America’s ‘campus rape crisis’
Identifying the seriousness of America’s “campus rape crisis”, US President Barack Obama in January established a ‘White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault’. (Source: AFP photo)
One in 5. That’s the number cited by recent research in the US of victims of sexual assault on college campuses.
Identifying the seriousness of America’s “campus rape crisis”, US President Barack Obama in January established a ‘White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault’. Now, The Hunting Ground, a documentary by Oscar nominees Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, has put the issue back at the forefront.
“The film is a reminder that… this whole uproar began because a great many students have been raped with impunity,” Michelle Goldberg writes in The Nation. “Dick and Ziering… kept hearing from students that the rape crisis in the military had parallels at their own schools.”
Andrea Flynn expresses outrage in Salon that lawmakers are using campus sexual assault outrage to push that women carry guns to college. Pointing out that a Republican leader recently said, ‘If these young, hot little girls on campus have a firearm, I wonder how many men will want to assault them’, Flynn says, “As if anything positive could come from adding loaded weapons to the already toxic mix of drugs, alcohol, masculine group think, and the rape culture… on campuses.”
Eliza Gray of TIME points out, “The college town of Missoula, Montana, saw at least 80 reported rapes over three years, earning it the name ‘America’s Rape Capital’… For young women… America’s campuses are hazardous places.”
According to Collier Meyerson in Jezebel, The Hunting Ground “underscores the most persuasive reason for the dearth of campus rape convictions: college is a business… This explains why the punishment for academic cheating is generally harsher than for committing sexual assault…”
Christine Baker, however, notes in The Daily Beast that the one in five figure of sexual assault may be inflated. Baker cites the fears of Stuart Taylor Jr., a lawyer and journalist, on ‘the pressure to treat all drunken sex as rape’. “Taylor said he could imagine young men today tape-recording permission at every stage… to document your case against ‘de facto extreme feminist presumption of guilt’.”
Writing in The Slate, Emily Yoffe wonders whether “moral panic is clouding our ability to rationally assess the problem”. “A range of voices has raised concerns that the systems being put in place… are grossly unfair to the accused”.
Jessica Valenti dismisses this “worry for men’s futures” as “odd”. “There is a distinct lack of evidence that young men on campuses are suffering any harm due to the increased focus on ending rape,” says Valenti in The Guardian.
Source:: Indian Express
