FEMINISM’S RAPE EPIDEMIC MYTH

There’s one chance in four a coed will be raped before she graduates from college, feminists say. Which is like saying the earth is flat, the sun revolves around it, the moon is made of camembert.

FBI data indicate "the probability that an American woman is raped in her lifetime is 2.6 percent and in college 0.2 percent," author Susan Patton and math professor Jonathan Farley wrote in an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun.

The White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault said one woman in five has been sexually assaulted while in college. Only 12 percent of student victims report the assault to law enforcement, the task force said.

It’s not possible for both of those assertions to be true, said Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute.

There were 104 reports of sexual assault at Ohio State University between 2010 and 2013, he noted. About 28,000 OSU students are women.

If only 12 percent were reported, there’d have been 867 sexual assaults during that period. The chances a coed would be sexually assaulted during four years at OSU would be about 1 in 32, not 1 in 5, Prof. Perry said. For the 1 in 5 statistic to be true, there would have to be 1,400 sexual assaults a year.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics said 64 percent of rapes and sexual assaults between 2005 and 2010 went unreported. Which gibes with the estimate of the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. That’s a lot – but a lot less than 88 percent.

A 2009 DOJ report on "The Sexual Victimization of College Women" includes as victimization "general sexist remarks made in front of you."

Victims were "raped" an average of 2.9 times in the year preceding, said the National Violence Against Women survey. They had sex with their "rapists" on subsequent occasions, said 42 percent in a 1988 Ms. Magazine survey.

In the 1985 Ms. magazine article in which the "one coed in four" myth originated, only 27 percent of the women the author counted as having been raped described themselves as rape victims.

There were 23.6 forcible rapes per 100,000 inhabitants in 2013, a 41 year low, the FBI said.

For college women, the annual rate of sexual assault is 0.61 percent, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Women aged 18 to 24 not attending college were more likely than coeds to be sexually assaulted.

Only about two percent of rape charges are false, feminists claim. That number "is very bad and should never be cited," said Bloomberg columnist Megan McArdle. It originated in Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 book, "Against Our Will." She offered no evidence to substantiate it. No study ever has, said Edward Greer in a law review article.

When Purdue sociologist Eugene Kanin studied rape accusations in a small midwestern city, he found 41 percent were false. Half the rape allegations at two large midwestern universities were bogus, he found in a subsequent study.

The DNA on the victim didn’t match that of the accused in about 25 percent of sex assault cases referred to the FBI, DOJ said in a 1996 report.

About 45 percent of rape allegations made to the Denver police department are false, said former prosecutor Craig Silverman.

Without having made any effort to verify the incendiary charge, Rolling Stone published an article accusing a fraternity at the University of Virginia of using gang rape as an initiation rite.

It’s absurd to think a fraternity would commit over and over a felony for which the perps could be jailed for life; that no fraternity member would object; that no victim would go to the police. Yet feminists embraced this noxious nonsense.

It doesn’t matter if the accusation isn’t true, some feminists said after the story fell apart, which indicates their character is as deficient as their reasoning and math skills. The worse the crime, the more vile are those who make false accusations of it.

The Rolling Stone flap shines a spotlight on how little regard feminists have for truth, facts, evidence, logic, fairness and basic human decency. It’s about time.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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