NH, for its size, has a lot of colleges. Certainly UNH and Dartmouth get a lot of attention but there are a bunch of colleges dotting the NH landscape. I keep reading about the “rape epidemic” at our college campuses but I keep wondering: “If the stat is that 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted, where are all the watchdog reports on it??”. Yes, tongue in my own cheek here – but where ARE all of the media reports (newspapers, TV, radio, blogs, social media) reporting them all. C’mon, with college students making up an inordinate percentage of NH’s population, it should be “a standing head” (headline) that we see all the time – FAR more than what we do.
Well, it seems that “the truth” seems to be different than “conventional wisdom” as portrayed by some that would have us believe otherwise:
Look, there are going to be those that will scream at me “how DARE you!” for even bringing it up. Public policy cannot be done (GOOD public policy, that is, which should be what all of us that are not pursuing an ideological dogma should be about) just on the back of a few anecdotes. Violent crimes have been falling for years now and this FBI stat shows that rape is no different.
“The chart above is based on the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports available here and here, and shows the annual frequency, or rate of rapes per 100,000 population, from 1974 to 2012 (most recent year available). From 1974 to 1992, the rate of rapes in the US was increasing from 26.2 per 100,000 population to a peak of 42.8 in 1992. Then for the next 20 years, the rate declined in almost every year, and fell to a 36-year low of 26.7 rapes per 100,000 in 2012, the lowest rate since 1976. Also note that the current rate of 26.7 rapes per 100,000 people means that there would be 26.7 rapes per 50,000 women, or 1 in about 1,900.” (H/T: Instapundit)
So why is Obama’s Quota Guy, Eric Holder, pushing the Federal Hand onto and further into campus “law” and making what used to be a reasonable facsimile of due process into more of a politically correct monkey court system where often the only person who gets to speak is the accuser and the accused is all but stripped of all rights to that due process?
However, the tide may be turning against Obama’s War on Campuses – by going into the real court system (yes, another H/T to Glenn):
PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Students Accused of Rape Can Fight Back // Court OKs Suits Against University, Employees, and Female.
With so much attention focused on the alleged failures of many universities to forcefully prosecute male students accused of date rape and sexual assault, the problem of universities whose judicial proceedings are unfair to the accused, and/or are overzealous because of pressure from female students or otherwise, have been largely overlooked.
But now a new judicial ruling gives those wrongly convicted a powerful new weapon – they can sue the university, the employees who participated in the proceedings, and even the accused herself in federal court for substantial monetary damages and other remedies, notes public interest law professor John Banzhaf, who was twice called a “radical feminist.”
After a school tribunal at Saint Joseph’s University found a male student to have committed sexual assault arising out of an incident of allegedly consensual sexual intercourse, he took legal action, says Banzhaf, who has been successful in over 100 sex discrimination proceedings.
The federal court held that he was entitled to sue the private university under the state’s Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law, and that he could also sue the university, university employees, and the female complainant for defamation (slander), with the court holding that their accusatory statements about him were not legally privileged.
We may be ready to see the pendulum swing once again – as the above shows, sometimes the false accusations that the colleges ignored due to a narrative (short version: men are nothing but pigs and rapists and not to be trusted according to the militant feminists that have often controlled how this version of political correctness works) fall apart in a real court where real discovery and evidential processes hold to a higher standard than what is found on campuses now (and to which Eric Holder is trying to further weaken).
