An Epidemic of Rape Fakery

There’s a very good reason why Democrats are working so hard to convince the country that we’re in the throes of a sexual assault epidemic. Identity politics, with its demonization of imaginary villains and scare tactics are all that the Democrats have left. The Democrats’ reliance upon grievance theater is a confession that they really have exhausted legitimate reasons to convince Americans to vote for them.

The Democrats’ economic theories are in ruins. Six years ago, at the depths of the recession, 39.7 million Americans lived below the poverty line. Today, the Democrats face the challenge of convincing America that 47.2 million living in poverty qualifies as prosperity. Under Obama, the very rich have gotten richer and the rest of us have gotten poorer. If not for its tragic consequences, Obama’s foreign policy would serve as the butt of jokes.

So Democrats have defaulted to their old standby of divisive, identity politics. Identity politics requires villains and victims. And for it to work to the Democrats’ advantage, they have to portray themselves as Dudley Doorights, riding to the rescue.

The latest desperate grasp by Democrats to paint themselves as knights in shining armor revolves around the narrative that American women are endangered by an epidemic of rape and sexual assault, especially on college campuses. According to this myth, this supposed plague has gotten so bad that the typical college campus has degenerated into an unsafe, intolerably hostile environment for women. Indeed, the gravity of the situation requires that centuries of due process law should be scrapped and replaced with a legal process that the Salem Witch Trial prosecutors would find familiar. The burden of proof now rests largely upon the accused. He must prove his innocence.

By stretching Title IX powers beyond anything imagined by the law’s authors, the Obama administration has demanded colleges and universities supplant the criminal justice system with a leftist axe grinder who serves as judge, jury and executioner.

For decades now, radical feminists have insisted a woman’s word was unquestionable should she lodge a claim of sexual assault. They insisted that women simply do not lie about such things. Although the radical feminists suspended that rule for a time when ex-president Bill Clinton faced multiple accusations of sexual assault and sexual harassment. And in retrospect, considering who the vice president was, America should be thankful.

By the way, I checked MS Magazine and was not surprised to learn that the rule was back in force.

And recent events show us just how hard it is to prove innocence to liberals. In 2006, Duke University’s lacrosse team was accused of gang raping a stripper hired to perform at a team party. Even though the accuser’s partner disputed her friend’s account of events, and forensic evidence disproved the accusations that emerged, the team was still found guilty by the media, the school’s intelligentsia, Al Sharpton, and everybody else who matters in liberaldom.  Only when the mountain of exculpatory evidence crushed the local prosecutor were the men exonerated.

A similar story unfolded at the University of Virginia, when a young lady convinced a Rolling Stone magazine reporter that she had suffered a gang rape as part of a fraternity initiation. The feminists and the university’s administration condemned the entire Greek system as guilty, until investigators for The Daily Caller and The Washington Post committed brazen acts of old school journalism and interviewed the principles in the story. What they discovered was that the story was likely a hoax.

Even so, the university’s administration has been reluctant to lift sanctions against the Greek system.

As it turns out, the whole sexual assault epidemic is a hoax. The Democrats claim that one in five women will suffer sexual assault in college. The real number is well below 1%. And data from the Department of Justice reveal that the number of reported rapes in the United States declined by two-thirds in the last 20 years. And when one considers that the population has grown and that victims are less likely to experience stigmatization, the real rate is probably much lower.

And young women who are enrolled in college are less likely to suffer an assault than women who are not enrolled.

And if college were such a hostile environment, why would the rate of women enrolling in college be soaring?

It’s all a fraud. Once again Democrats are saving America from boogeymen that live mostly in their own fevered imaginations.