The Real Story Behind College Rape

          Suspect statistics, new rules, fake news stories, and fake rape reports have created a problem where there is not one. Yes, there is a problem on college campuses when it comes to sex, but it is in no way a “rape epidemic.” The problem is that college kids have been sucked into a life of casual drunk sex. They spend their weekend nights partying and having a good time. They then find

themselves waking up in the morning not remembering exactly how they got into the bed they are in, or why they slept with the person. Because after the fact they regret what they have done and with whom they did it, these incidents are called rapes. The push to call these casual drunken hook ups rape has created what is now called the college “rape epidemic.” People will say that girls are drugged at parties just to be taken advantage of. While that happens occasionally, just as it does off campuses, almost all “college rapes” happen when both the man and woman are drunk and their senses lowered. This so called “rape epidemic” is taking away from just how truly atrocious the real act of rape is. It is also ruining the lives of many college students forever, because the accused do not have a chance todefend themselves adequately according to the Title IX rules that are in place.themselves waking up in the morning not remembering exactly how they got into the bed they are in, or why they slept with the person. Because after the fact they regret what they have done and with whom they did it, these incidents are called rapes. The push to call these casual drunken hook ups rape has created what is now called the college “rape epidemic.” People will say that girls are drugged at parties just to be taken advantage of. While that happens occasionally, just as it does off campuses, almost all “college rapes” happen when both the man and woman are drunk and their senses lowered. This so called “rape epidemic” is taking away from just how truly atrocious the real act of rape is. It is also ruining the lives of many college students forever, because the accused do not have a chance todefend themselves adequately according to the Title IX rules that are in place.themselves waking up in the morning not remembering exactly how they got into the bed they are in, or why they slept with the person. Because after the fact they regret what they have done and with whom they did it, these incidents are called rapes. The push to call these casual drunken hook ups rape has created what is now called the college “rape epidemic.” People will say that girls are drugged at parties just to be taken advantage of. While that happens occasionally, just as it does off campuses, almost all “college rapes” happen when both the man and woman are drunk and their senses lowered. This so called “rape epidemic” is taking away from just how truly atrocious the real act of rape is. It is also ruining the lives of many college students forever, because the accused do not have a chance todefend themselves adequately according to the Title IX rules that are in place.Title IX is part of the Education Amendments Act of 1972. The rules contained in Title IX deal with sex discrimination and its prohibition. The rules in Title IX are part of the problem. It is because of Title IX that many of the problems surrounding college rape are occurring.          To accuse someone of rape in college, students are not told to go to the police, but to go to the Dean of Students, or the Title IX officer and fill out a Title IX report. To get another student accused of rape you only have to say that you have been raped. There is no form of evidence that you need to

present. When a student is convicted of rape the Title IX officer on campus will send them a letter. The letter will contain a written notice of the things the student has been accused of. The list of charges does not have to be a complete list, and in most cases it is not. This makes it very trying for any accused person to defend themselves. For a student to be accused of the crime there just has to be a 50.1% chance that they are guilty. This means that once an accuser is able to prove that there is a more likely than not chance of a rape, the defendant can be convicted. Colby Bruno who is an attorney explains in College Students Fight Sexual Assault Accusations, “Accused students often expect to be held to the criminal standard of evidence, that it was beyond a reasonable doubt that they had committed a crime. However, the US Education Department actually advises colleges to use a lower standard of proof, a preponderance of the evidence.” (1) Preponderance of the evidence merely means that the accuser only has to prove that there is a more likely chance than not of the defendant being a rapist.          There is what is called a Hearing Panel that is in charge of running these hearings. Their job is to find if the defendant is guilty or innocent. The Hearing Panel is comprised of one to three individuals, or panelists. These panelists are chosen by the Title IX officer on campus. These rules surrounding rape on campuses are in place to make sure that real rapists in college do not get away, but in turn they are tarnishing many names of accused and wrongly convicted students. The reason for the standard to convict someone, and the reason women are urged to take it to the Title IX officer and not the police is because it is hard to prove that you have been raped in a real courtroom. So in an effort to make sure that rapists do not get away with rape, these lower standards have been created. In doing that it has made it easier for some girls to take advantage of the situation. There are cases when women have accused someone of rape to protect themselves in one way or another. In an open letter titled Higher Education about Sexual Violence, Brett Sokolow of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management (NCHRERM) highlights a case where a women accused a man who she had been cheating on her boyfriend with of rape. The reason for this? Her boyfriend had found out she had cheated on him so she tried to cover it up. The accused man had to prove himself innocent, as opposed to being proven guilty. Luckily he was able to do that by showing a text message thread reading, “Him: How do I compare with your boyfriend? Her: You were great Him: So you got off? Her: Yes, especially when I was on top Him: We should do it again, soon Her: Hehe” (4)If this student had not been able to produce this text message conversation because he had deleted it, as most people would have, then he would have been accused and convicted of a rape that he had not committed. That conviction would have ruined his life, wasted thousands of dollars that he had spent for the worthless partial college degree he now possessed, and the years of his life that he had spent on campus.
          So as you can see there are cases where there is clearly not a rape involved, but this man had to walk around campus as a rapist until a hearing could be arranged to prove that he was innocent. There are other cases like this one. The following case is a more typical case. A woman will accuse a man of rape awhile after they break up, because presumably they become jealous, or grow to regret the relationship. Soklow also addresses this type of rape in his open letter, “A long-term relationship between two students involved many consensual sexual acts. The couple broke up. The male student started dating another student on campus, at which point the former girlfriend filed a complaint that there were non-consensual acts amongst many prior and subsequent consensual acts that they had engaged in.” (5) The NCHERM did their investigation and found that there was no merit to what the girl was saying. These accusations take away from just how atrocious actual sexual assault is.Judith Grossman, who identifies herself as a feminist, explains in A Mother, a Feminist, Aghast, the unjust ways her son was treated when an ex-girlfriend accused him of rape. These alleged rapes occurred with consensual sexual acts while the couple were dating. Grossman explains, “Worst of all, my son would not be afforded a presumption of innocence.” (1) This is one of the biggest problems with how Title IX works. The accused are not given the common innocent until proven guilty title. They are guilty until proven innocent. A New York based attorney, Andrew T. Miltenberg, asserts in an article called College Students Fight Sexual Assault, “However … there is a presumption of guilt put upon the accused, and that is a critically flawed process.” (1) The way these hearings are run conflict with the way this country's courts have ran for hundreds of years. While it seems well and good to make these changes for these types of hearings, it may not be worth the backlash. These changes make it easier for someone to be wrongly accused of a crime that ruins their name for life. A professor at Occidental College, Danielle Dirks, who is quoted in an article titled Sexual Assault Injustice at Occidental convinced a freshman woman into reporting what the freshman later confessed was voluntary drunken sex as rape. She told the freshman that her partner “fit the profile of other rapists on campus in that he had a high GPA in high school, was his class valedictorian, was on [a sports] team, and was ‘from a good family.’” (1) This does not sound like the profile of someone who commits a violent and heinous crime. That is not to say that someone who has good grades, plays sports, and has a good family cannot become a rapist, or other type of criminal. However, if this is the profile of a rapist, then it seems our goal as a society is to create men who fit the profile of being rapists. Heather Mac Donald interviewed a student at Virginia University for her paper The Campus Rape Myth. The interviewed woman claims that her friends would retaliate against her if she turned in the man that raped her. Mac Donald writes, “[This is] presumably because they wouldn’t believe her accusation. Students are often more skeptical of the campus rape-epidemic claim than are the denizens of women’s-studies departments, because they see the ambiguities and mixed responsibility of drunken campus sex.” (1) If a women is actually raped it is hard to think that her friends would retaliate against her if she reported it to the police. Why? Because girls in this day and age do not have to be afraid of any sort of retaliation by the police or school, for reporting actual sexual assault.          Everyone talks about how 1 in 5 women are raped in college. The one major flaw with the 1 in 5 number toted by so many, and the reason it is so high, is because women were asked in the survey that is regularly cited if they ever had a regretful sexual encounter. So many women who had regretted a totally consensual sexual encounter while they and their partner were drunk answered yes. The reason the number for unreported rapes is so high is because most women do not think to report their regretted drunken consensual sex as rape. These women do not think to report these incidents as rapes because they are not. There should be no blame placed on just one person for the drunken mistakes made by partners. When colleges do their own reports on campus crime it is found that colleges are one of the safest places. The Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey found that women are less likely to be raped if they go to college, as opposed to going straight into some kind of work out of college. It was also found that the percentage of women raped in college is much lower than the well known 1 in 5 statistic. It was found in the study that 6.1 women per 1000 are raped in college.          Currently in colleges there is a terrible culture of binge drinking and hook-up sex. When students wake up the next morning and do not like what they see next to them, they call it the “roll and scream.” These are the types of so-called rapes that are so prevalent on college campuses. Women feel like they are being taken advantage of by men who have sex with them while they are drunk. What is always left out is that the men are drunk too. There are many other cases that follow these stories where the women regret what happened so they report it as rape. There are actual sexual assaults in the world, and these are not them. These cases take away from just how terrible rape is. When people hear about all of the rape that happens on college campuses they are being misinformed. Glenn Reynolds in The Great Campus Rape Hoax writes, “Even one rape is too many, of course, on or off of campus. But when activists and politicians try to gin up a phony crisis, public trust is likely to be a major casualty.” (1) When you look at the recent studies and statistics you will find that colleges are a safe place for the young adults of today. They have just subjected themselves to an environment where it is easy to drink to much, and make bad decisions. If we want to fix the college “rape epidemic” we need to rid our colleges of binge drinking, and the casual sex culture.

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