Wash. Post ‘s George Will: Sexual Assault Victim Is Now A “Coveted Status”
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on June 8th, 2014 11:08 pm by HL
Wash. Post ‘s George Will: Sexual Assault Victim Is Now A “Coveted Status”
Fox News contributor and Washington Post columnist George Will derided efforts on college campuses to combat the sexual assault epidemic as a ploy to “make victimhood a coveted status that confers privilege.”
In a June 7 syndicated op-ed which appeared in The Washington Post and the New York Post, Will dismissed “the supposed campus epidemic of rape, aka ‘sexual assault,'” arguing that the definition of sexual assault was too broad because it could include “nonconsensual touching” and disputing the evidence that shows 1 in 5 women experience sexual assault on campuses in the U.S., implying that individuals were pretending to be victims because colleges have made victimhood a “coveted status” (emphasis added):
Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating.
They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous (“micro-aggressions,” often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.
[…]
Now the Obama administration is riding to the rescue of “sexual assault” victims. It vows to excavate equities from the ambiguities of the hookup culture, this cocktail of hormones, alcohol and the faux sophistication of today’s prolonged adolescence of especially privileged young adults.
The administration’s crucial and contradictory statistics are validated the usual way, by official repetition; Joe Biden has been heard from. The statistics are: One in five women is sexually assaulted while in college, and only 12% of assaults are reported. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12% reporting rate is correct, the 20% assault rate is preposterous.
[…]
Education Department lawyers disregard pesky arithmetic and elementary due process. Threatening to withdraw federal funding, the department mandates adoption of a minimal “preponderance of the evidence” standard when adjudicating sexual assault charges between males and the female “survivors” — note the language of prejudgment.Combine this with capacious definitions of sexual assault that can include not only forcible sexual penetration but also nonconsensual touching. Then add the doctrine that the consent of a female who has been drinking might not protect a male from being found guilty of rape. Then comes costly litigation against institutions that have denied due process to males they accuse of what society considers serious felonies.
Will also criticized colleges and universities for attempting “to create victim-free campuses — by making everyone hypersensitive, even delusional, about victimization.”
Despite Will’s dismissal of the statistics, a report on sexual violence by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) confirmed that “in a study of undergraduate women, 19% experienced attempted or completed sexual assault since entering college.” Moreover, the dangerous stigmatization of sexual assault victims has kept many from reporting these crimes — particularly because victims who do report can become the targets of vicious attacks. According to the FBI, people falsely report sexual assault only 3 percent of the time.
