If Campuses Are Overrun With Unpunished Sexual Assault, Why Is It So Difficult to Find Victims?

Last Friday I observed that a new Washington Post poll purporting to show that 1 in 5 college students are sexually assaulted was bogus. The poll showed no such thing. In fact the questions encompassed not just “sexual assault” but so-called “unwanted sexual contact,” defining that term so broadly that it could encompass behavior that not only wasn’t “sexual assault,” it wasn’t even unlawful at all. Writing in the Weekly Standard, K.C. Johnson and Stuart Taylor take their own swings at the poll, pointing out something from the Post’s coverage that I’d overlooked. The Post, in its story package, used the standard tactic of using both statistics and individual stories to make their case. That certainly can be a valid method of communicating truth (I’ve used it myself). The statistics tell the scope of the problem, while the stories provide the human face and emotional impact that stirs readers to action. But what if neither the statistics nor the stories support your point? Johnson and Taylor explain:

According to the Post’s accompanying articles, the “survivors” of these sexual encounters experienced enormous pain and suffering. But it’s not entirely clear how the Post determined that the students with whom the paper spoke are in fact “survivors” of sexual assault, although some clearly were. Virtually none of these students went to the police, nor did most report any incident to their colleges, whose adjudication procedures are all but designed to find the accused student guilty. Instead, the Post reporters simply assumed the truth of most of their sources’ claims and thus the guilt of the accused.

Details from the few subjects who did report matters to police reflect badly on the Post’s credibility. Take, for instance, the student with whom one of the Post’s front-pagers leads, Rachel Sienkowski. Reporters Emma Brown, Nick Anderson, Susan Svrluga, and Steve Hendrix say in their second paragraph that a few weeks after arriving on the Michigan State campus, Sienkowski “had become a survivor” after an afternoon of tailgating ended with a man she didn’t know in her bed. She went to the police, the Post reported, because she awoke not only having been violated, but with her head bloodied.

But the end of the article lets slip that in fact this, the paper’s lead example of a campus sexual assault, seems instead to have been a regretful, but not atypical, drunken hookup that neither party remembers well. The scary bleeding was apparently self-inflicted when Sienkowski fell out of her loft bed onto the floor, while the male was asleep. The person she brought back to her room wasn’t a Michigan State student (and might not have been a college student at all). And, the Post disclosed in the last 120 words of a 2,870-word article, even Sienkowski conceded that “she doesn’t know for sure whether she had wanted sex in the moment.” She said this after seeing the police report, including photographs of the hickeys that the accused said her lips had branded on his neck as evidence that she “was very into everything that was happening.” (Emphasis in original.)

In fact, some of the Post’s stories “have nothing to do” with campus sexual assault:

A student from Eastern Michigan, visiting New York City, got drunk and separated from her friends, and then was raped by a stranger in the Port Authority. A student from Wisconsin-Eau Claire was found passed out in a Minneapolis bar and thought he was drugged and raped, though he never went to the hospital for tests. Both of these experiences are awful, and raise disturbing questions as to why neither of these seeming victims of violent crime reported the offense to law enforcement. But from either a public policy or a journalistic perspective, do offenses allegedly committed hundreds or thousands of miles away from campus, by perpetrators who were not fellow college students, have any relevance to the question the Post series hopes to address?

These problems are typical in mainstream media and activist (I’m being redundant) reporting on campus sexual assault. From the infamous Rolling Stone story, to the misleading Hunting Ground documentary, to Emma Sulkowicz’s famous mattress protest, the Left is having a hard time finding the right stories to tell, sometimes even after national searches for just the perfect incident. For an alleged national epidemic of unpunished rape, it is apparently difficult to find examples of “survivors” whose stories withstand scrutiny and faced hostile or indifferent law enforcement and campus officials. The very reason the Department of Education lowered the burden of proof in such cases is because they are often so ambiguous, with the truth painfully difficult to discern. So the DOE didn’t just put a thumb on the scales against young men, it threw a lead weight on the balance. After all, what are free speech and due process (much less the careers and reputations of young men) compared to the power and importance of the Narrative?