If Zachary Kane is a brutal rapist, whose fault is that? This is the central question at the heart of a lawsuit filed against Virginia Wesleyan College (VWC), which is either (a) a small Methodist college in Norfolk or (b) Rapeville, USA. Amid the nationwide furor over claims of a “campus rape epidemic” that allegedly claims 1-in-5 female college students as victims, the case presented in the $10 million Jane Doe lawsuit against VWC highlights the nature of the controversy.
Is there or is there not an “epidemic” of sexual assault on America’s college and university campuses? Consider this: The Jane Doe lawsuit against VWC includes a chart (Exhibit A) demonstrating that this small Methodist college had “the highest per-capita rate of sexual assault” of any campus in Virginia. VWC boys are on a notorious rampage in Norfolk — this is from federal data — and so, we might expect, these Methodist monsters would be perpetrating sexual assault at rates even higher than the 1-in-5 national statistic touted by President Obama and Vice President Biden, among others. Yet a look at Exhibit A in Jane Doe’s lawsuit shows that the reported per-capita rate of sexual assault at VWC in 2010 was less than 0.5%. Fewer than one in 200 VWC females reported being sexually assaulted, and this at the campus that led the entire state of Virginia in such reports.
It is impossible to reconcile this data with the 1-in-5 statistic. There were a total of six sexual assaults reported at VWC in 2010. According to U.S. News, VWC’s total enrollment is 1,459, of whom 61% (890) are female. In order to calculate the likelihood of any student being raped during her four-year college career, we must take the average number of annual rapes, multiply it by four, and then divide that number into the total female enrollment. So if 2010 was an average year for rape at VWC, then 6 times 4 equals 24, and 890 divided by 24 equals 37, so that the reported sexual assault rate at VWC is 1-in-37* — a frightening statistic, but far below the 1-in-5 rate claimed nationally. This number, keep in mind, is based on federal data for a school that led the state of Virginia in reported sexual assault cases in 2010, and as Elizabeth Nolan Brown of Reason magazine points out:
In 2011, zero sexual assaults were reported and in 2012, there were three. Virginia Wesleyan is a small school, with only about 1,300 students at any time, so that works out to a sexual assault rate of about 0.2 percent. Even making the fair assumption that there are more assaults than get reported, the picture is hardly one of a rape culture so widespread that school officials should treat every freshman female as one party away from being attacked.
However, the situation at VWC was bad enough that freshmen were specifically warned “students could be provided drinks spiked with drugs to facilitate rape,” according to Jane Doe’s lawsuit, and officials at the college “knew that female students faced an especially high risk of rape from lacrosse team members, as acknowledged by Dean [David] Buckingham.” This is exactly what the lawsuit says happened to Jane Doe, on her third day at Virginia Wesleyan in August 2012, immediately after the orientation where freshmen were warned about the risk of rape.
In alleging negligence by VWC, Jane Doe’s lawsuit points to the role played by a student “peer advisor” named Troy Katzer, who “invited numerous teenage freshman students to an on-campus party at his townhouse” where alcohol was served. According to the lawsuit, “Katzer had previously himself exhibited predatory behavior towards freshman teenage girls,” behavior that the lawsuit alleges “was known to agents of the school.” This upperclassman was assigned as a “peer advisor” and — surprise! — Jane Doe alleges she and her friends began feeling dizzy after having just one drink at the party. She ended up in the dorm room of Zachary Kane, a lacrosse player who “repeatedly and brutally raped, sodomized and forced Plaintiff to orally copulate him until she vomited, for approximately five hours,” according to the lawsuit.
In February 2013, there was a campus hearing at which Kane was found responsible for sexual assault and expelled from VWC, although subsequently the record was changed to allow Kane to “voluntarily withdraw.” Now, as part of the discovery process in Jane Doe’s lawsuit, “VWC is seeking to compel Doe to identify ‘any individuals with whom (she has) had sexual intercourse at any time and… any individuals with whom (she has) had a romantic relationship’ since the alleged assault,” Brown writes at Reason:
The school says this is necessary to determine Doe’s credibility in regard to the trauma she says she’s suffered and whether she was, as claimed in the school hearing, a virgin before the attack.
Why should Doe’s virginity matter to the case? It doesn’t per se. But Doe testified (of her own accord) during a school adjudication hearing that she had been a virgin before the rape. The college claims to now have “a good faith basis for believing” that this was not true. While her virginity or lack thereof has no bearing on whether she was raped, lying about her virginity unprovoked might not bode well for her broader credibility. The school states that “if they knew (Doe) had provided false testimony” during the hearing, campus officials may have come to a different conclusion in the original case. . . .
“Virginia Wesleyan College has carefully reviewed the facts of this unfortunate incident and the allegations in Jane Doe’s Complaint,” it said in a statement last fall. “While the College sympathizes with Jane Doe, Virginia Wesleyan denies any allegation of improper conduct and will vigorously defend this lawsuit.” . . .
“VWC acknowledges that Plaintiff’s sexual history is a sensitive subject,” the school states in its motion to compel the info. “However… Plaintiff has put her sexual history at issue by arguing she is unable to have sex, does not have any interest in sex, and has experienced difficulties in romantic relationships due to her inability to have sex and lack of interest in sex. Given the significance of these claims in a case where $10 million is at issue, VWC feels compelled to explore Plaintiff’s sexual history.”
For the record, Zachary Kane “claims the two participated in consensual sexual activity, including intercourse, for about 45 minutes. He apologized for any pain he might have caused Doe, but insisted that he was neither aware she had been drugged nor that she didn’t want to have sex with him.” Whether we believe Kane is irrelevant to the problem that concerns Elizabeth Nolan Brown, namely that college officials are not qualified to investigate rape cases:
Regardless of how this all turns out, the story already embodies everything that’s wrong with colleges handling violent assault cases. First, we have a student who feels her rape allegations were diminished by the school, causing her even more distress. Second, we have someone accused of assault whom, if innocent, was wrongly kicked out of school and branded a rapist without ever having the chance to mount a real defense and, if guilty, was merely kicked out of school and not subject to punishment, a criminal record, or any measures that may limit his ability to commit future assaults. And finally, we have a college now forced to spend time and money defending its lack of crime precognition while also dragging a former student’s sexual history into the public record. Why do so many people find this preferable to leaving rape cases to the criminal justice system?
This is the problem: Federal law (Title IX) has forced college administrators into this situation of setting up campus hearings to adjudicate sexual assault accusations in cases where no criminal charges are filed and no police investigation occurs, and where the due process of law is effectively null and void. Feminists who supported these policies in the name of “equality” now denounce the consequences of these policies, using exaggerated statistics to depict all male college students as a menace to all female students, while denouncing as “rape apologists” anyone and everyone who dares to question feminist propaganda.
ADDENDUM:
* In the comments below, John Bradley explains how I’ve miscalculated the rate. According to his math, the likelihood of a female VWC student being sexually assaulted is no more than 1-in-65, not 1-in-37.
I never understand people who sue when they have to know that, once discovery starts, their lives are going to come under a microscope.
Please pardon the slight digression from the topic of your latest post>
One thing that strikes me about feminist dialogue is the arsonist/firefighter aspect of “sex positive” rhetoric and “patriarchy” rhetoric. Young women are encouraged to be sexually licentious–for example by Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues which is an overt attempt to break down women’s modesty and sexual restraint via engineered group behavior. Ensler’s Monolgues was quite the thing on several Catholic college campuses about 10 years ago, and still persists under the rubric of “academic freedom”. Some young lady attends a performance of Ensler’s trash and then starts living as a campus harlot in order to be “liberated” (ie: liberated from the moral law, which classical sources point out is actually slavery to base passions). When said young lady has a guilty conscience abut her behavior, the Feminist-Industrial Complex is prepared with Patriarchy and “rape culture” rhetoric to then attempt to turn the young lady into a man-hating Daughter of Sapho.
did VWC have any Vagina Monologue performances or similar Feminist indoctrination while the Jane Doe was attending?
did they encourage her sexual licentiousness?
Perhaps the local Feminist campus organizations should be sued
There’s a reason Formal Logic and various Classical sources have been deliberately removed from Liberal Arts and Humanities programs and I believe it’s because these programs have become state sponsored Frankfurt School-style indoctrination programs to socially engineer the youth
As Burke said in Reflections on the Revolution in France
Lots of people seem to have Not Thinking Things Through Syndrome.
FWIW, your “chance of being raped in 4 years” calculation isn’t quite right. Assuming all numbers stay the same, then yes, the chance of any single woman being raped in any single year at Rapesville College is 6 / 890, or 0.67% or 1 in 148.
Also, we can say there’ll be 4 * 6 = 24 rapes in a 4 year period. BUT the total female student population those 24 rapes will be distributed over will not be 890, but 890 * 1.75 = 1557, as each year 25% (222) of the female student population will leave and be replaced by a new group of 222. (All numbers staying constant.)
24 / 1557 = 1.5% or 1 in 65.
Not that this is relevant to your actual point or anything, but that’s why the 1-in-37 stat seems too high.
So despite being specifically warned about the behavior earlier in the day and the potential outcomes, Doe participated in that exact behavior and experienced (per her story) the outcome which was warned about? Who would have thunk it?
Perhaps the University should just lock up the female students when not in class, for their own protection.
This youthette presumably has a mother, a father, and a lawyer. If she’s not thinking things through, they ought to be on her behalf.
Do not know what’s true re this particular case, but, re Emma Sulkowicz, it is a reasonable suspicion that a problem in that case was that mother and father had never successfully hammered into her a sense of personal agency and accountability and maybe never tried.
And it would not surprise me in the least if at the bottom of this was a pair of adults who failed to properly instruct or govern little princess. Just a guess.
You make good points. A young woman’s embrace of liberal “pro-sex” feminism is quite often the antecedent to her embrace of radical lesbian feminism, for reasons that should be obvious. If a girl pursues promiscuity in the guise of “empowerment,” she will (a) encounter men who are selfish and immature, (b) discover that, despite rhetoric about “equality,” males enjoy all the natural advantages in casual sex while females sustain most of the emotional damage, and (c) probably contract at least one sexually transmitted disease by the time she’s been with a half-dozen partners.
Promiscuity is dehumanizing and, no matter how “enlightened” it may be to pretend otherwise, men simply do not respect promiscuous women. The woman who embraces “pro-sex” feminism will therefore have the dehumanizing experience of being treated with disrespect. And as this sort of “empowerment” is promoted by the culture, disrespect for women will become generalized. As night follows day, then, there is always a backlash of radical “anti-sex” feminism, invariably accompanied by a surge of lesbian activism. The worse men treat women, the more women will wish to avoid men. Lesbian feminists know this, and are always willing to take advantage of the harms produced by “liberated” sexual culture. Guys slipping girls roofies are basically recruiting for Team Lesbo.
The simple answer is that lay people don’t know that. It’s up to lawyers to tell them and, alas, many lawyers do not for various reasons. Inexperience, incompetence or a belief that they as attorneys can hide stuff. It rarely works out well, and I speak from the experience of defending personal injury cases for thirty years. I’ve lost count of the number of plaintiffs who will testify under oath about past medical history where their testimony is directly contradicted by medical records which I have. The good news, is that provides comic relief during the trial when I get to confront them with it.
“Discovery is a bitch.”
This is the first thing any honest lawyer will tell you, if you ask him about filing a lawsuit.
Seek help immediately for an erection lasting more than four hours . . . .
The problem is whether VWU really had any knowledge of Mr Katzer’s alleged previous behavior, and what role the school had in assigning him as a “peer advisor.” If VWU had any clues that Mr Katzer might not be a fine upstanding young man, then there is a real legal liability in assigning him to any such functions. And how, exactly, did the school permit a “peer advisor” to host a party for underaged students at which alcohol was available?
The veracity of Miss Doe’s story might be in question, but if the points about Mr Katzer are correct, the school fouled up, big time.
Really, we need to go back to a Victorian system of chaperones for these college girls. Elizabeth Nolan Brown makes the point that it is not “blaming the victim” to say that the victim’s behavior was foolish. Clearly, the responsibility for crime belongs with the criminal, but this does not mean we should not take reasonable precautions for our own safety.
My general rule at social occasions is to drink only beer in a bottle, and to count the number I’ve drank, striving never to exceed the “two-beer buzz” stage. Mixed drinks are always a hazard, because (a) you can’t tell how much alcohol is in a drink, and (b) mixed drinks are usually 8 oz. whereas a beer is 12 oz., so that if you’re thirsty, you’re going to actually drink more mixed drinks than you would if you were drinking beer.
Oh, and why beer in a bottle? Well, sometimes drunk people like to fight, and you never know when the “Puerto Rican switchblade” might come in handy. I guess it’s silly to be thinking of defending myself with the jagged edge of a broken beer bottle while I’m at a D.C. cocktail reception, but one must be prepared for every contingency. You never know when those neocons might decide to make their move …
Really, we need to go back to a Victorian system of chaperones for these college girls.
Or dispose of residential colleges unless they’re single-sex and have curfews (as did the schools my parents attended ca. 1950).
A more realistic solution might be to promote commuter schools, promote the replacement of the baccalaureate degree with briefer programs covering a single subject or vocation, and promote the practice of part-time schooling while working as bog standard. Do you ever hear of these disasters happening at places like Long Island University?
“Puerto Rican switchblade?” That’s racist, and I thoroughly denounce you!
The plaintiff in this case is attempting to present a rather straightforward claim of negligent failure to protect from a known risk of criminal activity. This claim is usually brought against a public venue–think fast food restaurant–which has a history of assaults or crime on its premises but refuses to hire security. In this case, however, the plaintiff is attempting to conflate that cause of action with one for negligently failing to supervise and/or a tort claim against the university under a respondeat superior theory for the actions of the student peer adviser.
There are a lot of problems with this approach. With the first claim, it applies only to general activity and not persons. Other than warning students to be vigilant, there’s not much a university can do to protect students who are off campus.
With respect to the supervision claim, the university must have the authority and power to change the bad actor’s behavior. Think parents and children or employers and employees while on the job. Again, this happened off campus. Under what theory of law does the university impose its authority outside its confines? Further, the bad acts, if any, on the part of peer adviser did not occur during the discharge of his official duties, but “off the clock.”
Methinks, this case has a long uphill battle for the plaintiff, discovery issues notwithstanding.
Dude, we’ve even heard about some bad stuff at the United States Naval Academy.
The problem with this argument is that, if the university assigned or recommended Mr Katzer as a “peer advisor,” they introduced him to the freshmen girls, and implied that he was someone who could be trusted. If the school had any knowledge of Mr Katzer having engaged in prior misconduct, as the lawsuit alleges, the school is on the hook.
Virginia Wesleyan is a private school where tuition is about $33,000 a year. At nearby Old Dominion University, a state school, in-state tuition is less than $10,000. We might surmise, therefore, that Virginia Wesleyan is a party school for rich kids, and that the administration turns a blind eye to underage drinking because this attitude is part of the “campus atmosphere” students are paying for.
If you pay attention to this “rape epidemic” narrative, you notice a pattern. Complaints seem to cluster disproportionately at so-called “elite” schools. Why? Perhaps because students at these schools come from privileged backgrounds.
Both male and female students at an “elite” school are likely to have a certain sense of entitlement, so that the males expect women to treat them with deference and vice-versa. Meanwhile, at the big state universities, there may or may not be less sexual assault, but there are more women with the kind of common-sense attitude that says, if you don’t want to get drunk, don’t go to the party, and if you don’t want to have sex, don’t go to a guy’s dorm room after the party.
But I suppose “common sense” is now hate.
My hunch is that VWC will ultimately settle this case out of court. They’re playing hardball in discovery because Jane Doe’s lawyer didn’t accept their first offer to settle.
Does VWC want this to go to a jury trial? No. No, they certainly don’t. Therefore, the bottom line is, what are they willing to pay?
Jane Doe has them by the short hairs, and their next offer to settle had better be a very generous offer. No way she’s gonna let them off the hook for less than a million.
I don’t understand this, but then again, “Mathematics for Journalists” is a sort of continuing education course.
Is the alleged rapist a recruited scholarship athlete? If so, then the argument can be made that Virginia Wesleyan bears responsibility form having this alleged rapist on campus in the first place.
You might find that a specious argument, but you never can tell what a jury will do.
We might surmise, therefore, that Virginia Wesleyan is a party school for rich kids,
It’s quite unselective. We might surmise it’s plan B for youngsters who failed in efforts to be admitted to state schools.
I’ve lost the reference, but if I’m not mistaken, there is not much of an economic distinction between the clientele of state schools and that of rank-and-file private colleges. It’s just that the students at the state schools got better grades and test scores. Private universities (e.g. Emory) and private colleges with a certain amount of cachet (e.g. Davidson) do not account for more than a third of the enrollment of private institutions generally.
I think you’d have to scrounge like mad to find a case of an academic institution ever allowing itself to be subject to a jury trial.
We’re all here to help Stacy 😉
According to an article at The Cavalier Daily (UVA’s student paper?):
The student said neither the nurse nor the school counselor she met with a few weeks after the assault provided any information on how to report the rape to the school or to the police.
Questions:
1) Did this woman ever file criminal charges against the alleged rapist with the police? If not, why not?
2) Where in the hell were this girl’s parents during all this???
I too am mystified by the 1.75 factor, but I think you and RSM ask different questions. I get the same answer as RSM if I pose the question as that of placing the odds of at least one rape reported over a four year period given an annual incidence rate of 6 per 890 = 1-in-148 = p. Then 1 – p is the probability of no rapes in one year and (1 – p)^4 that of no rapes over a four year period ~ 97.3%, and 1 – 97.3% ~ 1-in-37.5 gives the probability of at least one rape over the same period. This agrees with RSM’s calculation due to p being small compared to 1, i.e., (1 – p)^4 ~ 1 – 4 * p.
When all they were doing was kicking a potentially innocent kid out of school and ruining his life, they were cool with taking her for word on everything and not asking any hard questions. But now that they’re at risk, everything is fair game.
I haven’t been able to find the statistic to document it for years, but back during the arguments before the University of Michigan Affirmative Action cases, I read the statistic that 85% of colleges in the United States have open admissions; anyone who meets some basic standards and applies is admitted.
Um,,, a college student doesn’t know or can’t figure out how to call the police without directions from someone else?
Really? Mommy & daddy never showed her how to dial 9-1-1?
“The student said neither the nurse nor the school counselor she met with a few weeks after the assault …”
What? “… she met with a few weeks after the assault …”
????
Our host assumed:
I wouldn’t take that assumption at all: Virginia Wesleyan is a Methodist college, and much smaller than ODioUs.
I lived in the Hampton Roads area for 15 years, and it is about as atypical a collegiate area as I have ever seen. It’s a very populous area, but has no “prestige” colleges at all. Hampton University and Norfolk State are traditionally black colleges within twenty miles of each other, and ODU is next to the Norfolk Marine Terminal; not exactly a great place.
The “prestige” colleges in Virginia start with William & Mary, and work their way west.
You see people in real lives willingly walk into traps. They just pretend it is not real (till it is).
https://twitter.com/MsEBL/status/632282135177465857
U.S. News has the numbers, and, no, that’s atypical. In Upstate New York, you’d be hard put to find a private college which does not reject at least 20% of its applicants. For the state colleges, rejection rates are higher. For the state schools, rejection rates exceed 40% quite reliably.
Of course, the raw rejection rate can be misleading as people may be discouraged from entering the applicant pool to begin with. Some of the junk colleges in the CUNY system have surprisingly high rejection rates (and a large bloc of students who never finish).
William and Mary’s in the Tidewater, just not in the thick of it.
If I understand right, the main division today in Virginia is between research and teaching institutions with Virginia Tech, UVa, Mason, Old Dominion, and now William and Mary in the former category and the rest in the latter category, and most in the former acquiring that status only in recent decades. William and Mary used to be a sort of honors college and it’s still small as a research institution goes. UVa may still have the most cachet, but it’s really Mason which is the flagship institution.
https://twitter.com/MsEBL/status/632292919169257472
I disagree on two counts, your calculation and the question answered.
First, I think you answered the wrong question. What matters is a girl’s odds of being raped in her four years there, not her odds of being raped in a given set of four calendar years.
Second, in any given four years, the freshman at the beginning will be there for four years, then the sophomores for three, then two and one for the juniors and seniors. That adds up to ten years, divided by the four cohorts, equals 2.5 average years on campus per girl in those four years.
Or, you could have gotten the same number by considering the average of a four-sided die, since that is essentially what we’re talking about.
FWIW I disagree with both of you, albeit for different reasons. I think that you chose a poor premise (“if 2010 was an average year for rape at VWC”) and should use an actual recent four-year total instead.
Short answer is $$$$$$.
I think the key phrase is “meets basic standards” which I interpret to mean meets the GPA and ACT/SAT requirements, In my state there are 12 public four year colleges and universities. Three of those are “selective” –the state flagship university, the STEM university and the dedicated liberal arts university–but that selectivity is reflected in the entrance requirements. Any state resident who meets those requirements is admitted.
Ethnocentric.
“[F]emale students faced an especially high risk of rape from lacrosse team members[.]” Why does this seem familiar?
When I was in the Navy, ODU was anything but a research university. Having said that, most universities expect their faculty to engage in research. It may have been pushed into that category in the last 20 years, but it’s going to overshadowed by Tech and UVA by quite a bit. It’s in the same category as Tennessee Tech. A teaching university that does some research.
Norfolk state was almost forced to merge with ODU during the 70s. The NMT must have expanded quite a lot to put ODU next to it. I think they did combine some programs as the state saw no reason to maintain two colleges across town from each other simply because NS had been a traditionally black school. I took a Calculus and English course there the summer of ’75 and it wasn’t a bad place to go at the time. They had standards they upheld and my Comp instructor actually made a point of telling students they weren’t in for an easy time. It was the equal of any of the courses I had at Volunteer State or Tennessee Tech.
The Calc instructor was a German and was simply a weird man. He knew his stuff, though and didn’t brook laziness for any of the students.
None of the state “Wesleyans” are prestige schools. They exist mainly to prepare minsters and offer other majors mostly to be able to maintain the ministry programs. They aren’t cheap, but such schools are not cheap to operate and most are in the lower cost range of private schools.
AKA “The Monastery on the Servern.” Or the USMA sometimes called “South Hudson Institute of Technology.”
Let’s make a couple of assumptions: that 6 rapes a year is a constant and the female population of 890 is constant. That boils down to a 0.67% chance of a given girl being raped in one year, or a 2.6% chance of being raped in 4 years as the probabilities are additive over that period.
0.67% is the chance for at least one incident among a population of 890. The chance of it happening to “a given girl” is much smaller than that. If for the sake of argument, we were to agree that each member of that population has an equal probability of being victimized, which is clearly not the case, then the probability for a “given girl” in one year is .075%.
That requires an assumption which isn’t reasonable. In my assumptions the “given girl” could be any one of them.
And, it is true that the probability is different for every girl, but that is dependent upon the acts of the individual. The reality is that any computation of probability in this case requires some assumptions and the probability of any one girl being raped is simply impossible to compute in reality.
It is not unreasonable if you’re interested in a baseline, average likelihood for one girl to be attacked, which is all that can be done with reported incidence numbers. Such a likelihood (or probability) increases or decreases depending on the risky behavior of the individual – the principal theme in RSM’s posts.
Gotta watch out for us Methodists, we’re a randy bunch !
I think the “1-37” odds is incorrect because:
An individuals odds of an event happening to them is based primarily on their own actions.
Meaning the odds are much higher for girls that get drunk around college age “men.”