In the winter edition of City Journal, the Manhattan Institutes’s Heather MacDonald has a lengthy piece on the campus rape industry. As MacDonald points out, the central tenet of the campus rape industry is the one-in-four statistic. This stat alledges that one quarter of college women will be raped or will be targets of attempted rape by the end of their four years in college. Like others before her, MacDonald shows the statistic to be severely inflated. But that doesn’t stop campus feminists from declaring a rape crisis:
If the one-in-four statistic is correct-it is sometimes modified to “one-in-five to one-in-four”-campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. No crime, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20 or 25 percent, even over many years. The 2006 violent crime rate in Detroit, one of the most violent cities in America, was 2,400 murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants-a rate of 2.4 percent. The one-in-four statistic would mean that every year, millions of young women graduate who have suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience. Such a crime wave would require nothing less than a state of emergency-Take Back the Night rallies and 24-hour hotlines would hardly be adequate to counter this tsunami of sexual violence. Admissions policies letting in tens of thousands of vicious criminals would require a complete revision, perhaps banning boys entirely. The nation’s nearly 10 million female undergrads would need to take the most stringent safety precautions. Certainly, they would have to alter their sexual behavior radically to avoid falling prey to the rape epidemic.
Read more here.