Suppose Jackie’s story was not so
incredible. Suppose that premeditated, ritualistic gang rape
was a plausible occurrence at the average college. Suppose that one
in every five—or four, or three—female students found themselves in
serious danger of assault the moment they set foot outside their
dorm rooms. Suppose that America’s campuses really did rival
Somalia in terms of the violence faced by young women.
Would it be enough to merely place a moratorium on Greek
activity, form a task force, and defend the actions of
administrators who failed to report rape to the police, as
University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan has done (arguably
in violation of the Constitution)?
Of course not.
On the other hand, suppose the details of Jackie’s story were
exaggerated, or in doubt. Suppose that premeditated, ritualistic
gang rape was
highly implausible. Suppose that cherry-picked statistics
from a few unrepresentative studies were clearly masking an
extraordinary decline in rape rates nationwide over the past few
decades. Suppose the best available evidence suggested that
campuses were, on the whole, safer for women than other
environments. Suppose that campus sexual assaults were largely the
work of a few sociopaths and nearly always the result of
alcohol-induced incapacitation.
Wouldn’t the supposed solution to the campus rape crisis look
markedly different?
In a major magazine story that succeeds on all the levels
Rolling Stone’s failed, Slate’s Emily Yoffe
argues persuasively that we live in the latter world. Confusion
about the prevalence of rape and its proximate causes—confusion
that Rolling Stone has only worsened—has driven
governments and universities to greatly mishandle sexual assault by
mandating solutions that wrongly evaluate the scope of the problem
while needlessly violating civil liberties, from
due process to
freedom of association.
Yoffe quickly cuts through the hyperbole about surging assault
rates and discovers that college campuses aren’t nearly as
dangerous as we have let ourselves believe:
Being young does make people more vulnerable to serious violent
crime, including sexual assault; according to government
statistics those aged 18 to 24 have the highest rates of such
victimization. But most studies don’t compare the victimization
rates of students to nonstudents of the same age. One recent paper
that does make that comparison, “Violence Against
College Women” by Callie Marie Rennison and Lynn Addington,
compares the crime experienced by college students and their peers
who are not in college, using data from the National
Crime Victimization Survey. What the researchers found was the
opposite of what Gillibrand says about the dangers of campuses:
“Non-student females are victims of violence at rates 1.7 times
greater than are college females,” the authors wrote, and this
greater victimization holds true for sex crimes: “Even if the
definition of violence were limited to sexual assaults, these
crimes are more pervasive for young adult women who are not in
college.”Rennison, an associate professor at the School of Public Affairs
at the University of Colorado Denver, recognized in an interview
that her study goes against a lot of received wisdom. “Maybe that’s
not a really popular thing to say,” she said, adding, “I hate the
notion that people think sending kids off to college is sending
them to be victimized.”
We see this fear manifest itself all the time. After reading
Yoffe’s story, I instantly thought of Reason’s Lenore Skenazy,
who warns that many parents—as well as the state—have become myopic
about the relative dangers their kids face. Skenazy has covered
cases where police arrested parents for letting their
children play outside by themselves, or wait in the car while
mom grabbed groceries. Unrealistic fears about predators waiting
around every corner to snatch and abuse kids have prompted the
enactment of paranoid laws; these are bad for society and minimize
child and parental autonomy, but do little to make children
safer.
Consider Skenazy’s
video for Reason TV. She discovered that concerns about sex
offenders abusing kids on Halloween are entirely misplaced, and
laws that force registered sex offenders to turn off their lights
or report to a facility during Halloween hours are cruel and
needless. In most respects, kids are no less safe on Halloween. In
fact, the one great danger to trick-and-treaters is being hit by a
car. Skenazy’s research suggests that taking the cops off sex
offender patrol and putting them on crossing guard duty would be a
far more effective use of police resources.
It’s not that children face no danger; rather, certain dangers
are exaggerated in people’s minds (predators) and others minimized
(car accidents). And so the policy designed to make children safer
ends up focusing on the wrong thing.
It’s the same with rape. Culture does not cause rape. Tasteless
jokes do not cause rape. Fraternities are not universal rape
factories. Rape is not occurring more frequently. Whatever happened
to Jackie, it wasn’t a Silence of the Lambs sort of ordeal
as reported by Rolling Stone.
Which is not to say that nothing happened to Jackie, or
that rape never happens, or that it has no cause
or cultural enablers, or that all frats behave perfectly
all the time. Of course rape happens, and it’s a serious matter
deserving of everyone’s attention. The police should vigorously
investigate accusations and prosecute offenders. Policies can and
should be changed to diminish it. But this can only be done if
people have a good sense of the scope of the actual problem.
And at the end of the day, obliterating that scope is perhaps
the most costly consequence of Rolling Stone’s
disastrous abandonment of journalistic principles. The
article’s defenders cling—wrongly—to the notion that the world is
brimming with Drews, and as such, all Jackies should
automatically be believed without question. But some of the
article’s critics, who are right about its significant flaws, will
nevertheless draw the incorrect conclusion that all accusers are
liars. Neither outcome is good for addressing actual sexual
assault.
The ubiquity of misleading statistics about rape and absurd
policies designed to deter it—including, most notably,
affirmative consent policies that make neo-Victorian
requirements of students who want to have sex—betray a great deal
of societal confusion on this issue. Rolling Stone has
worsened the matter, and it’s going to take lot more articles like
Yoffe’s to undo the damage.
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