Tag Archives: Trial

Commentary

Christina Hoff Sommers takes on sexual harassment hysteria on campus

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Christina Hoff Sommers
Christina Hoff Sommers

Christina Hoff Sommers writes about feminism gone wild in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Excerpt:

American courts take exacting precautions to avoid convicting an innocent person of a crime. It was therefore startling to read the April 4, 2011, directive on sexual violence sent by the U.S. Department of Education’s assistant secretary for civil rights, Russlynn H. Ali, to college officials across the country. In an effort to make campuses safe and equitable for women, Ali, with the full support of her department, advocates procedures that are unjust to men.

[…]Marching under the banner of Title IX and freed of high standards of proof, campus disciplinary committees, once relatively weak and feckless, will be transformed into powerful instruments of gender justice. At least, that is the fantasy. But here is the reality: Campus disciplinary committees—often a casual mix of professors, students, and an assistant dean or two—are well suited to resolving cases involving purported plagiarism and cheating, and violations of college rules on drugs and alcohol. But no one considers them prepared to adjudicate murder, arson, or kidnapping cases, or criminal assault. They lack the training and the resources to investigate and adjudicate felonies. So why are they expected to determine guilt or innocence in cases of rape?

As with murder and arson, serious charges of sexual assault should be left to the police and the courts. The Department of Education should not pressure universities to enact a system whereby a student can be found guilty of a major crime by a mere preponderance of evidence.

[…]Being a victim of rape is uniquely horrific, but being accused of rape is not far behind. If the person is guilty, then the suffering is deserved. But what if he is innocent? To be found guilty of rape by a campus tribunal can mean both expulsion and a career-destroying black mark on your permanent record. Such occurrences could become routine under the Ali dispensation.

So why is Ali taking such draconian measures? Because she asserts that rape on campuses has reached epidemic levels, citing a study that states that 19 percent, or almost one in five women, will be a victim of assault or attempted assault during their college years.

But is that figure accurate or even plausible? Research on sexual assault is notoriously hard to conduct, and the studies are wildly inconsistent. A 2003 Bureau of Justice Statistics special report, “Violent Victimization of College Students, 1995-2002,” found that among the nation’s nearly four million female college students, there were six rapes or sexual assaults per thousand per year during the years surveyed. That comes to one victim in 40 students during four years of college—too many, of course, but vastly fewer than Ali’s one in five.

The study cited by Ali used an online survey, conducted under a grant from the Justice Department, in which college women were asked about their sexual experiences, on campus and off, and the researchers—not the women themselves—decided whether they had been assaulted. The researchers employed an expansive definition of sexual assault that included “forced kissing” and even “attempted” forced kissing. The survey also asked subjects if they had sexual contact with someone when they were unable to give consent because they were drunk. A “yes” answer was automatically counted as a rape or assault. According to the authors, “an intoxicated person cannot legally consent to sexual contact.”

Surely, reasonable people can disagree on that: If sexual intimacy under the influence of alcohol is by definition assault, then a significant percentage of sexual intercourse throughout the world and down the ages qualifies as crime.

The Justice Department stamped a disclaimer on every page of the survey report, advising that it is not a publication of the Justice Department and does not necessarily reflect its positions or policies. Ali, however, treats it as an official government finding and ignores the controversies and ambiguities surrounding her “one in five” figure.

I’m a huge fan of Christina Hoff Sommers. I really recommend her book “The War Against Boys”. Must-reading for any parent. The article notes in the author bio that she is working on an updated version of that book, and you can bet this topic will be covered.

News

Obama administration paves way for false sexual harassment charges

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Famous conservative professor Mike Adams explains the problem at Townhall.

Excerpt:

[T]he Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has announced new guidelines that will force due process to take a back seat to political correctness. These guidelines will apply to sexual harassment and felony sexual assault cases.

[…]According to the new OCR guidelines, any college that accepts federal funding or federal student loans (close to 100% of our nation’s colleges) must now employ a “preponderance of the evidence” standard of proof in sexual harassment and sexual assault cases. This lowered standard replaces the traditionally accepted standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, which, according to most triers of fact, is close to 100% confidence of guilt. In contrast, “preponderance of evidence” means the campus judiciary only needs to be 50.01% confident that a person is guilty of a given offense – even if that offense is rape, which, regardless of degree, is always a serious felony.

This mandate from the federal government will have profound real-life costs for real students. If we learned anything from the infamous Duke Lacrosse case it is this: Academia is quick to blame people for creating a “rape culture” on campus and slow to take responsibility for false accusations.

Unfortunately, Duke was not an isolated case. At Stanford, student jurors in sexual misconduct cases are actually given “training materials” that say things like, “Everyone should be very, very cautious in accepting a man’s claim that he has been wrongly accused of abuse or violence” and “An abuser almost never ‘seems like the type.'”

In other words, even highly respected universities like Stanford try to create unfair and partial juries prior to rape adjudications – in clear violation of the spirit of the 6th Amendment (Do you remember when liberals cared about the “spirit of the law”?). Adding a mere “preponderance” standard to such a toxic environment would be a recipe for disaster – disaster in the form of wrongful felony convictions.

The OCR mandates are not merely confined to actions. They apply to students’ speech, too. Columbia University already lists “love letters” as a form of sexual harassment. The University of California, Santa Cruz, classifies using “terms of endearment” as sexual harassment. (Who could have ever imagined that one could be endeared and harassed at the same time?). At Yale, “unspoken sexual innuendo such as voice inflection” is considered sexual harassment. The absurdities are seemingly endless in 21st Century “hire” education.

Studies have shown that the number of false rape accusations is near 50%.

Here’s a Fox News article from a prominent equity feminist, Wendy McElroy.

Excerpt:

“Forty-one percent of all reports are false.”

This claim comes from a study conducted by Eugene J. Kanin of Purdue University. Kanin examined 109 rape complaints registered in a Midwestern city from 1978 to 1987.

Of these, 45 were ultimately classified by the police as “false.” Also based on police records, Kanin determined that 50 percent of the rapes reported at two major universities were “false.”

Although Kanin offers solid research, I would need to see more studies with different populations before accepting the figure of 50 percent as prevalent; to me, the figure seems high.

But even a skeptic like me must credit a DNA exclusion rate of 20 percent that remained constant over several years when conducted by FBI labs. This is especially true when 20 percent more were found to be questionable.

False accusations are not rare. They are common.

If you would like to get an idea of how false rape accusations are handled by the police, here is an example. Here’s a very recent example.

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If you are looking for a good charity, try the Alliance Defense Fund

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The Alliance Defense Fund secured a matching grant of 1.25 MILLION dollars. These guys do more for religious liberty in the world than anybody. A great organization. It’s all about getting a return for your investment, and these guys provide a huge return on investment.

Watch the video:

What they’ve done:

Christian attorneys trained at the ADF Legal Academy are on the frontlines fighting for religious freedom in communities like yours every day. These faithful allied attorneys are protecting the Body of Christ from legal attacks – and by God’s grace, are winning case after crucial case.

Some ADF victories:

  • Charles LiMandri achieved an important victory for four San Diego firefighters who were forced to endure sexual harassment during a lewd city-sponsored parade celebrating homosexual behavior.
  • Natalie Decker successfully defended a Christian couple in Colorado who were criminally charged for disciplining their child in accordance with church teaching.
  • Steven O’Ban helped the Christian non-profit organization, World Vision, win an important victory after the ministry was sued by two former employees who were dismissed after admitting that they didn’t believe in the Holy Trinity.

What they’re doing:

ADF Legal Academy-trained attorneys are in communities across America defending the constitutionally protected rights of Christians who have been censored and punished for expressing their faith. Please be in prayer for these and so many other important allied attorney cases being fought to protect Our First Liberty – religious freedom – and to keep the door open for the spread of the Gospel.

Some current ADF cases:

  • Randall Wenger is representing a 5th-grade public school student in Pennsylvania who was prohibited from distributing fliers that invited classmates to a Christmas party at her church because the school district has a policy that bars speech “promoting Christianity.”
  • Karen Mueller is defending a nurse-practitioner in Wisconsin who was fired for sharing her faith with the patients for whom she cared.
  • Daniel Cox is assisting with the defense of three young women who were arrested, shackled, strip-searched, and detained overnight by Maryland state police after peacefully expressing their pro-life views.

Religious liberty is what I would call my “core value”. The freedom to be who I really am, and to say what I really think in public, whether people like it or not. The ADF defends my religious liberty, and no one does it better.

I never give money to charities that don’t promote my worldview. My goal is not to alleviate people’s suffering, primarily. My goal is to persuade others about the truth of the gospel. And that takes legal work, policy work and research on arguments and evidence. I want to defend God’s existence and character, and to promote the social conditions (e.g. – protection of unborn children, traditional marriage, low taxes, free trade, school choice, security from terrorism, etc.) that maximize the opportunities of non-Christians to investigate the gospel for themselves.

Yes, arguments and evidence are very important, but arguments and evidence are not weighed in a vacuum. Every person on the planet was created to know God, and my job is to make sure they get their best opportunity to do that. Part of that opportunity is letting Christians have the freedom to be who they are in public, in front of non-Christians. It’s also important for me to be able to find a job, to keep what I earn, and to spend my earnings on the causes that I think are important – not to let someone else take my money and spend it buying votes from special interest groups with wasteful government spending.

My favorite charities are Reasonable Faith, Stand to Reason, Please Convince Me, CrossExamined, Faith Beyond Belief, Heritage Foundation, Family Research Council, Access Research Network, Discovery Institute Center for Science & Culture, and Alliance Defense Fund. These are charities that move the ball forward effectively.