Happy Saturday, everyone. As usual, I hope you’re all having a relaxing weekend. Speaking of the weekend, tomorrow night they’re going to churn out another edition of the Academy Awards, know colloquially as the Oscars. I make no secret of my love for film, although I am way behind on the nominees this year. I also usually enjoy the Oscars, even though it’s a frequently bloated broadcast that leaves much to be desired. This year seems like it’s going to be another one of those nights, even with my man Chris Rock hosting. Vice President Joe Biden is set to demean his office by introducing Lady Gaga. Well, to be fair, as much as I don’t care for Gaga, that’s not the demeaning part. The thing that disgraces Biden’s office is his insistence on helping to spread more untruths about a supposed campus rape epidemic here in the United States.
Before I get into just how bogus that is, I’ll let NBC News give us the rundown on Biden and Gaga…
Vice President Joe Biden will join pop star Lady Gaga on stage at the Oscars on Sunday to spotlight the issue of campus sexual assault.
Biden will introduce Lady Gaga’s performance of “Til It Happens to You,” a nominee for best original song, according to a White House official. The song was featured in the documentary “The Hunting Ground,” which deals with campus rape.
Biden will use the opportunity to promote the White House’s “It’s On Us” campaign against sexual assault, according to the official. The Obama administration launched the campaign last September.
The only problem with all that is the campus rape epidemic tale is nothing but a pack of lies…
What happens when the statistical basis for a massive, nationwide legislative push crumbles into dust? Absolutely nothing, if the subject is sexual assault on campus…
But the very studies these politicians relied on don’t say what they have claimed — yet the “yes means yes” juggernaut rolls on.
A study by prominent psychologist David Lisak, “Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Detected Rapists,” has been used by the federal government, schools and activists to justify policies slanted against the accused.
The report purportedly showed campus rapists as serial predators. “This report analyzes the most recent, reliable data about rape and sexual assault in our country,” Obama pronounced. The recent documentary “The Hunting Ground,” a film about campus “rape culture,” relies heavily on Lisak.
But, as a Reason Magazine investigation revealed, Lisak didn’t conduct the study himself. He pooled data from four separate studies directed by others at the University of Massachusetts-Boston between 1991-1998. The sample size was 1,882 men, ranging in age from 18-71. Of this group, the average subject was 26.5 years old — not exactly the age of the typical college student. What’s more, according to the university’s demographics, most students are commuters and don’t live on campus…
Another frequently touted statistic, also asserted by President Obama as well as Gov. Cuomo, is the claim that one in five women on college campuses in the United States has been sexually assaulted or raped.
The statistic is derived from a 2007 study conducted by the National Institute of Justice, a division of the Justice Department, and directly studies campus sexual assault, unlike Lisak’s study. But there are holes in this research, as well. For starters, the study was conducted at “two large public universities, one in the South and one in the Midwest,” and the sample size was 5,446 undergraduate women — a “relatively low” response rate, two of the researchers told TIME.
The survey included women who had suffered rape and experienced other types of sexual assault, “such as forced kissing or unwanted groping of sexual body parts,” and of the women surveyed, 19 percent reported experiencing some form of sexual assault. According to the two researchers, “To limit the statistic to include rape only, meaning unwanted sexual penetration, the prevalence for senior undergraduate women drops to 14.3%, or 1 in 7” at the universities studied.
I suggest you go read that whole article, because there’s a lot more there, including the Justice Department’s own stat that shows the actual rate of sexual assault for women is about .05%, which is nowhere near the frequently cite 1-in-5 number. Oh, you want to know more about that 20% stat? I’ll let Ashe Schow take it from here…
The statistic comes from a 2007 Campus Sexual Assault study conducted by the National Institute of Justice, a division of the Justice Department. The researchers made clear that the study consisted of students from just two universities, but some politicians ignored that for their talking point, choosing instead to apply the small sample across all U.S. college campuses.
The CSA study was actually an online survey that took 15 minutes to complete, and the 5,446 undergraduate women who participated were provided a $10 Amazon gift card. Men participated too, but their answers weren’t included in the one-in-five statistic.
If 5,446 sounds like a high number, it’s not — the researchers acknowledged that it was actually a low response rate.
“Another limitation of the CSA study, inherent with Web-based survey, is that the response rates were relatively low,” the researchers said. “Although the response rates were not lower than what most Web-based surveys achieve, they are lower than what we typically achieve using a different mode of data collection (e.g. face-to-face interviewing).”
By the way, the movie the Gaga song appears, The Hunting Ground, is also full of shit. Talk about one lie after another. How do they keep getting away with this? A compliant and oftentimes complicit media, that’s how. Take a look for yourself. One of the central stories in the film is completely flawed…
Of the details Yoffe reported, I was must struck by the fact that Willingham had offered Winston—an old acquaintance who had come to Willingham’s apartment to rekindle their friendship—cocaine, which they both consumed. The night eventually included a trip to a bar in the company of a female friend of Willingham’s. All three drank copious amounts of alcohol, and Winston and the friend (“KF”) made out on the dance floor. If there was an initiator in this encounter, it seems to have been KF.
The trio returned to Willingham’s apartment at 2 a.m. And guess what? Their recollections of what happened aren’t that great (alcohol and cocaine tend to have that effect). All collapsed on a bed at various points; there was some kissing and sexual contact, but no intercourse. There’s not a shred of evidence that Winston did anything criminal to either of the girls, aside from Willingham’s error-riddled assertions that he did. Some of her claims border on parody: she insisted that Winston had raped KF and a bloody condom in her wastebasket was the proof. But according to a lab test, it was Willingham’s blood on the condom, not KF’s, and no traces of Winston’s DNA were found.
This is the type of bullshit Joe Biden is going to be promoting on Sunday night at the Oscars. If there truly was a campus rape epidemic, I would be one of the first people to say it needed to be called out at every turn. But there’s not. Instead, progressive activists have created this cause out of thin air in order to get more money and screen time for themselves. I’m sad to tell you all that it has worked pretty brilliantly so far. Still, never stop reminding friends who don’t pay attention to all this shit that the stats (and that film) simply aren’t true
