified herself from being taken seriously.

Good thing Mitchneck wasn't cursed with a son, as far as we know. Sometimes it's nice to see the occasional resource for mothers whose sons have experienced the abdication of due process protections for alleged sexual assault.