Take Back the Nonsense

Feminists on campus held their annual Take Back the Night event on Thursday, April 10.

Group fights sexual assault in Take Back the Night
Take Back the Night offers an opportunity for sexual assault awareness, education at WMU
Take Back the Night has come a long way since Bailey administration, is an important event
Take Back the Night, because sexual assault affects everyone
Letter to the editor: Sam Kallen

The event received lavish publicity in th Herald and a write-up afterwards. The event is supposedly to combat rape on campus. The event sponsors' primary means of doing this is to "raise awareness" by recounting stories of sexual assault.

The promotion of the event has raised questions whether there might be another agenda. Last year, its promotion featured the claim that "one in four" women have been raped. This year, an editorial promoting the event mentioned the claim.

"I was raped. I am your sister. Cousin. Mother. Girlfriend. Wife. Classmate. Friend. Nobody wants to talk about this. But I deal with it every day." So reads one of the flyers for Take Back the Night, an annual event held by FIRE!, the sexual assault peer educators on campus, that serves to raise awareness and empower survivors of sexual assault. Considering the statistic that one in four women will experience sexual assault, as the flyer's message states, you know someone who has been raped.

The problem that often arises with the "one in four" statistic is definition: what is rape? Definitions vary to the extremes and encompass a great deal of gray area. The only way to change the confusion and gray area is to create opportunities for awareness and education. Take Back the Night is WMU's biggest annual event about sexual assault, and it is a powerful one.

The problem with the "one in four" statistic is that it is not true. The only definition of rape that makes it true is one that includes non-rape. Letter-writer Sam Kallen takes a skeptical look at the statistics.

One in four raped? According to a 1988 study by Ms. 20 to 25 percent of women will be the victims of a rape or an attempted rape in their lifetimes. At WMU, there are 12,918 females enrolled in the undergraduate program in the fall of 2007 (last semester). If it is true that one in four were raped during college, then that would be 12,900 (students) / 4 (one in four raped) / 5 (years at school) = 645.9 rapes per year or 322 per semester. Were there 300 rapes last semester? 80 rapes a month? 2.6 rapes a day? If so, we must have the most lax security force possible. It's a veritable rape-a-thon going on here at WMU.

Here are the statistics from the WMU DPS Crime Report: Forcible Sex Offenses: Total Crimes Reported: 2004 - 8, 2005 -10, 2006 - 4.

In 2006 there were 13,076 enrolled female students according to the university statistics. If it were true that there were only four reported cases of rape, then instead of a one in four statistic, we at WMU have a one in 3,269 rape rate, which is roughly 00.0305 percent. This is 161 times less than those claimed by the anti-rape promoters.

Of course, it is doubtless true that some rapes go unreported. But 99% of them?

The recent and extremely valuable article The Campus Rape Myth by Heather MacDonald explains the origin of the phony "one in four" statistic.

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.”

...

If the one-in-four statistic is correct—it is sometimes modified to “one-in-five to one-in-four”—campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. No crime, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20 or 25 percent, even over many years. The 2006 violent crime rate in Detroit, one of the most violent cities in America, was 2,400 murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants—a rate of 2.4 percent. The one-in-four statistic would mean that every year, millions of young women graduate who have suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience. Such a crime wave would require nothing less than a state of emergency—Take Back the Night rallies and 24-hour hotlines would hardly be adequate to counter this tsunami of sexual violence. Admissions policies letting in tens of thousands of vicious criminals would require a complete revision, perhaps banning boys entirely. The nation’s nearly 10 million female undergrads would need to take the most stringent safety precautions. Certainly, they would have to alter their sexual behavior radically to avoid falling prey to the rape epidemic.

None of this crisis response occurs, of course—because the crisis doesn’t exist. During the 1980s, feminist researchers committed to the rape-culture theory had discovered that asking women directly if they had been raped yielded disappointing results—very few women said that they had been. So Ms. commissioned University of Arizona public health professor Mary Koss to develop a different way of measuring the prevalence of rape. Rather than asking female students about rape per se, Koss asked them if they had experienced actions that she then classified as rape. Koss’s method produced the 25 percent rate, which Ms. then published.

Koss’s study had serious flaws. Her survey instrument was highly ambiguous, as University of California at Berkeley social-welfare professor Neil Gilbert has pointed out. But the most powerful refutation of Koss’s research came from her own subjects: 73 percent of the women whom she characterized as rape victims said that they hadn’t been raped. Further—though it is inconceivable that a raped woman would voluntarily have sex again with the fiend who attacked her—42 percent of Koss’s supposed victims had intercourse again with their alleged assailants.

That's right. The statistic comes from classifying non-rape as rape.

Angry feminists commenting on Sam Kallen's letter cited even more ridiculous statistics. "Angela Simon, WMU Doctoral Associate" claimed

It is only through facing the reality-- that far more than 1 in 4 college women , 1 in 6 women in general, and 1 in 33 men are sexually assaulted each year and that there is a culture which produces an environment in which 60% of victims don't feel comfortable reporting their experience--and in creating change that we will see progress and that we can re-create the new culture and safe environment that is needed so desperately.

That's about 3000 rapes per year at Western for those of you keeping track.

So what is the point of all this? Certainly rape is a serious issue. Why trivialize it with such bogus statistics?

What do they advocate? Rape is illegal and severely punished. There is no pro-rape lobby. Do rapists care if women hold rallies? Encouraging the reporting of genuine rapes is fine, but there is no need for bogus statistics for this.

Sam Kallen argues

Why is this a problem? Because it perpetuates anti-male propaganda. There is already enough going against us [men] without the need for women to be afraid whenever they see a man walking down the street. I am all for protection, and I am all for safety, and I am totally against rape, but I think it's important to realize the damage that a campaign chanting "One In Four" might do to men. "All men are rapists" sounds a lot to me like "all blacks are criminals." It simply isn't true.

The feminists' actions strongly suggest that they have an anti-male agenda. If "one in four" women are raped, and most rapists are friends or relatives, then something approaching one in four men are rapists. This is an outrageous slander. It suggests an anti-male, anti-American worldview, for any society that tolerated this would have to be considered evil.

Feminism is a twisted view of the world that implies hatred of men and any women who resist the feminist agenda.

Another questionable claim coming from the Take Back the Night crowd appears in this letter from Dr. Robert Wait.

Speakers and organizers of TBTN were stalked and harassed by members of anti-feminist political groups, and rumors were spread that the event would be disrupted. Participants in the event had to provide for their own protection. They were stalked even as they walked peacefully to Kanley track to commemorate sexual violence experienced by female (and male) participants.

It is hard to believe that hardcore anti-feminists would try to prevent or disrupt this event, but that's exactly what happened three years ago. The opposition to TBTN was organized and planned, and occurred with the knowledge of members of Judith Bailey's administration. Hopefully, we we'll never again see a repetition of these sorry events on this campus.

Wait doesn't bother to name these anti-feminist groups, but rumors at the time implicated the College Republicans after we pointed out that the speaker for the first Take Back the Night event was Dr. Edith Fisher. The stalking and harassing is almost certainly wholly fictitious.

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Fight Back with Poetry
Don't Bring an Umbrella to a Gunfight
Planned Parenthood Covers Up Rape
Take Back the Night
End the Campus Gun Ban