From 2011, but highly bookmark-able. Send this to anyone who throws the thoroughly-debunked (but not acknowledged as such by POTUS, et al.) 1-in-4 statistic at you. Excerpt:

'You can not have an article on sexual assault in college, of course, without a solemn invocation of that infamous, oft-repeated, almost-as-oft-debunked One-in-Fourstatistic. The Trib does not disappoint:

The National Sexual Violence Research Center in Enola, northwest of Harrisburg, estimates 20 percent to 25 percent of women are victims of forced sex during their time in college.

But where the Trib, like everyone else who uncritically accepts this uncritical notion, does disappoint is in its failure to acknowledge that the numbers do not add up. And, in fact, that they do not even come close.

As a supplement to that same article, the Trib published a Campus Safety sidebar that provided a list of reported sexual assault offenses for eight local colleges over the past three years. All told, there were 65. 

65. At 8 colleges. Among tens of thousands of female students. Over 3 years.

That’s a long way from 1-in-4. And thus a complete repudiation of the now-boilerplate statistic claimed in the article.

Those numbers, however, only represent reported assaults that occurred in student housing. Surely the numbers would be much higher, and much more alarming, once you counted sexual assaults that occurred elsewhere on campus and in the community at large. Surely that would get us much closer to the canonical 1-in-4 wisdom. 

I decided to test that theory by examining the sexual assault statistics at Pittsburgh’s three largest residential universities: the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and Duquesne University.
...

Article here. Excerpt:

'A study of sexual assault released by the federal government on Thursday challenges conventional wisdom about the heightened danger on college campuses, finding that women there are less likely than nonstudents to be victims. College women are also less likely, the study found, to report the incidents to the police.

The rate of rape and other sexual assault over the past two decades was 1.2 times higher for nonstudents of college age than for students, according to the study, by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. It showed an average of 7.6 cases per 1,000 nonstudents, compared with 6.1 per 1,000 college women. For the most recent year, 2013, those rates were almost identical, according to the study, which focuses on women ages 18 to 24.

Article here. Excerpt:

'In a piece posted just two days before the story came undone, New York’s Kat Stoeffel not only deplored the resistance to “taking a traumatized young woman at her word” but argued that even if Jackie’s harrowing tale was made up or exaggerated, it was problematic to debunk it. In Stoeffel’s view, the benefits of believing the story—“forcing reform at UVA, encouraging other women to come forward”—outweighed any possible negatives, since no specific individuals had been accused and no innocents’ lives could be ruined.

Article here. Excerpt:

'THE uproar about sexual assaults on American college campuses is growing louder. Barack Obama has called them “an affront to our basic humanity”. Several universities—including Johns Hopkins, San Diego State, Emory, MIT, Clemson and the University of Virginia—have shut down or suspended parties at their fraternities in recent months. This week Wesleyan University in Connecticut banned a fraternity from holding social events for a year following two allegations of assaults at booze-fuelled revels. Meanwhile, 90 schools in 35 states are under investigation by the federal Department of Education for mishandling cases of sexual violence.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Feminists are distraught now that Rolling Stone has retracted the sensational University of Virginia rape story published last month. Many are continuing to defend “Jackie,” the UVA student whose tale of a horrific gang rape was found to contain numerous holes.

Jessica Valenti, columnist for London’s Guardian newspaper, wrote: “I choose to believe Jackie. I lose nothing by doing so, even if I’m later proven wrong.”

Liberal blogger Melissa McEwan tweeted: “I can’t state this more emphatically: If Jackie’s story is partially or wholly untrue, it doesn’t validate the reasons for disbelieving her.”

Conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly believes feminists are so vehemently defending Jackie and her partially discredited allegations because they don’t want to lose out on an anti-male narrative.

“The reason they bought into the story and didn’t have any suspicions about the flakiness of it is antagonism toward men in general,” Schlafly said. “Their cry is they want to abolish the patriarchy, and anything that hurts men is something that pleases the feminists.”
...
There isn’t any rape culture,” she said. “There’s nothing ‘culture’ about rape. Rape is a crime and ought to be punished. But people who make false accusations about a dangerous crime like that also ought to be punished, and I hope everybody connected with this false story will suffer the consequences.”

Schlafly, whose recently published book “Who Killed the American Family?” came out just days before she turned 90, sees a national media landscape dominated by feminists and those who are afraid to anger the feminists.

Article here. Excerpt:

Article here. Excerpt:

'Despite the furor that’s swept campus in the last week, it appears Washington Post columnist George Will won’t be disinvited from speaking at Michigan State University graduation ceremonies on Saturday.
george-will-2.jpgGeorge WillCourtesy of MSU

That was the message sent by university President Lou Anna K. Simon in an interview following Friday’s meeting of the Michigan State University Board of Trustees.

Simon repeated the university’s talking point that Will’s view on sexual assault — made infamous in June 6 column where he wrote reports of sexual assault on campus make “victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges” — is not condoned by the university. However, she believes Will should be allowed to speak.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Last Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its proposed guidelines on male circumcision for public comment. The new federal guidelines would recommend male circumcision as a healthy choice that doctors should offer for parents to make for their sons and for teenagers and adults to consider. The CDC background report claims that circumcision has been shown to prevent HIV, HPV and other infections. The new CDC report mimics the 2012 American Academy of Pediatrics Circumcision Policy Statement which drew widespread criticism for its claim that circumcision benefits outweigh the risks.

IntactNews asked the CDC for comment about the risks for an average American male in acquiring HIV. “It’s hard to establish one, single figure for risk of HIV acquisition by a heterosexual male,” the CDC responded in an email to IntactNews today, saying the risks are not well documented.

One study estimates the chance of an American male acquiring HIV through a single unprotected sex act with a known HIV+ female partner is less than 0.04%. That adds up to a 6% risk per year, with an estimated total of 620 new HIV infections per year for white, heterosexual males with known HIV+ or high-risk female partners.

Article here. Excerpt:

'A recent article in Rolling Stonehas related a horrifying account of an on-campus gang rape allegedly committed by University of Virginia students in 2012. Third-year student “Jackie” told her story of how, as a freshman, she was brutally raped for three hours by seven men in a darkened, upstairs room at a fraternity party after being lured there by “Drew,” an upperclassman. Jackie’s account of her subsequent run-ins with Drew only add to the chilling nature of the crime: Weeks and months after the incident, Drew acted as though nothing unusual had happened, even thanking her for the “great time” he’d had.

This is criminal, predatory, and sociopathic behavior. If Jackie’s account is accurate, the perpetrators deserve lengthy prison sentences. Yet they reportedly graduated from UVA and remain at large. Why? Did police and prosecutors drop the ball?

Article here. Excerpt:

'He was suspended for three semesters by the University of Colorado Boulder for “sexual misconduct,” even though police filed no charges against him and his accuser admitted she wanted to scare him when she made the complaint.

So John Doe, as he is known in court records, filed a lawsuit last week against the university saying his rights had been violated under Title IX, the 1972 law that forbids universities from discriminating on the basis of sex.

"CU Boulder has created an environment in which an accused male student is effectively denied fundamental due process by being prosecuted through the conduct process under the cloud of a presumption of guilt,” says the Nov. 21 lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Colorado. “Such a one-sided process deprived John Doe, as a male student, of education opportunities at CU Boulder on the basis of his sex.”'

Article here. If anything good comes of the now-impugned UVA rape article, it'll be this -- but only if it entails the removal of the handling in any way of such accusations by colleges, since they aren't competent to vet criminal allegations. Excerpt:

'Virginia lawmakers are calling for mandatory reporting of campus sexual assaults to law enforcement agencies after allegations of a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house.

Rolling Stone magazine last month published a detailed account of brutal sexual violence on the campus and highlighted colleges and universities’ often inadequate handling of cases that could be considered criminal assaults. Since then the university has been under increasing scrutiny.

Several Democrats and Republicans in the General Assembly will seek bipartisan consensus on passing a law in next year’s session requiring reporting within a day or two of a reported assault.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'One of the reasons that Rolling Stone's discredited story about a vicious gang rape at the University of Virginia (UVA) was initially believable is that many of us take it for granted that colleges are a hotbed of sexual assault.

As Sen. Kristen Gillibrand of New York has said, "Women are at a greater risk of sexual assault as soon as they step onto a college campus."

A telling story about male unemployment in the United States. Excerpt:

'Working, in America, is in decline. The share of prime-age men — those 25 to 54 years old — who are not working has more than tripled since the late 1960s, to 16 percent. More recently, since the turn of the century, the share of women without paying jobs has been rising, too. The United States, which had one of the highest employment rates among developed nations as recently as 2000, has fallen toward the bottom of the list."
...
Many men, in particular, have decided that low-wage work will not improve their lives, in part because deep changes in American society have made it easier for them to live without working. These changes include the availability of federal disability benefits; the decline of marriage, which means fewer men provide for children; and the rise of the Internet, which has reduced the isolation of unemployment.

Article here. Excerpt:

'"They keep saying, 'well, this story is a hoax, but it shouldn't detract from the epidemic of rape going on on college campuses.' Well, if we're drowning in this epidemic of rape on college campuses, why are all the cases they keep giving us hoaxes? Could they give us a real one? And in fact, what it illustrates is an epidemic of false claims of rape. This nonsense that Obama repeats about one in four or one in five women on college campuses being raped, it's madness," she also argued that people like the president were "minimizing" the horror of rape by using an absurdly broad definition and pointed to what she argued were methodological flaws in campus sexual assault studies.

Article here. To jump the paywall, Google the first sentence from below and click the link to the Chicago Tribune article. Excerpt:

'Writing in The Washington Post about the University of Virginia rape case, Zerlina Maxwell asserts, "We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says. Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist."

Where to begin with this kind of statement?

For one thing, even an outlandish accusation would not exactly be cost-free; it could be devastating. There would be police interviews, professional questions. As Maxwell blithely notes in the piece, the accused might be suspended from his job. Does he have enough savings to live on until the questions are cleared? Many people don't.'