American universities and the rape of "rape"

Some years ago, an acquaintance of mine commented on a poster he saw on the wall at a nearby college. The poster said, "MEN RAPE".

Someone had written in, "WOMEN OVERGENERALIZE".

More to the point, when the word "rape" is defined down to where it means anything less than genuinely forced sexual contact, it cheapens the word. If "rape" can mean anything, it winds up meaning nothing.

The other day, Heather Mac Donald wrote a piece in the L.A. Times called "What Campus Rape Crisis?"

Among other things, she noted that the claimed incidence of rape – between 20% and 25% of all women – is much higher than the observed rates of all felonies combined anywhere else in the country. Indeed, it's high enough that if it were real, women would be staying away from college in droves.

The 2006 violent crime rate in Detroit, one of the most violent cities in the U.S., was 2,400 murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants -- a rate of 2.4%.

Laer at Cheat Seeking Missiles notes an article "rebutting" Mac Donald's piece. One item cited is a couple of studies...

Having vented, Clark-Flory does actually rebut Mac Donald, but she does it by quoting another study instead of addressing the perceptive demographic challenge raised by Mac Donald.

Let's dispense with the "science" behind this argument first. It all goes back to a 1980's study commissioned by Ms Magazine (red flags, anyone?), in which the author, Mary Koss, didn't use the word "rape" in her survey designed to identify the rate of rapes on campus.

That may seem odd, but she had her reasons. Her question didn't use "rape" because she thought sensitive females would not answer such a direct question honestly. Instead, she asked,

"Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?"

Not surprisingly, she got HUGE results -- the same 20 to 25 percent figure the colleges want us to believe. Mac Donald says, and I believe, that many women who answered "yes" simply had on "beer goggles" at a bar and put out, then regretted it.

But here's the problem: Neither question addressed the man's intent, the woman's actions against the man, or any of the circumstances of the act. Rape is -- or has been up until now -- described legally by a particular set of circumstances that feminists are now trying to redefine. Just as anti-war factions are trying to redefine "torture" in order to create a cause where where wasn't one before, the feminists want to broaden the meaning of rape so more women become victims, thus increasing the relevance of their cause.

Laer then moves on to discuss drug-facilitated rape, where GHB or some other "date-rape drug" is slipped into a woman's drink.

Victims like Annette have trouble convincing police and prosecutors they've been raped. They have no memory of what happened and there's frequently no physical evidence because memories of what happened to them start to become real well after the crime. And, most damaging to the victims, law enforcement officials too readily dismiss these victims as bar sluts, not rape victims. That's particularly damaging to them because they were drugged, and were not drunk and promiscuous prior to being drugged.

To the extent that creating a false crisis out of campus and bar rapes will help the thousands of Annettes who are struggling to be heard, and who are psychologically damaged because society is calling them bar sluts instead of rape victims, more power to the false statistics.

But the studies cited by Clark-Flory do just the opposite. They group true date-rape victims with the girls who just got drunk and got laid. That minimizes the crime, and worse, it minimizes the perpetrator. One perp is a premeditating criminal who uses dangerous drugs just as effectively as other rapists use weapons and threats of violence; the other is some guy who just happened to be at a bar when a drunk girl said, "Lesh do it."

The other danger of the Clark-Flory approach is that it places justice in the hands of collegiate bureaucrats. As you can imagine, the colleges have set up protocols for dealing with the crisis created by foolishly broadening the definition of rape. Girls can ask committees of muddle-headed academics to rule on the fate of boys whose crime may have been no more than to say "Sure" to the girl's "Lesh do it."

Come to think of it, it may be tempting to skew the data to gin up more support for your cause. There are examples covering such things as rape, harassment, homelessness, hunger, and any number of topics where someone has an axe to grind. The thing is, if you fiddle with statistics and definitions to make whatever problem you want people to notice look more prevalent, are you doing yourself any good in the long run?