Don's Tuesday Column (Sorry, a day late)

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   12/16/2014

Sexual assault statistics, reality

If home-made desserts and camaraderie is your thing, the Tea Party Patriots meeting tonight is devoted to just such not-quite-calorie-free activity. Hey, just skip dinner and go for the stuff you normally stingily portion out. December 23^rd and 30^th meetings are cancelled.

I’d like to share some Department of Justice data on frequency of rape and sexual assaults. It goes without saying that any man, or woman for that matter, that forces themselves on an unwilling victim deserves serious prison time and a life long stain on his or her reputation. True, these perpetrators are overwhelmingly male. However, it should not be neglected that hardly a day goes by without a report showing up at Instapundit (pjmedia.com/instapundit) describing some phase of the legal process applied to a female assaulter of a minor boy or girl, either as teachers or some other figure of authority.

Each entry is preceded by the title, “Teach Women Not to Rape,” and, before someone starts throwing literary stones my way, they should spend some time perusing the actual cases and instances. This year, over 300 of those reports involved female teachers somewhere in America, a trend which reminds me that such criminal assaults were deemed newsworthy, outrageous and widely condemnable when committed by priests or Boy Scout leaders.

The DOJ statistics cover reported acts of “Completed Rape,” “Attempted Rape,” “Sexual Assault” and “Threats of Rape or Sexual Assault.” The so-called epidemic and culture of “rape” and “sexual assault” on college campuses has been publicized and used to make broad political and cultural points that many have questioned. By questioned, it is meant that the widely quoted figure of “one in five” women being assaulted sexually on campuses in America is doubtful. The now-debunked Rolling Stone story of a “gang rape” at a University of Virginia fraternity has fit the popular (at least among the media, academic and cultural left) anti-male theme.

I posted the source article, “New DOJ Data On Sexual Assaults: College Students Are Actually Less Likely To Be Victimized,” from thefederalist.com with links to the full DOJ report, on Sunday at donpolson.blogspot.com. “A new report on sexual assault released today by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) officially puts to bed the bogus statistic that one in five women on college campuses are victims of sexual assault.”

The “Average annual number” and “Rate” is provided at the “full study” link. The bottom line is that “rape” happens to 6.1 out of 1,000 female students; when you combine all four categories together, culled from 18 years of crime reports (1995 to 2013), slightly over 12 women out of 1,000 on college campuses are victims per year. To understand how wildly inflated the “one in five” figure is, just realize that equals 200 women out of 1,000—the real figure, again, is about 12. Even if they meant that in four years of college, 200 out of 1,000 women are assaulted, that would be 50 per year per thousand—still over 4 times the actual rate of incidents.

What is even more revealing is that the frequency of rape and assault on campuses is less than that for “Nonstudent women”; the raw numbers are twice as high off campus while the frequency is over 15 per 1,000. No one seems disturbed that women not in college suffer greater from what, also from DOJ figures, is a crime that has declined dramatically (by about half) since 1997.

I have also read that many such crimes are committed by “serial” offenders who have their modus down and, not unlike the accusations against Bill Cosby, show pathology and methodology. Many occurrences involve inebriation by one or both parties. In incidents at frat houses, for instance when an obviously drunk female is observed being led away, the observing “brother” is reluctant to step in, much less report and provide witness testimony against an offending fraternity brother.

I’ll not provide critics with a fat target by lecturing about the evils of alcohol consumption by young women; an inebriated woman with diminished ability to resist should be treated as a victim of self-inflicted over-indulgence, not as an opportunity for sexual exploitation. However, a basic rule for both sexes is that one’s reputation and self-respect is far easier to sustain with honor than to salvage after lost control and blacked-out memory leave one open to all manner of indefensible accusations and perfidy.

It should also be remembered that the inexcusability of violent rape has been with mankind for all of recorded civilization; so have the occurrences of false accusations of rape. I find it hypocritical for the same people and political spectrums that insist on the presumption of innocence for murder and terrorism suspects, to then say that those accused of sexual assault are assumed guilty because victims are universally truthful.

My comment on the report on CIA interrogation released by Senator Diane Feinstein: It is the most deceitful, slanted, manipulated presentation of non-fact, damaging to those protecting us from terrorists, in my memory. Since I began this column in 2005, pushing back against the lies and propaganda over this subject has been no small effort, given the Bush Derangement Syndrome that drove the accusers. For perspective, read the 7 recent (of 391) posts under the “War on terror” label at donpolson.blogspot.com.