Criminal Law and the Moral Panic on Campus Rape

Article here. Excerpt:

'As the Obama Administration steps up the federal effort against an alleged epidemic of campus rape, some states are contemplating measures of their own. A recent Newsweek story on a bill pending in the California State Assembly, discussed by K.C. Johnson on Minding the Campus, raises a number of troubling issues: among them, potential spillover from the campus crusade into the criminal justice system and actual spillover from the radical feminist blogosphere into the mainstream media.

he legislation, AB 1433, introduced on January 6 by Southern California Assemblyman Mike Gatto, requires colleges and universities to promptly bring to local law enforcement all campus reports of violent crimes (homicide, rape, robbery or aggravated assault) and hate crimes--unless the complainant requests anonymity. Federal law--the 1990 Clery Act, named after Jeanne Clery, a 19-year-old Lehigh University (Pennsylvania) student who was raped and murdered in her dorm in 1986--already requires colleges to record all crimes reported to campus authorities in a public log and in an annual security report, and to disclose them to the U.S. Department of Education.
...
The problematic nature of the bill is compounded by the fact that, due to input from campus activists whom Newsweek describes as "sexual assault survivors," accusers will be allowed to decide whether their charges should be reported to the police or not. (The alleged survivors told Gatto, and Newsweek, that they would not have gone to the campus authorities if they knew they would have to deal with actual law enforcement as well.) Not only does this leave the universities' "shadow justice system" entirely intact, it also underscores the extent to which feminist activism is pushing to make sexual assault or rape a subjectively defined offense.

As K.C. Johnson notes, the Newsweek article describes this situation entirely from the accusers perspective, uncritically repeating a Department of Justice report claiming that "college women are four times more likely to be sexually assaulted than the rest of the population" and "95% of rapes on campus will never be reported." But, actually, it's worse than that: the article by Katie J.M. Baker also cherry-picks the evidence from that report.
...
If this looks like deliberate bias rather than sloppy one-sidedness, perhaps that's because it is. Several Twitter users have brought attention to the fact that Baker came over to Newsweek from Jezebel.com, a leading website in the radical feminist blogosphere. A look at her past work for Newsweek reveals that she began to write for the magazine last October; her debut was an essay responding to Emily Yoffe's much-debated article on Slate.com arguing that advising college women to avoid heavy drinking should be a part of sexual assault prevention. The tenor of Baker's riposte can be gleaned from its title: "No. 1 Surefire Rape Prevention Tip For Ladies: Don't Exist."'