Tuesday, May 12, 2015

College-Campus Common-Sense

On 10 May, the Lexington Herald-Leader, Lexington, Ky., devoted nearly all of pages one and seven in its A section to the issue (used to be called problem) of sexual assaults on university campuses. This stuff pops up so frequently that it's become ho-hum, not least because neither the universities nor the paper will admit the root causes of assaults, real or imagined and including rape. Consequently, no serious effort is made to “do something.”

The usual rundown of statistics was presented, this time remarking the disparity between the number of reports of violence to campus police and campus counseling centers. Presumably, a report to a university-paid counselor would result in some action by that counselor more than just a conversation, but that seems not to be the case. This is a quote from one counselor: “I want to see every perpetrator go to jail, but that may not be the right choice for the victim.” So, the victim might as well have been in Philadelphia.

The big deal now is not “No means no,” but rather, “Yes means yes.” About this switch in semantics, a UK bureaucrat said this: “There's a greater level of consent and understanding.” The caveat: anyone who is impaired can't be accused of saying yes. One would think the same thing about saying no, but this is academia-think, often not susceptible to common sense. Apparently, saying yes puts an affirmative enjoyment on hanky-panky, whereas saying no is just so fun-negative. Egad!

Impairment was described in a survey used at Eastern from July 2014 through April—“without your consent account being passed out, drugged, drunk, incapacitated, asleep, threatened or forced.” Of 157 students surveyed, 28% answered yes to having been sexually violated on these bases. There was no definition of sexual contact, so one presumes it was what anyone (mostly females) said it was. With the exception of force, all the possibilities are self-inflicted, i.e., preventable through exercising common sense. It's hard to get drunk (or drugged) without drinking.

A classic example was given regarding how folks differ on that subject. Last year, a UK football player was accused of rape in a UK dorm. A UK hearing was held, with no comment made available to the public; however, the man, as a result, disappeared from campus and probable scholarship. When the case was presented to the Grand Jury, there was no indictment returned. So, the guy lost it all while the gal got her 15 minutes of attention (revenge).

The university is culpable because it maintains coed dorms and allows across-the-board visiting privileges in dorm rooms, both the result of incredibly stupid UK administrative decisions. Item: In January 2013, a female student charged her “friend” with rape in her UK dorm room. The case went to trial, with a verdict of not guilty. The male was sent home. Later in the year, the woman committed suicide.

The “rape problem” has been front and center in the military for years now. In both 2012 and 2013, the DOD gave the statistics for charges and convictions but also claimed that exactly 26,000 unreported assaults took place, coincidentally, for both years. How unreported assaults can be counted is a mystery. The latest statistics have just been released for 2014, an overall increase in assaults of 11% from 2013. There were 6,131 reported, mostly by women.

According to the DOD, 10,600 men and 9,600 women were assaulted in 2014 but didn't report the violations, for a total of 20,200, which, of course, is a decrease from 2013, not an 11% increase even if the reported cases were counted. The exact counts of unreported violations are suspicious, as are those especially of the men although the grand welcome of practicing homosexuals into the military might account for a sizable number.

College- and military-women claim victim-hood and addle-brained officials consider them a protected species, like a hippopotamus, which has a brain to body ratio of 1:2,789. Significantly, especially in university, most assaults are by acquaintances—date rape. With no witnesses, the obvious conclusion is consensual, so the gals need to use their brains for a change and not become “impaired.”

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

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