Do sexual assaults on campuses require a federal response?

Article here. Excerpt:

'Be wary of the claim that one in five students has been sexually assaulted or raped at some point in their college careers. In an era of declining violent crime rates, the statistic is remarkably resilient.

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reports a sharp drop in total rapes and sexual assaults nationwide — down 38.7 percent between 2008 and 2009, which are the most recent years for which data are readily available. Yet the White House stubbornly repeats the one-in-five claim, a number that has circulated since at least 2000.

As my Manhattan Institute colleague Heather Mac Donald noted in 2011 — the last time the White House touted the campus rape issue — there were 36.8 rapes per 100,000 residents of Detroit, a city with one of the worst violent crime rates in America. That’s a rate of 0.037 percent.

“If 18-year-old girls were in fact walking into such a grotesque maelstrom of sexual violence when they first picked up their dormitory room key,” Mac Donald observed, “parents and students alike would have demanded a radical restructuring of college life years ago.” Obviously, that hasn’t happened.
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What’s really happening here? The latest White House report offers a hint, noting how sexual assaults are “fueled by drinking and drug use.” The supposed epidemic of sexual violence on college and university campuses is really an epidemic of binge drinking, drug abuse and pervasive hookups.

Changing the “rape culture” really requires cracking down on the party culture that permeates too many colleges today. But don’t expect administrators to reimpose the old “in loco parentis” system that went out 40 years ago. Instead expect more demands for greater funding, and endless cries to “take back the night.”'