Robby Soave on the Wild and Crazy Summer of Criminalizing Campus Sex

Students returning to class this fall, consider
yourselves warned: This was the summer that federal regulators,
state lawmakers, and college administrators got together for a
threesome—incidentally criminalizing campus sex in the process.

The debate over campus sexual assault—how much it happens, and
how to handle it when it does—has been heating up for a while now
thanks to increasing federal intervention, reports Robby Soave, but
the latest round of action kicked off at the end of spring, when
the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education
identified 55 colleges under investigation for failing to report
and handle rape allegations. The message to colleges from the
federal government was do something, or else.

Caroline Kitchens, a senior research associate at the American
Enterprise Institute who frequently writes about the travesty of
campus sexual assault trials, told Reason that colleges,
at the federal government’s insistence, are codifying “a sexual
double standard whereby all men are presumed rapists.”

“In an effort to address sexual assault, college campuses are on
the verge of entering into an Orwellian nightmare in which all
sexual encounters are policed and students accused of misconduct
are guilty until proven innocent,” she said.

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