When I visited Virginia Tech a few weeks ago, the lead story in the campus newspaper was a take-out on the supposed “campus rape culture.” The number is widely touted that 20% of women are the victims of sexual assault while at campus. My instinct is to dismiss that figure as a figment of the feminist fringe, in which transgressions of any kind, from unwanted touching to real rape, are conflated as “sexual violence.” Many incidents are fueled by the combustible combination of rampant drunkenness and the casual sex of the hook-up culture, in which all normal standards of behavior are obliterated.
That said, rape that everyone recognizes as rape does occur. One such incident, which allegedly occurred at the University of Virginia, is profiled in Rolling Stone. The story of a first year student gang raped in the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house, if accurate, is absolutely horrifying. What allegedly followed (or didn’t follow) is a travesty. Writes author Sabrina Rubin Erdely:
At UVA, rapes are kept quiet, both by students – who brush off sexual assaults as regrettable but inevitable casualties of their cherished party culture – and by an administration that critics say is less concerned with protecting students than it is with protecting its own reputation from scandal. Some UVA women, so sickened by the university’s culture of hidden sexual violence, have taken to calling it “UVrApe.”
Maybe that’s a fair take on what’s happening at UVa and other colleges, maybe it’s not. There are a lot of conservatives like me whom, I suspect, get turned off by the blather associating campus sexual violence with “patriarchal attitudes” and other such nonsense, as if society ever condoned rape as a “boys will be boys” thing to be swept under the rug. It was social conservatives, after all, who warned that the mixing of genders in college dormitories, the relaxation of visitation rules and the collapse of traditional moral values would lead to precisely the phenomenon we’re discussing today. Such fears were dismissed at the time, of course, as the hilariously antiquated thinking of prissy, tea-sipping old bitties.
But here we are. Feminists have discovered a “culture of rape” in what are arguably the most thoroughly enlightened and liberal institutions in the entire country, our colleges and universities. While I don’t think the Rolling Stone article has captured the entire truth of what’s happening on college campuses, I think it has captured part of the truth. And even that partial truth is ugly enough to take very seriously.
I would ask Virginia newspapers, why did Rolling Stone break this story, not you? If there is a campus rape epidemic on college campuses, are you going to continue to ignore it, highlighting only the cable news spectacles, like that of missing UVa student Hannah Graham, that are unrepresentative of the college experience? Conversely, if there’s not a campus rape epidemic, are you going to ignore that story, too? If the whole problem is wildly exaggerated — analogous, say, to the satanism scare of a couple decades ago — worried parents of college co-eds would like to know.
My suspicion is that there is a widespread problem but that it’s not as white-and-black as portrayed. College kids are… how shall I put this politely…. incredibly horny. The old social mores that held horniness in check have been obliterated. Concentrate thousands of males and females of the same age in a college campus, tear down the moral inhibitions against promiscuous sexuality, and dissolve inhibitions and judgment in a haze of alcohol, and you’re going to have a lot of sexual encounters, some percentage of which, in retrospect, are worthy of criminal punishment and some percentage of which participants simply regret. There is a cultural problem here. It’s not one of oppressive “patriarchy.” But it’s very real.
(Hat tip: The Nutshell by Frank Muraca. Check out Frank’s newsletter — it’s a short but punchy round-up of Virginia news, well worth reading.)
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