‘It’s a lonely job, working the phones at a college rape crisis center…you wait for the casualties to show up but no one calls’

“It’s a lonely job, working the phones at a college rape crisis center. Day after day, you wait for the casualties to show up from the alleged campus rape epidemic—but no one calls. Could this mean that the crisis is overblown? No: it means, according to the campus sexual-assault industry, that the abuse of coeds is worse than anyone had ever imagined. It means that consultants and counselors need more funding to persuade student rape victims to break the silence of their suffering…

“The campus rape industry’s central tenet is that one-quarter of all college girls will be raped or be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years (completed rapes outnumbering attempted rapes by a ratio of about three to two). The girls’ assailants are not terrifying strangers grabbing them in dark alleys but the guys sitting next to them in class or at the cafeteria.”

Heather Mac Donald’s recent column What campus rape crisis? Promiscuity and hype have created a phony epidemic at colleges (2/24/08) debunks the commonly propagated myth that one out of every four or five college women will be victims of rape or attempted rape. I don’t agree with everything she says about modern college sex culture or the rape research, but her central premise–that a fake rape crisis has been whipped up against hapless, ever-vilified college boys–is correct.

Many of her arguments aren’t new–Christina Hoff Sommers, Warren Farrell, Wendy McElroy, myself, and others all covered this issue from a similar angle years ago. But Mac Donald does update us on the issue, as well as bringing out some other interesting tidbits about modern campus life.

Predictably, the ladies at www.Feministing.com have responded with boiling rage and obscenities, without attempting to factually critique Mac Donald’s research and arguments. The Feministing blog post is LA Times: What rape crisis?

I make the following offer–if anybody at www.feministing.com or any other feminist has written or would like to write a critique of Mac Donald’s article, I will publish it here. If anyone would like to take me up on this, please contact me at glenn@glennsacks.com.

Below is a excerpt from and a link to the long version of Mac Donald’s article as it originally appeared in City Journal (1/18/08)

The Campus Rape Myth
The reality: bogus statistics, feminist victimology, and university-approved sex toys
Heather Mac Donald
City Journal, 1/18/08

It’s a lonely job, working the phones at a college rape crisis center. Day after day, you wait for the casualties to show up from the alleged campus rape epidemic—but no one calls. Could this mean that the crisis is overblown? No: it means, according to the campus sexual-assault industry, that the abuse of coeds is worse than anyone had ever imagined. It means that consultants and counselors need more funding to persuade student rape victims to break the silence of their suffering.

The campus rape movement highlights the current condition of radical feminism, from its self-indulgent bathos to its embrace of ever more vulnerable female victimhood. But the movement is an even more important barometer of academia itself. In a delicious historical irony, the baby boomers who dismantled the university’s intellectual architecture in favor of unbridled sex and protest have now bureaucratized both. While women’s studies professors bang pots and blow whistles at antirape rallies, in the dorm next door, freshman counselors and deans pass out tips for better orgasms and the use of sex toys. The academic bureaucracy is roomy enough to sponsor both the dour antimale feminism of the college rape movement and the promiscuous hookup culture of student life. The only thing that doesn’t fit into the university’s new commitments is serious scholarly purpose.

The campus rape industry’s central tenet is that one-quarter of all college girls will be raped or be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years (completed rapes outnumbering attempted rapes by a ratio of about three to two). The girls’ assailants are not terrifying strangers grabbing them in dark alleys but the guys sitting next to them in class or at the cafeteria.

This claim, first published in Ms. magazine in 1987, took the universities by storm. By the early 1990s, campus rape centers and 24-hour hotlines were opening across the country, aided by tens of millions of dollars of federal funding. Victimhood rituals sprang up: first the Take Back the Night rallies, in which alleged rape victims reveal their stories to gathered crowds of candle-holding supporters; then the Clothesline Project, in which T-shirts made by self-proclaimed rape survivors are strung on campus, while recorded sounds of gongs and drums mark minute-by-minute casualties of the “rape culture.” A special rhetoric emerged: victims’ family and friends were “co-survivors”; “survivors” existed in a larger “community of survivors.”

An army of salesmen took to the road, selling advice to administrators on how to structure sexual-assault procedures, and lecturing freshmen on the “undetected rapists” in their midst. Rape bureaucrats exchanged notes at such gatherings as the Inter Ivy Sexual Assault Conferences and the New England College Sexual Assault Network. Organizations like One in Four and Men Can Stop Rape tried to persuade college boys to redefine their masculinity away from the “rape culture.” The college rape infrastructure shows no signs of a slowdown. In 2006, for example, Yale created a new Sexual Harassment and Assault Resources and Education Center, despite numerous resources for rape victims already on campus. (more…)

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