Politics, Rape, Women's Issues

Radical Feminism And The So-Called 'Rape Epidemic'

For the college-age male accused of sexual assault, it’s “guilty until proven innocent,” where the blameless are sacrificed at the ideological altar of radical feminism.

By  
on

Ed. note: This is the second essay by new columnist Kayleigh McEnany, who will be writing about law and politics from a conservative perspective. In case you missed it, you can read her first post here.

“Innocent until proven guilty.” The serial killer. The terrorist. The pedophile. All are accorded the presumption of innocence with the exception of one: the college-age male accused of sexual assault. Unfortunately for him, it’s “guilty until proven innocent,” where the blameless are sacrificed at the ideological altar of radical feminism.

Devoid of facts and eager to add renewed vigor to their flailing movement, the rabid feminists loudly proclaim and denounce the so-called “rape epidemic” on college campuses, all the while ignoring the “justice epidemic” they have created. At the hand of feminists, college campuses are quickly becoming microcosms of injustice – where no rape accusation is a false accusation and all men are guilty by virtue of their gender.

At the helm of this mob justice is none other than Hillary Clinton, who issued a battle cry to her feminist sisters on Twitter last month: “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.”

Heard? Absolutely. Believed and supported? That’s for a court to determine.

Nonetheless, these are ironic words indeed from a woman whose husband was Sexual Assaulter-In-Chief. See Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, and Kathleen Willey.

Sponsored

But perhaps Clinton is more of a hypocrite than a feminist. For the same woman avidly urging us to “hear, believe, and support” accusers was herself doing just the opposite when she disparaged a 12-year-old survivor of sexual assault in the course of representing the young girl’s alleged rapist.

Clinton wrote this in the affidavit:

I have been informed that the complainant is emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and engage in fantasizing. I have also been informed that she has in the past made false accusations about persons, claiming they had attacked her body. Also that she exhibits an unusual stubbornness and temper when she does not get her way.

The victim has dismissed all such allegations as false.

Thanks to Clinton’s valiant efforts, accused rapist Thomas Alfred Taylor struck a plea deal, sentencing him to one year in county jail rather than the 30 years to life in prison for which he was eligible. Clinton can be found laughingly acknowledging her client’s guilt here. Chuckling, she says: “He took a lie detector test. I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs.”

Sponsored

The 12-year-old was not “heard, believed, and supported” by Hillary; rather, in her own words, she was taken “through hell.”  Though Clinton might be a faux feminist, there are many purists in the movement to pick up the slack.

In a shockingly tone-deaf article entitled Institutionalized Rape: It’s Not just an ISIS Problem, Amy Lauricella, an attorney at Global Rights for Women, writes: “ISIS’ treatment of Yazidi women as sexual slaves may seem far removed from fraternity or athletic team members’ treatment of women as sexual objects for conquest, however the results are distressingly similar.”

As absurd and insensitive as comparing the college co-ed to the Yazidi sex slave may be, this same radical mentality is the animating principle fueling the justice epidemic on college campuses. The rhetoric of Clinton and the radical feminists is supplemented by the actions of the White House, which repeatedly states, “[O]ne in five women is sexually assaulted while in college.”

To address this purported epidemic, Obama’s Department of Education issued a list of new mandates for schools in dealing with sexual assault that effectively tip the scale in favor of the accuser. Indeed, 28 Harvard Law School professors have publicly rejected several of the policy changes as inconsistent with due process.

Ironically, the “justice epidemic” spurred by feminist rhetoric and the White House mandates found its impetus in the “rape epidemic,” which itself is more ideological than factual.

Take the White House’s claim that “one in five women is sexually assaulted while in college.” This number is taken from a 2007 Internet-based survey entitled The Campus Sexual Assault Survey. The White House repeatedly touts this number as the impulse behind its aggressive move to change college campus sexual assault procedures, but it fails to mention this study is far from scientific. The Washington Post’s Politifact warned, “[R]eaders should be aware that this oft-cited statistic comes from a Web-based survey of two large universities, making it problematic to suggest that it is representative of the experience of all college women.”

Moreover, feminists say repeatedly that false rape accusations compose just 2 percent of all rape reports, and yet we are inundated with a slew of high-profile false rape cases: the Duke Lacrosse case, Lena Dunham’s accusations, Rolling Stone’s slanderous allegations against a UVA fraternity, and the Columbia University “mattress case.” The seemingly endless anecdotal accounts of false accusations should prompt even the cursory observer to take a closer look at this “2 percent number” splashed across headlines.

As Bloomberg points out, “The number of false accusations is what statisticians call a ‘dark number’—that is, there is a true number, but it is unknown, and perhaps unknowable,” a conclusion that is easily verified by looking at the methodology of the study which produced the 2 percent figure.

First, the study only counts a rape allegation as false if it is demonstrably false, evidenced by an alibi or an accuser recanting the claim. It does not count cases where there was insufficient evidence to bring charges, which might very well prove to be false, thus making the false accusation statistic higher.

According to National Review, of the 98 percent of cases counted as credible rape charges in the study, only 35.3 percent of those actually led to discipline of the accuser. This leaves 62.7 percent of rape allegations counted as credible in a very questionable, gray area, and raises the following question: how many of these cases involved false accusations, where there was simply not enough evidence to prove they were false? Due to methodological limitations, we will never know. We are nonetheless encouraged by activists to treat them all as credible, to assume the 2 percent number is entirely accurate, and, quite remarkably, to use this number as compelling justification for depriving the accused of procedural safeguards.

The highly questionable statistical evidence undergirding the rape epidemic becomes particularly troublesome when coupled with the dismissive attitude attached to false accusations. Attorney Zerlina Maxwell describes the aftermath of a false accusation this way: “The accused would have a rough period. He might be suspended from his job; friends might defriend him on Facebook… [But] errors can be undone… Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.”

On the contrary, vindicating the claims of the sexually assaulted and ensuring that rapists are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law is equally as important as the accused receiving due process of law. Indeed, the American criminal justice system rests on this very notion.

Earlier: A Year After Ferguson Burned

Kayleigh McEnany is a conservative writer and commentator who appears regularly on Fox and CNN. She is currently in the third year of pursuing her J.D. at Harvard Law School. Kayleigh graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and also studied politics at Oxford University. You can reach her by email at Kayleigh@PoliticalProspect.com or follow her on Twitter: @kayleighmcenany.

Topics

, , , , , , , , , , ,