Your Daily Dose of Dumb - Washington Post's George Will Thinks Being a Sexual Assault Victim Is Now A "Coveted Status"

Wow, and the GOP wonders why they get so few female voters, or voters with working brain matter, as far as that goes. This is just utterly absurd - George Will is now the poster boy for Stupid Rich White Men Who Don't Get It (or SRWHWDGI).

If you think, as I do, that George Will should apologize to the nation's female sexual assault survivors, send him an email and let him know what think: georgewill@washpost.com

Via Media Matters for America:

Wash. Post's George Will: Sexual Assault Victim Is Now A "Coveted Status"

June 8, 2014 ››› SOPHIA TESFAYE


Fox News contributor and Washington Post columnist George Will derided efforts on college campuses to combat the sexual assault epidemic as a ploy to "make victimhood a coveted status that confers privilege."

In a June 7 syndicated op-ed which appeared in The Washington Post and the New York Post, Will dismissed "the supposed campus epidemic of rape, aka 'sexual assault,'" arguing that the definition of sexual assault was too broad because it could include "nonconsensual touching" and disputing the evidence that shows 1 in 5 women experience sexual assault on campuses in the U.S., implying that individuals were pretending to be victims because colleges have made victimhood a "coveted status" (emphasis added):

Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating.

They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous ("micro-aggressions," often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.

[...]

Now the Obama administration is riding to the rescue of "sexual assault" victims. It vows to excavate equities from the ambiguities of the hookup culture, this cocktail of hormones, alcohol and the faux sophistication of today's prolonged adolescence of especially privileged young adults.

The administration's crucial and contradictory statistics are validated the usual way, by official repetition; Joe Biden has been heard from. The statistics are: One in five women is sexually assaulted while in college, and only 12% of assaults are reported. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12% reporting rate is correct, the 20% assault rate is preposterous.

[...]

Education Department lawyers disregard pesky arithmetic and elementary due process. Threatening to withdraw federal funding, the department mandates adoption of a minimal "preponderance of the evidence" standard when adjudicating sexual assault charges between males and the female "survivors" -- note the language of prejudgment.Combine this with capacious definitions of sexual assault that can include not only forcible sexual penetration but also nonconsensual touching. Then add the doctrine that the consent of a female who has been drinking might not protect a male from being found guilty of rape. Then comes costly litigation against institutions that have denied due process to males they accuse of what society considers serious felonies.

Will also criticized colleges and universities for attempting "to create victim-free campuses -- by making everyone hypersensitive, even delusional, about victimization."

Despite Will's dismissal of the statistics, a report on sexual violence by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) confirmed that "in a study of undergraduate women, 19% experienced attempted or completed sexual assault since entering college." Moreover, the dangerous stigmatization of sexual assault victims has kept many from reporting these crimes -- particularly because victims who do report can become the targets of vicious attacks. According to the FBI, people falsely report sexual assault only 3 percent of the time.

A Broader Definition of Rape Will Include Male Survivors

The FBI is in the process of changing its definition of rape, which has been unchanged for decades and is essentially useless. Here is the explanation of the current definition, from Slate:

Currently, the only sexual assault the UCR collects data on is “forcible rape,” which it defines as “the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.”  Because “carnal knowledge” is defined as penetration of the penis into the vagina, the definition excludes oral and anal rape, as well as assaults with foreign objects. It also excludes male rape.

 I see as many male survivors of sexual molestation and rape as female, but those men do not show up in the rape figures kept by the FBI. It's long past time for this to change.

What constitutes rape?

An FBI definition excludes a wide range of sexual assaults, including ones against men. That might finally change

By Julia Dahl

 (Credit: Alexander Gitlits via Shutterstock)

For nearly a decade, Carol Tracy, the executive director of the Women’s Law Project, has been agitating for a change in what she describes as the FBI’s  ”archaic” definition of rape.

This month, the agency made a major step forward to doing just that.

At a meeting in Washington last Friday, members of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), including representatives from police agencies in Chicago, Baltimore and Philadelphia, came together with FBI officials and victims’ advocates to discuss the importance of broadening the definition of a crime that most experts believe is significantly underestimated by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR).

Currently, the only sexual assault the UCR collects data on is “forcible rape,” which it defines as “the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.”  Because “carnal knowledge” is defined as penetration of the penis into the vagina, the definition excludes oral and anal rape, as well as assaults with foreign objects. It also excludes male rape.

When Tracy spoke with The Crime Report last summer about the difficulties involved in prosecuting sex crimes, she was frustrated and disheartened at the lack of progress on changing the 80-year-old definition.

In the wake of bombshell reports about thousands of unexamined rape kits languishing in police storage and several recent investigative series, including ones by the Baltimore Sun and the New Orleans Times-Picayune that indicated police often downgrade reports of sexual assault, Tracy said she believed that part of the reason departments weren’t taking these crimes seriously was because national bodies like PERF and the FBI were not showing proper leadership on the subject.

“I actually think we’re losing ground,” she said.

But the future now looks a little brighter.

“There was a clear consensus at the meeting that the UCR definition had to change,” says Tracy, who attended the closed meeting at the invitation of PERF.

Though the proposed change must still go through a working group in October and an advisory group in December, Tracy is hopeful that the momentum is finally on her side.

Scott Berkowitz, the president and founder of the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, agrees:  ”I feel pretty good that it’s actually going to get changed this time.”

Changing Police Paradigms

According to Gregory Scarbro, unit chief of the FBI UCR program, the impetus to reexamine the rape definition came in early 2010 when the agency received a letter from Tracy requesting they look at the issue.

Since then, Scarbro says his office has been discussing the “antiquated” definition with the Department of Justice, the Office on Violence Against Women, and the Office of the Vice President, and working on ways to change local reporting systems to collect the data differently.

“There’s a lot of work to do,” Scarbro told The Crime Report. “We’ll need new forms, people will need to be trained, and there’s no money for it. We know we need to do it — it’s just about getting everything in place to get it done right.”

Scarbro says he hopes to walk out of next month’s working group meeting with a new mechanism that will allow the agency to collect a wider range of data on sexual assault.

Part of the reason this can happen is that police agencies, who the FBI relies on to report to the UCR, are coming aboard. A recent PERF survey found that 80 percent of the more than 300 responding police agencies did not believe the FBI definition of rape was adequate.

According to PERF’s director of communications, Craig Fischer, the push within PERF to change the definition was spearheaded by Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, who testified with Tracy in September 2010 before the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs about underreporting of rape.

Ramsey was unavailable for comment yesterday.

Statistics on the crime of “forcible rape” collected by the UCR have historically been significantly lower than other counts, including the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey. For example, in 2009 the UCR reported just over 88,000 rapes, while the NCVS counted more than 200,000 sexual assaults or attempted sexual assaults.

Part of the reason for the disparate numbers is that UCR records only crimes reported to police (and most experts believe fewer than 50 percent of sexual assaults are actually reported) and voluntarily reported to the FBI. The NCVS, on the other hand, collects data on victimization, regardless of whether the crime was reported.

But the difference also lies in the theory and attitude behind the NCVS survey, which collects data on several kinds of sexual assault, including attempted rape (of a man or woman) and unwanted sexual contact that may nor may not include force.

“We look at the broader scope of victimization,” explains Jennifer Truman, a statistician with the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

And this, says Carol Tracy, is exactly the point.

Police, she believes, should be investigating more seriously all sexual assaults, including those involving intoxicated victims and victims who work as prostitutes, because “there are serial offenders out there” and information gleaned from these crimes that police “don’t always take seriously” can help get these people off the streets. Tracy points to a case in Cleveland where police failed to properly test a rape kit that could have led them to Anthony Sowell — who was recently convicted of killing 11 women and burying them around his home.

This police attitude toward certain kinds of sexual assaults may contribute to low reporting rates. Although the reasons for not reporting an assault or attempted assault are manifold — from shame, to fear, to trauma-induced memory loss — many believe that part of the problem is law enforcement’s focus on investigating the victim’s behavior prior to and during the assault — instead of the perpetrator’s.

Some departments have even been found to routinely downgrade and re-classify rapes as non-crimes. This attitude can scare off already traumatized victims who know that they will have to endure an invasive rape kit as well as questions about their sexual past as part of an investigation.

All these issues, says Tracy, were discussed last Friday. And although the process is far from over, she believes a shift in police paradigm is on the horizon.

“I really feel like police are getting it,” she says. “We may have been preaching to the choir [at the Friday meeting] because everyone there chose to come to a meeting on this subject — but there were a lot of them.”