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KC on rape culture
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Topic Started: Mar 19 2014, 02:41 PM (260 Views)
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Quasimodo
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Mar 19 2014, 02:41 PM
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http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2014/03/rapeculture.html
MARCH 18, 2014
'Rape Culture' Fraud--Unmasking a Delusion By KC Johnson
Anyone who follows the contemporary media closely is doubtless familiar with the suddenly ubiquitous phrase "rape culture." In the context of higher education, the phrase implies two interlocking beliefs. First: despite crime statistics showing sexual assault (as well as all violent crimes) to be very uncommon on campus, colleges and universities are, in fact, hotbeds of rape (but not, it appears, of all other violent crimes). Second: despite the fact that most college faculties and nearly all administrations are extraordinarily sympathetic to the activists' position on gender issues, the campus culture over which these figures preside nonetheless--somehow--actually encourages the prevalence of rape at college.
That little, if any, evidence exists to sustain either of these beliefs has not deterred the "rape culture" believers; if anything, the lack of evidence for their claims appears to have emboldened them. Nor have they been deterred by the revelation of high-profile false rape claims on campus (ranging from the Duke lacrosse case to the Caleb Warner affair at North Dakota); if anything, the increasing build-up of sympathy for clearly railroaded males has intensified the rage of those who discern a "rape culture" on campus.
Duke's "Campus Culture Initiative"
An early sign of an obsession with "rape culture" on campus occurred at Duke during the lacrosse case. In April 2006, in a 2000-plus word statement that declined to mention the presumption of innocence, Duke president Richard Brodhead created a "Campus Culture Initiative," to explicate and "confirm [emphasis added] the existence of a dominant culture among Duke undergraduates." There was, of course, no rape, but the CCI proceeded along as if there were, operating under the Orwellian slogan that "diversity makes a more excellent university."
The CCI had four subcommittees; three were chaired by extreme anti-lacrosse voices among the faculty (Professors Karla Holloway, Anne Allison, and Peter Wood). The gender subcommittee accepted as an unquestioned premise that "Duke's gendered culture is, in no small part, derived from a fundamental lack of respect, fueled by a mix of insecurity, dis-empowerment, and alcohol." Members detected a harsh campus culture caused by men's athletics and Duke's policy of allowing fraternities, which simply "supports our community of divides."
When evidence didn't support the CCI's claims of a campus culture that tolerated rape, Allison and her colleagues ignored the facts. They claimed that between 20 and 25 percent of Duke female students were victims of "sexual assault"--even though the most recent Duke statistics available to them, which covered from 2000 through 2006 and used a much broader reporting standard than the FBI database, indicated that 0.2% of Duke students, not 20%-25%, "report that they have experienced a rape or attempted rape."
The CCI's recommendations, especially about athletics, were so extreme that even the craven Brodhead rejected them. But their spirit lived on as attention from the lacrosse case tailed off. The university subsequently revised its sexual assault procedures to hold that sex between students of "perceived" power differentials could be a sexual assault; and Duke recently further revised procedures to all but guarantee expulsion when a student is deemed a rapist through the school's due process-unfriendly disciplinary panels.
Dartmouth
A continuing theme in campus "rape culture" debates is the manner in which the critique clashes with reality. Consider, for instance, the escalating protests last spring at Dartmouth. Exercising a "heckler's veto," activists concerned about what ThinkProgress delicately described as the "school's attitude toward sexual assault, racism, and homophobia" (it's pretty safe to say the school opposed all three) disrupted an orientation event for incoming students, on grounds that the college had not invited them to address the incoming students. In the preferred terms of the protesters, who wore t-shirts with such sayings as "Real rapists walk this campus," the college had "silenced" and "boycotted" them--as if every Dartmouth student has a right to speak at an orientation event for new students.
The protest prompted an alleged backlash--nasty, even violent, items were posted on a message board to which Dartmouth students had access. But, intriguingly, the protesters didn't report their concerns to the police, even though law enforcement could have obtained a subpoena to determine who precisely posted the threatening items. ("Rape culture" activists generally steer clear of law enforcement, since police might demand evidence to substantiate their claims.) Instead, they appealed to the Dartmouth administration, bizarrely arguing that some were afraid to attend class--even though these "fears" did not seem serious enough to prompt the activists to report the alleged threats to police. In the event, the administration cravenly canceled classes for a day of events that included an address from "a social justice and diversity consultant and facilitator."
The theater of the absurd culminated when mainstream students, not unreasonably, protested the protesters, noting that the cancellation of classes had robbed them of a day's worth of instructional time for which their tuition dollars had paid.
Here's how Huffington Post's Tyler Kingkade--who, as is typical in all of his work on campus events, uncritically presented Dartmouth matters according to whatever version of events the politically correct offered--described what happened next:
Dartmouth sophomore Nastassja Schmiedt, part of the protesting group, told HuffPost that they continued to receive hate mail after the teach-ins. She gave as one example an email with the subject line of "thievery" and the body simply reading, "You owe my family $280 in tuition for forcing classes to cancel."
Only in the academy could the item quoted above be considered "hate mail."
As at Duke, the fact that statistics didn't support the protesters' claim of a "rape culture" had no effect. Instead, the Dartmouth administration promoted Amanda Childress to coordinate all of the college's handling of sexual assault matters. Childress then promptly humiliated the school by musing, at a national conference, about the possibility of expelling accused students based solely on an allegation--on grounds that while campus due process isn't a right, "safety" is.
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Quasimodo
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Mar 19 2014, 02:43 PM
Post #2
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(snip)
The Premise
The "rape culture" movement operates from three central characteristics.
First, it has received almost fawning press coverage (what media members want to be deemed pro-rape?)--allowing for transparently absurd allegations, such as those at Occidental, to be presented as credible. In some instances, this has come from the usual suspects, such as Kingkade at Huffington Post, Allie Grasgreen at Inside Higher Ed, and Richard Perez-Peña of the New York Times. But the phenomenon has also received extensive, uncritical attention in BuzzFeed, which despite its generally solid treatment of legal issues just hired the discredited Katie Baker to help coordinate its "rape culture" articles. In a media too often accepts at face value a politically correct narrative on campus, the "rape culture" claim is almost ideal for campus "activists."
Second, the "rape culture" approach allows activists to shift the narrative away from uncomfortable questions about due process and false accusations against innocent male students, and toward a cultural critique in which the facts of specific cases can be deemed irrelevant. Selena Roberts pioneered the tactic at Duke--when the case against the lacrosse players imploded, she (falsely) claimed that her guilt-presuming columns were merely designed to critique a flawed "campus culture." Or, as Amanda Childress implied in her oft-criticized remarks, whatever value might exist in following specified procedures in sexual assault cases, universities should focus their efforts on tackling broader cultural mores.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the "rape culture" approach provides a weapon to advance a particular type of gender-based agenda (curricular and administrative priorities need to be revamped to recognize that women are victims) in a campus environment in which race/class/gender advocates already dominate. There always will be a stray, anonymous misogynistic comment on a message board, or by a drunken student at a spring-break party, from which advocates can then generalize to claim that a crisis exists on campus--without ever defining precisely what a "rape culture" is, or how the steps they recommend could possibly eradicate it. And since there isn't a recent example--from Duke to Dartmouth to any of the current Title IX claims--in which those who have cried wolf on campus have experienced any repercussions for their actions, there is no drawback in advancing inflammatory claims, no matter how unlikely.
So expect a lot of talk about "rape culture" in the coming months
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Quasimodo
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Mar 20 2014, 07:45 AM
Post #3
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http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/03/08/barbara-kay-rape-culture-fanatics-dont-know-what-a-culture-is/
Barbara Kay: ‘Rape culture’ fanatics don’t know what a culture is
Barbara Kay | March 8, 2014 11:11 AM ET
In today’s edition of the Post, there is a very thoughtful and serious discussion of whether the phenomena of “rape culture” even exists. It will no doubt receive the usual stream of invective — accusations of trivializing rape, denying that sexual assaults occur, implying that women who drank too much deserved to be raped. Hardly real criticisms in any intellectual sense, but they will come.
These critics — that seems almost too kind a descriptor for them, but alas — don’t seem to understand that a denial of rape culture is not a denial that rape exists or an expression of indifference to the pain it causes its victims. The world is imperfect. Bad or disturbed people commit crimes, including rape; good, well-adjusted people don’t. My heart breaks for children killed by their guardians, and in a perfect world none ever would be, but even 100 children dead at the hands of their parents does not make Canada a child-killing culture, or anyone who’d say so a child-murder denier.
Indeed, the more closely one follows the increasingly hysterical volleys of rhetorical fire back and forth on this issue, the more apparent it becomes that those who speak of a rape culture don’t understand what the word “culture” actually means. To result in a “culture,” a phenomenon must be widely accepted as the norm. It is culturally normal in some countries for women to be virtual chattels, governed by patriarchal standards of honour; to be married against their will; to meet blame from their kinsmen and indifference or even hostility at law enforcement and court levels when reporting sexual assault; to be shunned as unmarriageable — or worse — for the “shame” of having been raped, and so forth. There we can legitimately speak of a “rape culture.”
Here, where women are socially and legally equal to men, official sympathy for rape victims at every institutional level has created a climate so overwhelmingly sympathetic to female victims of sexual abuse that the emerging cultural danger is injustice to falsely alleged perpetrators. We are gripped by a baseless, but pandemic, moral panic in which significant collateral damage is beginning to pile up.
Moral panic fuelled by ideology and righteous indignation quickly corrodes the critical faculties and blinds even otherwise intelligent people to objective facts. The numbers on campus rape don’t even come close to the famous “one in four” [women on campus are victims of rape or attempted rape], even taking into consideration unreported rates (i.e. multiplying reported rapes by 10, or even 100).
Where did that figure come from anyway? From bowdlerized research.
It began in1982, when Mary Koss, then a professor of psychology at Kent State University in Ohio, published an article on rape in which she expressed the orthodox — and remarkably misandric – feminist theory that “rape represents an extreme behavior but one that is on a continuum with normal male behavior within the culture.”
Koss undertook a survey whereby she arrived at the one-in-four figure. To get there, Koss mischaracterized responses. For example, 73% of those she characterized as rape victims said they had not been raped. And 43% of the alleged victims said they had continued to date their alleged rapists. Nevertheless, the one-in-four meme took hold. The survey was published in Ms Magazine in 1987 and “took the universities by storm,” producing what can rightly be termed a rape-culture industry: expensive, over-staffed rape-crisis centres, hotlines, rallies, conferences, sexual-assault procedures consultancies and inter-collegiate sexual-assault networks.
You can produce any culture you like if you dumb deviancy down. If you change “against her will” to “without her consent,” as we have, that is a huge paradigm shift from what we used to think of as rape: i.e. forced sex. And if a drunk woman can’t give her consent, another moved goalpost, she is ipso facto raped.
Last word to brilliant feminist (the kind I like) Camille Paglia: “The feminist obsession with rape as a symbol of male-female relations is irrational and delusional. From the perspective of the future, this period in America will look like a reign of mass psychosis, like that of the Salem witch trials … The fantastic fetishism of rape by mainstream … feminists has in the end trivialized rape, impugned women’s credibility, and reduced the sympathy we should feel for legitimate victims of violent sexual assault.”
Amen to that, sister.
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Quasimodo
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Mar 20 2014, 07:51 AM
Post #4
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http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/03/07/is-there-an-epidemic-of-rape-culture-at-canadian-universities/
Is there an epidemic of ‘rape culture’ at Canadian universities?
Brian Hutchinson | March 7, 2014
VANCOUVER — They are all disturbing cases. Three different Canadian universities, in different regions of the country. Episodes of male sexual aggression, and beyond that, an alleged assault. And three similar responses from the schools’ leaders, identifying each campus with “rape culture.”
Coined some four decades ago, the term was not widely used. But it’s now bandied about on campuses across North America, and the implication is startling, if unintended: Despite decades of sexual politics, heightened awareness and warnings, prosecution, feminist instruction and activism, our institutions of higher learning are misogynistic traps. They are corrupted, dangerous environments for students, visitors and staff.
Are things really as bad as all that? At some schools where “rape culture” has purportedly spread, leaders have failed to define the term, much less identify its traits.
Does it even exist? Not every one is convinced. Few in academia are willing to speak out, and perhaps none as boldly as Miles Groth, a professor of psychology with an interest in men’s studies and health at tiny Wagner College, on Staten Island, New York.
“There isn’t a rape culture on our campuses,” Prof. Groth insists, knowing such a statement may cause controversy. He’s used to that. “The term ‘rape culture’ is unnecessarily hyperbolic. It’s meant to arouse strong feelings in people,” he says, “and it does a disservice to the issue of sexual aggression on campus as a whole.”
(snip)
The SMU report ends by recommending “mandatory University-wide programming during Orientation Week to educate around issues of consent, homophobia, transphobia, racism, colonialism, ableism and other oppressive frameworks that marginalized students and community members face daily.”
It also recommends “training on rape culture, transphobia, homophobia, sexism, racism, ableism, mental illness, Indigenous issues and other oppressive frameworks for all SMU Faculty, Staff and Administration.”
Prof. Groth says forcing all members of a college community to undergo such training, and painting all male students as potential aggressors, have negative consequences. They are causing “a crisis of enrolment” in some U.S. colleges, he maintains, and fears the same may be true in Canada. “Our colleges are haemorrhaging male students,” says Prof. Groth. Meanwhile, in the U.S., at least, “the statistics are clear. Incidents of rape have been falling for decades.”
The picture is not as sharp in Canada, where rape and sexual assault statistics are not broken down. Many feminist organizations and female support networks refer to loosely sourced data, some of which is simply inaccurate or distorted.
Search the Internet for “rape culture” on Canadian campuses, for example, and numerous descriptions and “rape facts” documents pop up, citing a passage from a 2000 book called Body Wars, by Connecticut-based clinical psychologist Margo Maine.
“In one study, over half of high school boys, and nearly half of the girls stated that rape was acceptable if the male was sexually aroused!” writes Ms. Maine, in the oft-quoted passage. “Eight percent of college men have either attempted or successfully raped. Thirty percent say they would rape if they could get away with it. When the wording was changed to ‘force a woman to have sex,’ the number jumped to 58%. Worse still, 83.5% argue that ‘some women look like they are just asking to be raped.’”
Reached in Connecticut this week, Ms. Maine acknowledged she does not know the original source of her numbers. She said she pulled some of the figures from another author’s book, published in 1988. “I don’t know if I had additional citations that somehow were dropped in production and I failed to notice at the time, or if I had another secondary source,” Ms. Maine wrote in an email to the National Post on Friday. “This is not something I can fully address right now, due to the urgent commitments of my clinical work as well as my other professional activities.”
The “one study” to which she refers in her book, and which is promulgated by so many others, simply does not exist. Worse, says the scholar responsible for some of the data which are mentioned, the Body Wars passage misrepresents his work.
(snip)
And sometimes they regurgitate inaccuracies and loaded phrases, passing them off as truths, twisting situations that call for attention and careful guidance into tangled messes that are bound to become worse.
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