By David
R. Usher
August 29, 2014
NewsWithViews.com
Rape has always been an issue everyone takes seriously. Feminist liberals have long used visceral imagery of rape (and domestic violence) as power tools to enact unconstitutional welfare, divorce, property confiscation, and now gun control laws. This Edwardian Witch hunt runs much of our family and criminal law systems.
Conservatives thought it silly when liberals said “the personal is the political”. We missed the unstated second half of this sucker punch. Liberals followed through by transforming the political into the personal and enacting it in federal law.
Existing rape and domestic violence policies harm thousands of individuals, behind closed doors, one at a time, and nobody knows. Most of us do notice that feminist claims are ridiculous, but pay no attention until they end up behind closed doors.
Feminists crank out volumes of shoddy unscientific surveys overwhelming the occasional but more accurate reporting by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Here is a fine example. One in five campus women are not raped in college, but a lot of them later regret hooking up with some guy after a party. This is not news to anyone who went to college.
Rape is in fact a shrinking problem. Scurrilous reports of rape are the real epidemic. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 2003 and 2012, rape victimization actually declined by about 82% (Table 4). Feminist-aligned researchers in the CDC highlighted a 49% increase in “reported” rapes in 2011-2012, but actual victimization rates did not change (Table 9).
Between 40% and 80% of rape allegations are false or unfounded. 1/3 of DNA tests prove the alleged assailant was not involved. One conservative study of adjudicated cases found that 27% of rape allegations were false. These facts prove that rape allegations are frequently false and that a high number of invalid cases are brought to trial by aggressive prosecutors.
Feminists hollering “fire” in every theater has de-legitimized rape to the point where courts, police, prosecutors, and colleges expect many allegations to be worthless. A confused and overwhelmed system misses some good cases while prosecuting poor innocent men defended by pro-bono attorneys. The lucky innocents later see their convictions reversed by the Innocence Project after spending decades in prison.
College campuses are ground zero for today’s iatrogenic rape-power agenda. The feminist agenda revolves around synthetic “victim power”. In the Weekly Standard, Harvey Mansfield pointed out that feminists promoted the “hook-up culture” and now want to control campuses by re-labelling it a “rape culture”. Wendy McElroy conservatively calls the “rape culture” a big lie. The number of reported rapes at Harvard has doubled, yet I cannot find one rape case involving a Harvard student that has ever been prosecuted.
The Duke Lacrosse rape case was the first national circus that educated the nation about false campus rape allegations. Zealous prosecutor Mike Nifong, Duke University, and 88 Duke professors “convicted” the Lacrosse players without so much as a hearing.
The lacrosse players were declared innocent after extensive investigation by the North Carolina Bar Association. The City of Durham and Duke University paid large sums to the Duke Lacrosse students and their parents. Prosecutor Mike Nifong was disbarred and sued. Stripper Crystal Mangum walked away unscathed but was later convicted of child abuse and for murdering her boyfriend.
A redux of the Duke case at Hofstra University unraveled in just 72 hours due to good police work. Our hat is off to our men in blue.
Feminists learned the hard way that the justice system does not cater to nepotic ideology. So they invented their own campus Star Chamber arrangement to replace the justice system. The Obama administration and Department of Education forced this on publicly-funded colleges by applying implausible administrative interpretations of Title IX. Protections preventing discrimination against women now force colleges to openly harass and discriminate againts many men.
Feminists are moving past administrative policy -- pulling the stops out to establish keystone legislation in California -- the state where feminists always launch their major initiatives. The proposed “yes means yes” sex assault law would require college men to get verbal permission each time they sleep with a woman. This establishes a discriminatory presumption of guilt nearly impossible to disprove in a court of law.
Colleges are caught in the crosshairs of calumny. “Why could we not expel a student based on an allegation?”, says feminist Amanda Childress, head of Dartmouth College’s Center for Community Action and Prevention. With this contradistinguishing mantra in mind, feminists are suing a few colleges in federal court for not adequately protecting women.
The majority of legal action on college Amphitheaters is by victims falsely accused of sexual violence. Men thrown out of college without due process such as Dez Wells, Drew Sterret, and at least 28 other men are suing colleges for sometimes-sizeable damages.
Senator Claire McCaskill hopes to codify feminist policy by introduction of the Campus Accountability and Safety Act. It is founded on only one small non-peer-reviewed survey of only two schools that hides the methodology and lacks a control group.
This bill is a declaration of war on due process facing stiff criticism. College “courts” are not proper venue for hearing of felony offenses such as rape, murder, terrorism, and other serious crimes. Colleges should immediately refer all felony cases to police and prosecutors and take actions recommended by police and prosecutors.
Even more insidious is the Domestic Violence Gun Homicide Prevention Act of 2014 introduced in Congress as a ruse to seize guns on untried allegations of domestic violence. 70% of domestic violence allegations are unfounded or false. Sexual violence accusations are implicitly subsumed in this bill. One unverified allegation is all it would take to end your right to carry a gun if this bill passes Congress.
Gabby Gifford’s organization and the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence are hawking a set of five grand rationalizations to pre-emptively and “temporarily” seize guns on assertions or ideations of mental health or violence allegations.
Gifford’s policy would not have prevented Jared Loughner from shooting her. He had only a minor drug charge and had been suspended from college for “disruptive behavior” on his record. Gifford’s policy would not help in most other cases. Rapists rarely use guns. Most school shootings are done by crazy kids using guns owned by their parents. Many shootings are done by hardened criminals using off-record, illegally-obtained guns. Most importantly: Tea Partiers are not crazy.
Gifford’s model is a recipe for the neutered feminist society depicted in the 1993 film “Demolition Man”. It will seize guns from anybody the government does not like on the notion that it might prevent a shooting, leaving guns only in the hands of hardened criminals.
So what happened to legitimate rape? Much of the real problems are flatly ignored by feminists and government agencies.
We have an epidemic of female teachers sexually abusing and raping young boys or girls. Several shocking new cases come out each week backed by hard evidence that abuse occurred. Feminists are doing nothing to address this as public policy or teaching opportunies because feminism revolves around political power, not principles.
Feminist liberals and the Obama administration paid no attention to the crisis of child sexual abuse committed by illegal immigrants. North Carolina had at least 112 new cases filed in June. States are overwhelmed by an expensive tidal wave of rape and other crimes inflicted on them by the Obama administration.
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The one man who stood on the ground of truth is Congressman Todd Akin, who was conservatively correct identifying the fact that rape allegations are not always legitimate.
Todd Akin’s position points to policy problems long overdue for correction. Feminist incendiaries should be removed from perches of power in education and government. Unscientific administrative regulations must be discarded from public policy. The “Violence Against Women Act”, on which expansive new feminist rape and violence initiatives are based, must be replaced with an effective gender-neutral “Family Violence Act”. Justice and freedom cannot exist when good men are ideologically served up on the platter of radical feminism.
� 2014 David Usher - All Rights Reserved
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David R. Usher is President of the Center for Marriage Policy, and a co-founder and past Secretary of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children.
Allen Icet is the former State Representative for Missouri’s 84th District, Chairman of The Missouri Club for Growth, and Vice President of the Center for Marriage Policy
Cynthia Davis is the former State Representative for Missouri’s 19th District and Executive Director of the Center for Marriage Policy
E-Mail: drusher@swbell.net
