Progressives cling to 1-in-5 campus rape stat as mainstream media debunk it

Article here. Excerpt:

'2014 saw the rise and fall of a curious statistic whose own authors tried to play down its weight: the claim that one in five women will be victims of sexual assault during their college career.

Much like Doonesbury‘s continued faith in the story of “Jackie” at the University of Virginia, however, the campus progressives at Generation Progress continue to hold out 1-in-5 as unquestionable scripture.

In its year-end wrap-up of liberal successes, the group touted its role in the national conversation on campus sexual assault, including helping the White House launch the It’s On Us awareness campaign:

"On January 22, 2014, the White House announced the Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault. In April, the Task Force released their first report, Not Alone, which laid out some startling statistics—one in five women is sexually assaulted in college, 75 to 80 percent of survivors know their attacker, and most often, they do not report the crime."

The group also celebrates California’s new affirmative-consent law for college campuses and its implication that drunk sex is by definition rape. But let’s go back to that 1-in-5 statistic.

Generation Progress may be one of the few organizations still refusing to acknowledge the stat, from a Justice Department report, is full of caveats – it’s based on a 2007 Web-based survey of two large public universities and had a low response rate, to say nothing of how it worded questions.

In addition to skeptics of campus administrators who are rushing to dump due process from adjudications of sexual-assault allegations, mainstream media increasingly say the 1-in-5 stat can’t be trusted.

Most recently, The Atlantic‘s Olga Khazan wrote about a sociologist working with men on campus to “discover the best male-oriented efforts to prevent sexual assault, and then replicate them nationwide” – an effort that sounds more fruitful than simply prejudging all men as latent rapists.'