The Plague of Campus Rape

Article here. Excerpt:

'‘Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town” is the empathetic account of five sexual-assault cases at the University of Montana (UM) between 2010 and 2012. Jon Krakauer, the acclaimed author of “Into the Wild” and “Into Thin Air,” was moved to write this very different book when he discovered “that many of my acquaintances, and even several women in my own family, had been sexually assaulted by men they trusted,” and he offers sharp insight into “what deters so many rape victims from going to the police.”
...
Mr. Krakauer devotes more than 100 pages to this complex encounter, which went to trial in February 2013. The football player says it was consensual, and his lawyers suggested that Ms. Washburn had lied to spite him for his uncaring post-coital demeanor. A jury unanimously found him not guilty in less than three hours. Mr. Krakauer argues that in the campus disciplinary proceeding, with a lower burden of proof, Mr. Johnson should have been expelled and probably would have been had he not been a football hero in a football-crazed town. Nobody except Ms. Washburn and Mr. Johnson really knows what happened—though Mr. Krakauer does show compellingly that she has been deeply traumatized by whatever Mr. Johnson did.

To its great credit, “Missoula” tells both sides of these disturbing stories faithfully enough to let readers draw their own conclusions. Yet Mr. Krakauer is convinced that a great many men get away with rape (which is true) because the authorities don’t try hard enough to punish them (which was true once but is much less so now). He urges universities to not let “legalistic quibbling” impede expulsion of alleged rapists.

This is troubling, especially as Mr. Krakauer’s passionate convictions rely heavily on the contested claim by psychologist David Lisak that only 2%-10% of sexual-assault reports are false. This statistic is misleading. Mr. Lisak’s 2010 study (like others often cited by anti-rape activists) treat as presumptively true all sexual-assault complaints that authorities have not formally labeled either true or false (the vast majority), including most of those dropped for insufficient evidence. Older studies suggest the possibility that up to 40%-50% of accused men may be innocent.
...
In the end, “Missoula” echoes the Obama administration’s demand for draconian disciplinary procedures in campus sex cases. When Harvard implemented such procedures last year, 28 of its own law professors, including prominent feminists and liberals, assailed the university for abandoning “the most basic elements of fairness and due process” in a system “overwhelmingly stacked against the accused.” Jon Krakauer writes eloquently of the “deep and intractable pain” suffered by sex-crime victims. But the remedies that he embraces are creating a new class of victims.'