The feminist discourse surrounding “rape culture,” particularly on college and university campuses, claimed that sexual assault was so prevalent as to suggest all men were complicit. University administrators imposed mandatory “consent training” as part of student orientation, male students were demonized as predatory monsters, and subjected to a systematic denial of due-process rights in tribunals where the mere accusation of sexual misconduct was taken as proof of guilt. Inciting a climate of fear (and anti-male prejudice) among impressionable college girls created what K.C. Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr. called The Campus Rape Frenzy, the focal point of a feminist narrative of harassment, misogyny, objectification, etc. Every form of male misbehavior was added to an indictment in which everything and anything a man did wrong was construed as part of the overall system of heteropatriarchal oppression, of which rape was the conclusive proof of universal male guilt.
Intelligent observers could see how politics was controlling this narrative, principally as a result of The White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, launched in January 2014. Obama administration officials partnered with feminist groups to sponsor campus activism that inspired such travesties as the “Mattress Girl” protest at Columbia University and the University of Virginia rape hoax. Central to this “rape culture” propaganda were two claims:
- That sexual assault on university campuses was an “epidemic” — an emergency, a crisis — requiring drastic intervention;
and
- Approximately 20% of female students — 1-in-5 — were raped during their undergraduate years.
These remarkable claims attracted critical scrutiny, and were rather swiftly debunked by competent researchers. In fact, data from the federal Justice Department showed that the rate of sexual assault had significantly decreased since the mid-1900s, and the female students ages 18-24 were actually less likely to be victims of rape than non-students in the same age group. So there was no “epidemic” of sexual assault on campus, and as for the “1-in-5” statistic (promoted by Joe Biden, among others), analysis of available reports indicted that this was at least a tenfold exaggeration. It is certainly a bad thing if 1-in-50 female students are victims of rape, but to exaggerate this number to 1-in-5 is dishonest and irresponsible. Yet those who called attention to the actual facts about sexual assault on campus — including Ashe Schow and Christina Hoff Sommers — were attacked by feminists, who denounced them as “rape apologists.” Anyone who disputed the feminist narrative was treated as persona non grata in academia and journalism.
My own cynical suspicion was that the “campus rape epidemic” narrative had been orchestrated for a particular partisan purpose, i.e., to “energize” female voters in crucial 2014 mid-term elections (when Democrats were defending their Senate majority) and also to prepare the ground for Hillary Clinton’s widely anticipated 2016 presidential campaign.
What struck me as most suspicious about feminist “rape culture” claims (beyond the politically convenient timing of this crusade) was that they contradicted what we know about crime in general. Academic achievement is inversely correlated with violent crime, which is to say, the higher a young person’s SAT score, the less likely they are to commit assault, robbery, murder or rape. While this doesn’t mean that valedictorians never commit crime, or that all criminals are low-IQ dimwits, the general pattern is quite clear. Given this well-known fact, how could it be that male university students — the “best and brightest” of America’s young men — were perpetrating sexual assault with such frequency as to constitute a rape “epidemic”? And there was something else apparent in the feminist narrative circa 2014: The high-profile cases cited by activists, and the loudest outcry against “rape culture,” tended to be on elite university campuses, which are most selective in their admissions policies. This alleged “epidemic” didn’t seem to be happening at second-tier state schools, but rather at prestigious (and extraordinarily expensive) private universities like Columbia, Brown and Yale. Again, this would seem to contradict what we know about violent crime in general. Americans were expected to believe that our 18-year-old daughters were in more danger of rape at Harvard or Stanford than they would be in West Baltimore or the South Bronx.
There was something else missing from the narrative:
An Obama-era subsidy for clearing rape kit backlogs, combined with DNA testing, has completely upended the conventional wisdom on rapists and how they commit their crimes.
The first insight is that serial rapists are very common and very prolific. Police departments had assumed that rapes with different types of victims and different techniques were committed by different men, but it turns out that serial rapists aren’t meticulous and careful repeaters of patterns: they’re chaotic and impatient and even if they’re looking for a specific kind of woman to attack, if they can’t find someone who matches their desires, they’ll just attack any handy woman.
So rapists also aren’t very smart about their crimes: their poor impulse control leaves behind plenty of physical evidence that can be used to convict them (Former Cuyahoga County prosecutor Tim McGinty: “These are not the Napoleons of crime. They’re morons. We were letting morons beat us”). . . .
They’re also not discriminating as to the kind of crimes they commit: as the old rape kits are subjected to DNA tests, we’re learning that many men who’ve been committed for petty property crimes or non-sexual assaults have also committed strings of rapes. . . .
Finally, though stranger rape is very rare (most rape survivors are assaulted by acquaintances), these rapists also frequently assault strangers: “When Cleveland investigators uploaded the DNA from the acquaintance-rape kits, they were surprised by how often the results also matched DNA from unsolved stranger rapes.”
Well, I don’t know whose “conventional wisdom” is being debunked here, because this data confirm everything I already knew about criminals. Of course, the typical rapist is not very smart; of course, the same criminals who commit rape also commit other types of crime; of course, sexual violence is mostly committed by men with “poor impulse control.”
Most of all, of course a disproportionate number of rapes are committed by serial offenders. This well-known fact was ignored or downplayed during the “campus rape epidemic” hysteria that erupted in 2014. Over and over, our attention was called to “he-said/she-said” incidents on university campuses, usually involving freshmen or sophomores (i.e., 18- or 19-year-olds) who were heavily intoxicated at the time of a sexual encounter which subsequently resulted in an accusation that the drunk female student hadn’t been fully consenting to whatever the drunk male student had done. Sometimes these accusations happened many months after the incident; in more than one case, a male student on the verge of graduation was expelled because of a boozy hookup that happened his sophomore year. Such cases were alarming to anyone familiar with American college life. If it’s “rape” every time two drunk teenagers have sex on campus, well, you’re gonna have to expel a whole lot of students.
Almost without exception, the male students in these “he-said/she-said” drunken hookup situations were accused only once, and had no other criminal history; that is to say, without regard to whether we believed any specific accusation in such a scenario, there was seldom any reason to believe that the accused student was a serial sexual predator. Yet in response to the Obama administration’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, universities had enacted procedures that reversed the “presumed innocent” standard (which would have been extended to any criminal suspect in a court of law) and treated accusations as tantamount to proof of guilt, so that male students were expelled on the basis of star-chamber proceedings reminiscent of the Inquisition or the Salem witch trials.
When we consider what can be learned from DNA testing of rape kits about patterns of criminal behavior, we see that repeat offenders — who typically commit a variety of crimes, not just sexual assault — are responsible for a disproportionate percentage of all rapes, a crime which the vast majority of men never commit in their lives.
What is true of rape in general is also likely true of rape on university campuses. Contrary to all the “no means no” lectures and all the demonizing anti-male rhetoric of feminists, very few male university students pose any real danger to their female classmates. Instead, most of the rape risk on campus involves a small number of male students — a single-digit percentage — who exhibit personality traits (“chaotic and impatient . . . poor impulse control”) typical of rapists in general.
Last year, the city of Detroit finished DNA testing on a backlog of more than 10,000 rape kits: “So far, the kits have led to the conviction of 130 sex offenders. They’ve led to the identification of more than 800 suspected serial sex offenders alleged to have committed sex crimes across 40 states.” Among the serial rapists convicted:
- Reginald Holland: Serving a life sentence; abducted and raped four women before being identified through DNA testing.
- Shelly Andre Brooks: Serving a life sentence; raped and murdered seven women.
- Gabriel Cooper: Serving a sentence of 30-70 years; raped three women.
- Eric Eugene Wilkes: Serving a sentence of 32-75 years; raped four women.
- Deshawn Starks: Serving a sentence of 45-90 years; raped four women.
In case you lost count, that’s 22 rapes by five perpetrators, but none of them were Yale-educated Catholic Republicans, so don’t expect to read about these serial rapists in the New York Times.
