The White House’s Report on Campus Sexual Assault Relies on the Lowest Common Denominator

Article here. Excerpt:

'Last year, a University of North Carolina student who remained anonymous for safety reasons spoke to the campus newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, about feeling victimized by the school’s response to a sexual assault report—the handling of which is now the target of a federal civil rights investigation.

But there’s a twist: the student is a man who says he was wrongly accused.
...
The administration’s effort, which made headlines last week with a report by the White House task force on campus sexual assault and new Department of Education guidelines, has an indisputably noble goal. Unfortunately, it is marred by flaws, including alarmist statistics, fuzzy definitions and a polarizing ideology of presumed guilt.

One of the foundations of this crusade is the staggering claim that one in five female students are sexually assaulted while in college. This figure comes from the 2005-2007 Campus Sexual Assault Study, which, as Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler has noted, was conducted at just two schools, with a fairly low response rate. Moreover, the survey’s data for “drug- and/or alcohol-enabled sexual assault” (about 70% of the incidents in the study) lump together unconsciousness or incapacitation with intoxication that may cloud one’s judgment and affect consent. Notably, despite widespread sexual assault awareness programs, two-thirds of the college women whom the study counted as victims of drug- or alcohol-enabled rape did not think they were raped, and few felt they had suffered psychological harm.'