Tag Archives: Campus Rape

News

Marco Rubio co-sponsored a bill to remove due process for accused college students

3 Comments
Marco Rubio with his allies: Democrat Churck Schumer and RINO John McCain
Marco Rubio with his allies: Democrat Churck Schumer and RINO John McCain

This is just shocking – it turns out that Marco Rubio supports a bill to presume that college students who are accused of rape are treated as guilty before any police involvement or any criminal trial.

National Review explains:

When it comes to due process on campus, Republicans in Congress, who campaigned on vows to rein in the Obama administration’s abuses of executive power, have largely acquiesced in its bureaucratic imposition of quasi-judicial tyranny. For more than four years, the White House and the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) have used an implausible reinterpretation of a 1972 civil-rights law to impose mandates unimagined by the law’s sponsors. It has forced almost all of the nation’s universities and colleges to disregard due process in disciplinary proceedings when they involve allegations of sexual assault. Enforced by officials far outside the mainstream, these mandates are having a devastating impact on the nation’s universities and on the lives of dozens — almost certainly soon to be hundreds or thousands — of falsely accused students.

One might have expected an aggressive response by House Republicans to such gross abuses of power — including subpoenas, tough oversight hearings, and corrective legislation. Instead, most of them have been mute. In the Senate, meanwhile, presidential candidate Marco Rubio of Florida, Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley of Iowa, and rising star Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire have teamed with Democratic demagogues Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Claire McCaskill of Missouri in co-sponsoring a bill that would make matters even worse.

[…]These Republicans are keeping bad company. Gillibrand, for example, published two statements branding a Columbia University student a “rapist” even though he had been cleared by the university and the police had found no basis for charging him. McCaskill, ignoring two generations of progress in the way police and prosecutors approach rape allegations, oddly asserted that “the criminal-justice system has been very bad, in fact much worse than the military and much worse than college campuses, in terms of addressing victims and supporting victims and pursuing prosecutions.”

Does this remind you of anything? It reminds me of the time that Marco Rubio sided with Democrats to give (at least) 20 million illegal immigrants a path to citizenship. It also reminds me of the time that Marco Rubio sided with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to intervene militarily in Libya. Libya is now a failed state, there is a civil war, Christians are being crucified and Islamic State has started another caliphate there.

So, think about that false rape accusation at UVA, where the accused was slimed and judged guilty, until we found out that the whole thing was a hoax. Apparently, Rubio is all in favor of enabling this sort of situation – enough that he would co-sponsor a bill to remove due process rights from accused college men.

Here’s more from the libertarians at Reason.com:

[…]Rubio is a co-sponsor of the Campus Accountability and Safety Act, which would codify into federal law several of Title IX’s most oppressive dictates. As The Washington Post’s George Will put it:

By co-sponsoring S.  590, Rubio is helping the administration sacrifice a core constitutional value, due process, in order to advance progressives’ cultural aggression. The next Republican president should be someone committed to promptly stopping this disgrace, not someone who would sign S.  590’s affirmation of it.

The Washington Examiner’s Ashe Schow attempted to get to the bottom of Rubio’s support for CASA and discovered that the simplest answer was the right one: he just doesn’t care very much about due process on campus. Schow writes:

Rubio is the only GOP candidate that has seemingly taken a stance on this issue – and it is a bad one. He has co-sponsored a bill that codifies into law the overreach of the Education Department and ensures that accused students will not have a fair hearing.

In the past, I blogged about Marco Rubio’s support for amnesty, his support for Hillary Clinton’s disastrous Libya intervention, and his deliberate skipping of votes to defund Planned Parenthood to do campaign events instead. Marco Rubio also pushed for cap-and-trade legislation as Speaker of the House in Florida. This would burden the energy sector with taxes and regulations, and raise the electricity bills of American consumers (who are already hard-pressed). Rubio has a billionaire donor who is strongly in support of gay rights, gay marriage and amnesty – does anyone believe that he does not expect to get his money’s worth if Rubio is elected President?

I hope everyone understands that he has many, many problems. I like Marco Rubio. If he is the nominee, I will back him completely, as he is much better than our nominee in 2012. But right now, my vote goes to the most conservative candidate who can win. And that’s Ted Cruz.

Polemics

Authors of 1 in 5 rape study explain how their work is being misrepresented

5 Comments

Earlier this week I found an amazing piece on the campus rape hysteria authored by Emily Yoffe on posted at the leftist Slate, of all places.

The whole article is worth the read, but there is one part that is very interesting. She spoke to the people who did that 1 in 5 study that everyone (including Obama) has been talking about, and found out some pretty interesting things.

Look:

One campus rape is one too many. But the severe new policies championed by the White House, the Department of Education, and members of Congress are responding to the idea that colleges are in the grips of an epidemic—and the studies suggesting this epidemic don’t hold up to scrutiny. Bad policy is being made on the back of problematic research, and will continue to be unless we bring some healthy skepticism to the hard work of putting a number on the prevalence of campus rape.

It is exceedingly difficult to get a numerical handle on a crime that is usually committed in private and the victims of which—all the studies agree—frequently decline to report. A further complication is that because researchers are asking about intimate subjects, there is no consensus on the best way to phrase sensitive questions in order to get the most accurate answers. A 2008 National Institute of Justice paper on campus sexual assault explained some of the challenges: “Unfortunately, researchers have been unable to determine the precise incidence of sexual assault on American campuses because the incidence found depends on how the questions are worded and the context of the survey.” Take the National Crime Victimization Survey, the nationally representative sample conducted by the federal government to find rates of reported and unreported crime. For the years 1995 to 2011, as the University of Colorado Denver’s Rennison explained to me, it found that an estimated 0.8 percent of noncollege females age 18-24 revealed that they were victims of threatened, attempted, or completed rape/sexual assault. Of the college females that age during that same time period, approximately 0.6 percent reported they experienced such attempted or completed crime.

That finding diverges wildly from the notion that one in five women college women will be sexually assaulted by the time they graduate. That’s the number most often used to suggest there is overwhelming sexual violence on America’s college campuses. It comes from a 2007 study funded by the National Institute of Justice, called the Campus Sexual Assault Study, or CSA. (I cited it last year in a story on campus drinking and sexual assault.) The study asked 5,466 female college students at two public universities, one in the Midwest and one in the South, to answer an online survey about their experiences with sexual assault. The survey defined sexual assault as everything from nonconsensual sexual intercourse to such unwanted activities as “forced kissing,” “fondling,” and “rubbing up against you in a sexual way, even if it is over your clothes.”

There are approximately 12 million female college students in the U.S. (There are about 9 million males.) I asked the lead author of the study, Christopher Krebs, whether the CSA represents the experience of those millions of female students. His answer was unequivocal: “We don’t think one in five is a nationally representative statistic.” It couldn’t be, he said, because his team sampled only two schools. “In no way does that make our results nationally representative,” Krebs said. And yet President Obama used this number to make the case for his sweeping changes in national policy.

So the actual number using reliable studies is less than 1%. And yet, we have so many people on the left telling us it’s 20 or 25 percent, in order to get their legislation passed. Just think about that for a minute. Our President stood up there and told us it was 20% but it’s actually less than 1%. And he does the same thing with the women’s pay gap, which he says is 23%, when the actual number when you correct for factors like pregnancies, type of work, number of hours worked, degree required, etc. is near zero.

UPDATE: Commenter Mathetes points me to this Department of Justice study which came up with the number 1 in 52.6, which is less than 2% for rape AND sexual assault together.