Child Support, Fatherhood

Child Support is a Crime Against Humanity | Georgia Senator (former) Nancy Schaefer

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“A number of qualitative studies have documented how mothers and grandmothers serve as gatekeepers for the father’s presence in the child’s life, and how institutional practices create barriers, particularly for young fathers (Allen & Doherty, 1995; Wattenberg, 1993). Many of these fathers relinquish involvement, and many who try to stay involved face strong structural and relationship barriers. Among external influences on fathering, the role of the mother has particular salience, since mothers serve as partners and sometimes as gatekeepers in the father­child relationship, both inside and outside marriage (De Luccie, 1995) Mother factors in the conceptual model, of course, interact with the coparental relationship, since the mother’s personal feelings about the father no doubt influence the coparental relationship. But there is also evidence that, even within satisfactory marital relationships, fathers’ involvement with their children, especially young children, is often contingent on the mother’s attitudes towards, expectations of, and support for the father, as well as by the extent of her involvement in the labor force (De Luccie, 1995; Simons, Whitbeck, Congar, & Melby, 1990). Marsiglio (1991), using the National Survey of Families and Households data set, found that mothers’ characteristics were more strongly correlated with fathers’ involvement than fathers’ own characteristics were. Indeed, studies have shown that many mothers, both inside and outside marriage, are ambivalent about the fathers’ active involvement with their children (Baruch & Barnett, 1986; Cowan & Cowan, 1987). Given the powerful cultural forces that expect absorption by women in their mothering role, it is not surprising that active paternal involvement would threaten some women’s identity and sense of control over this central domain of their lives. The evolution of a social consensus on responsible fathering, therefore, will necessarily involve a consensus that responsible mothering means supporting the father­child bond.”
(http://fatherhood.hhs.gov/concept.htm)

“Summary: 62% of custodial mothers do not receive child support. However, of that number, three-fourths of them simply do not want child support, have not asked for it, have accepted other financial arrangements instead of child support, or the father does not have the money. Only 11% of those custodial mothers who do not receive child support, is because of ‘deadbeat dads’.”
(Sources for data: GAO/HRD-92-39FS, January 9, 1992, and DHHS Greenbook, chapter 11)

“About 70 percent of the debt is owed by men who earn $10,000 a year or less, or have no recorded wage earnings at all, according to the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement. Less than 4 percent is owed by men with incomes of more than $40,000. Recent research by the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington, found that aggressive collection of debts played a crucial role in pushing low-income black men ages 25 to 34 out of lawful employment, the opposite effect policy makers might have desired.”
(Source: New York Times; February 19, 2005)

Society

#Equality

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Stop Equality-Mongering Before It Destroys Us

Although the word is shouted far and wide, we seldom consider what we actually mean by equality. And what we usually

And Excerpt from this article: http://thefederalist.com/2015/03/23/stop-equality-mongering-before-it-destroys-us/

It’s only been a few centuries since the idea of equality became a staple of Western political conversations. In that time, it has brought about some substantial benefits. We no longer divide our citizens into peasant and lord or master and slave, for example. Those with power and authority can be brought before a judge and answer to the same law as those they govern. It’s a concept that would be quite novel in many times and places, but it has been effective when it comes to curbing abuses of authority (while it lasts, at any rate.) It’s no wonder that equality has become a powerful political concept. Appealing to it has great potential to spur action and provoke change.

Nevertheless, such power has a tendency to corrupt even good ideas, and equality is no exception. As the West became more and more impressed with this new hammer it acquired, we began to see every social problem as a nail.  As time passed, we sought to extend equality and enforce it within every area of life—often to our own detriment. Eventually, we changed it from a political tool with specific and defined purposes to a broad, factual belief to which all human thought and behavior must be made to conform.

When this happened, equality ceased to be our servant and instead became our god. Rather than a means to an end, we deemed it valuable for its own sake, and today it claims unjust authority over our lives.

‘Equality,’ the Modern Incantation

C. S. Lewis wrote about this transformation half a century ago in “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.” In it, the demon Screwtape discusses Hell’s efforts at undermining every form of human excellence through modernity. He wants the humans to use the word “democracy” as a kind of incantation—not as a term with a clear definition, but as a sound that invokes a particular set of feelings in both speaker and audience. Screwtape advises his underlings accordingly:

You can use the word Democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of all human feelings. You can get get him to practise, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided. The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I’m as good as you.

Our everyday language has changed a bit since 1959. Nowadays, when Americans use democracy as an incantation, it is usually to generate certain feelings about our military adventurism in the Middle East. However, we do use equality in precisely the way Lewis describes. In the same paragraph, Lewis himself connects democracy with “the political ideal that men should be equally treated” which Screwtape uses to “make a stealthy transition in [human] minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal. Especially the man you are working on.”

By and large, invocations of equality are merely used to ward off good judgment.

Regardless of how the magic word has changed, the practical function of the incantation has not. Although the word is shouted far and wide, we seldom consider what we actually mean by equality. Neither do we question exactly what measurements or characteristics we suggest are equal. Sometimes we mean our standing before the law, other times we mean our virtues, still other times we mean our genders, but we never bother to specify because the specifics have become unimportant to us.

By and large, invocations of equality are merely used to ward off good judgment by generating feelings of offended entitlement that cry either “I’m as good as you” or, perhaps just as common among the social-justice warriors who most regularly abuse the word, “He’s as good as you.” No excellence can be acknowledged lest others feel ashamed or left out.

Overemphasizing Equality Erases Distinctions We Need

Some of our most poisonous philosophies have only managed to afflict America under the aegis of this kind of equality. No matter what our differences may be, we are told that these differences make no difference because we are all equal. Yet civilization hinges on the being able to recognize and judge certain differences. When we willfully fail to do so, the natural consequences are dire.

Such a society cannot encourage economic excellence among its citizens because it flattens the difference between excellence and inferiority.

Socialists, for example, proclaim an idealistic equality of rich, poor, and everyone in between as their rationale for equalizing wealth and income among them in fact. They chant equality over incomes and outcomes and expect society to fall in line. But a broad equality that purports to cover every aspect of economics ignores the very important distinction between the industrious and the lazy—between those who produce wealth and those who merely consume it.

Unfortunately, a society that is either blind to this difference or dismisses it as unimportant is fundamentally incapable of either discouraging laziness or rewarding and training a strong work ethic. It cannot encourage economic excellence among its citizens because it flattens the difference between excellence and inferiority. Equality instead demands the redistribution of wealth among lazy and industrious alike. Accordingly, such a society rewards the administration of wealth rather than its production, for only administration can achieve this venerated equality.

This is precisely how our own economy has shifted over the years. Administration does have a legitimate role to play, in that it aids the productive by greasing the wheels of commerce; but we do not treat it as a mere supporting role. The wealthiest of us are increasingly found among the bankers—those who administrate the wealth others have produced and skim off as much as they can.

The wealthiest of us are increasingly found among those who administrate the wealth others have produced and skim off as much as they can.

Likewise, the largest and most successful businesses tend to be the ones who are better at influencing government administrators to provide them special favors and opportunities. Meanwhile, as Lewis observed over 50 years ago, taxes and penalties meant to equalize rich and poor are destroying the middle class. These were precisely the people most willing to make sacrifices so their children would be better-educated and more productive than they were themselves—the class which, Lewis notes, “gave to the humans the overwhelming majority of their scientists, physicians, philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, composers, architects, jurists, and administrators.”

Equality-Mongering Diminishes Human Excellence

Multiculturalism is another philosophy which diminishes human excellence by making frequent use of the magic word. In this case, that feeling of “I’m as good as you” is used to blind us to the distinction between the barbaric and the civilized.

Refusing to distinguish between vice and virtue renders us unable to commend the civilized or condemn the barbaric.

The most common and obvious examples are found in our schools, where no aspect of American heritage can be spoken of with pride lest any of those of other heritage feel bad. We go out of our way to honor very troubled societies simply for not being us. To be sure, we have our vices and other cultures possess their virtues. Nevertheless, refusing to distinguish between vice and virtue renders us unable to commend the civilized or condemn the barbaric—both amongst ourselves and others.

This same blindness afflicts our current conversation on immigration. We refuse to consider that our nation may not be made better off by admitting people who fully intend to cling to their own culture’s barbarisms. Any thought that we are made worse off by welcoming droves of people with no root in traditions that have served us well—English common law, limited government, the rule of law—is dismissed by another magic word: racism. Like equality, racism is used more for the emotional reaction it provokes than for its actual meaning. More often than not, it is merely another provocative and ham-fisted incantation meant to ward off legitimate criticism.

But perhaps the most destructive philosophy that abuses equality is feminism. Here equality is invoked to obscure the differences between men and women. Human excellence is once again inhibited because men are discouraged from pursuing masculinity and women from pursuing femininity. After all, feminists chant equality in order to pretend that masculinity and femininity are both a kind of cultural illusion.  Instead, they hold up confused ideals of an androgynye—a person that is neither male nor female (or perhaps both.) Yet such creatures do not exist. There are no androgynous humans—only male humans and female humans.

Using Equality to Hide Moral Bankruptcy

The laws, customs, and other social mechanics feminists have foisted on us to hide the obvious differences between men and women have caused incalculable harm. A mother, for example, has a unique relationship with her unborn child, but feminists try to erase that difference. They work feverishly to make sure mothers can terminate that relationship, along with her child, for any reason—at a growing cost of tens of millions of lives. They then go a step further to make sure such a blood-soaked choice bears no social stigma.

True love—giving yourself for the sake of another—is considered perverse, while living for yourself no matter what it does to your family is considered a virtue.

Likewise, to break down distinct gender roles which have served civilization well for millennia, feminists encourage men and women to base relationships around a peculiar selfishness glamoured by equality. True love—giving yourself for the sake of another—is considered perverse, while living for yourself no matter what it does to your family is considered a virtue.

To provide a relief valve for the predictable unhappiness that follows, feminists sought no-fault divorce laws. These allow any spouse (and through the biased family court system especially encourages wives) to walk out on marriage and family for any reason at all. Feminism also walked hand in hand with the sexual revolution, which chanted equality in order to veil the moral distinctions between the chaste and the unchaste. The obvious result is that our society has refused to teach the virtue of chastity lest the slut feel ashamed. As a result, we force our children to wander an increasingly harmful sexual anarchy without guidance.

Here’s the Pivotal Question

What then shall we do? America cannot proceed with its uncritical vision of an unbounded and undefined equality—not when we consider the cost. At the same time, we do not want to lose the baby with the bathwater by rejecting equality altogether. It has been a very helpful political tool, after all. How, then, can we once more make it our servant rather than our master?

Whenever anyone says that people, cultures, or anything else are equal, they need to be able to answer a simple question: Equal in what sense?

The balance lies in removing equality from the realm of the vague and magical into the realm of the specific and practical. Whenever anyone says that people, cultures, or anything else are equal, they need to be able to answer a simple question: Equal in what sense?

Read the rest HERE:  http://thefederalist.com/2015/03/23/stop-equality-mongering-before-it-destroys-us/

Society

Safe Spaces, Trigger Warnings and The Return Of Kids To Pre-Schoolers While In College

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It appears as if college is a return to pre-school. I refuse to send my kids to a school that has “trigger warnigns”, “safe spaces,” and feels that the student body needs to be protected in this way. This is totally ridiculous. 

This is a grea comment: “Education occurs when you’re exposed to the world, and shielding yourself from it means that you’re not receiving an education. If there are things that you find too sensitive to bear, then you shouldn’t attend that meeting or take that course. Stay at home, in your room, with the windows shut and the TV off. But don’t expect a university to alter its core mission in some misguided attempt to prevent people from being exposed to reality. If this were to happen, the students who were the most afraid of knowledge who would be setting the curricula. What kind of education would that provide?”

An excpert from this article: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/judith-shulevitz-hiding-from-scary-ideas.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1&referrer=


KATHERINE BYRON, a senior at Brown University and a member of its Sexual Assault Task Force, considers it her duty to make Brown a safe place for rape victims, free from anything that might prompt memories of trauma. 

So when she heard last fall that a student group had organized a debate about campus sexual assault between Jessica Valenti, the founder of feministing.com, and Wendy McElroy, a libertarian, and that Ms. McElroy was likely to criticize the term “rape culture,” Ms. Byron was alarmed. “Bringing in a speaker like that could serve to invalidate people’s experiences,” she told me. It could be “damaging.” 

Ms. Byron and some fellow task force members secured a meeting with administrators. Not long after, Brown’s president, Christina H. Paxson, announced that the university would hold a simultaneous, competing talk to provide “research and facts” about “the role of culture in sexual assault.” Meanwhile, student volunteers put up posters advertising that a “safe space” would be available for anyone who found the debate too upsetting.

The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. 

Emma Hall, a junior, rape survivor and “sexual assault peer educator” who helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point she went to the lecture hall — it was packed — but after a while, she had to return to the safe space. “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,” Ms. Hall said.

  

Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being “bombarded” by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material. 

Some people trace safe spaces back to the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s, others to the gay and lesbian movement of the early 1990s. In most cases, safe spaces are innocuous gatherings of like-minded people who agree to refrain from ridicule, criticism or what they term microaggressions — subtle displays of racial or sexual bias — so that everyone can relax enough to explore the nuances of, say, a fluid gender identity. As long as all parties consent to such restrictions, these little islands of self-restraint seem like a perfectly fine idea.

But the notion that ticklish conversations must be scrubbed clean of controversy has a way of leaking out and spreading. Once you designate some spaces as safe, you imply that the rest are unsafe. It follows that they should be made safer. 

This logic clearly informed a campaign undertaken this fall by a Columbia University student group called Everyone Allied Against Homophobia that consisted of slipping a flier under the door of every dorm room on campus. The headline of the flier stated, “I want this space to be a safer space.” The text below instructed students to tape the fliers to their windows. The group’s vice president then had the flier published in the Columbia Daily Spectator, the student newspaper, along with an editorial asserting that “making spaces safer is about learning how to be kind to each other.” 

A junior named Adam Shapiro decided he didn’t want his room to be a safer space. He printed up his own flier calling it a dangerous space and had that, too, published in the Columbia Daily Spectator. “Kindness alone won’t allow us to gain more insight into truth,” he wrote. In an interview, Mr. Shapiro said, “If the point of a safe space is therapy for people who feel victimized by traumatization, that sounds like a great mission.” But a safe-space mentality has begun infiltrating classrooms, he said, making both professors and students loath to say anything that might hurt someone’s feelings. “I don’t see how you can have a therapeutic space that’s also an intellectual space,” he said.

I’m old enough to remember a time when college students objected to providing a platform to certain speakers because they were deemed politically unacceptable. Now students worry whether acts of speech or pieces of writing may put them in emotional peril. Two weeks ago, students at Northwestern University marched to protest an article by Laura Kipnis, a professor in the university’s School of Communication. Professor Kipnis had criticized — O.K., ridiculed — what she called the sexual paranoia pervading campus life. 

The protesters carried mattresses and demanded that the administration condemn the essay. One student complained that Professor Kipnis was “erasing the very traumatic experience” of victims who spoke out. An organizer of the demonstration said, “we need to be setting aside spaces to talk” about “victim-blaming.” Last Wednesday, Northwestern’s president, Morton O. Schapiro, wrote an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal affirming his commitment to academic freedom. But plenty of others at universities are willing to dignify students’ fears, citing threats to their stability as reasons to cancel debates, disinvite commencement speakers and apologize for so-called mistakes.

At Oxford University’s Christ Church college in November, the college censors (a “censor” being more or less the Oxford equivalent of an undergraduate dean) canceled a debate on abortion after campus feminists threatened to disrupt it because both would-be debaters were men. “I’m relieved the censors have made this decision,” said the treasurer of Christ Church’s student union, who had pressed for the cancellation. “It clearly makes the most sense for the safety — both physical and mental — of the students who live and work in Christ Church.” 
A year and a half ago, a Hampshire College student group disinvited an Afrofunk band that had been attacked on social media for having too many white musicians; the vitriolic discussion had made students feel “unsafe.” 

Last fall, the president of Smith College, Kathleen McCartney, apologized for causing students and faculty to be “hurt” when she failed to object to a racial epithet uttered by a fellow panel member at an alumnae event in New York. The offender was the free-speech advocate Wendy Kaminer, who had been arguing against the use of the euphemism “the n-word” when teaching American history or “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” In the uproar that followed, the Student Government Association wrote a letter declaring that “if Smith is unsafe for one student, it is unsafe for all students.” 

“It’s amazing to me that they can’t distinguish between racist speech and speech about racist speech, between racism and discussions of racism,” Ms. Kaminer said in an email. 

The confusion is telling, though. It shows that while keeping college-level discussions “safe” may feel good to the hypersensitive, it’s bad for them and for everyone else. People ought to go to college to sharpen their wits and broaden their field of vision. Shield them from unfamiliar ideas, and they’ll never learn the discipline of seeing the world as other people see it. They’ll be unprepared for the social and intellectual headwinds that will hit them as soon as they step off the campuses whose climates they have so carefully controlled. What will they do when they hear opinions they’ve learned to shrink from? If they want to change the world, how will they learn to persuade people to join them? 

Only a few of the students want stronger anti-hate-speech codes. Mostly they ask for things like mandatory training sessions and stricter enforcement of existing rules. Still, it’s disconcerting to see students clamor for a kind of intrusive supervision that would have outraged students a few generations ago. But those were hardier souls. Now students’ needs are anticipated by a small army of service professionals — mental health counselors, student-life deans and the like. This new bureaucracy may be exacerbating students’ “self-infantilization,” as Judith Shapiro, the former president of Barnard College, suggested in an essay for Inside Higher Ed.

But why are students so eager to self-infantilize? Their parents should probably share the blame. Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, wrote on Slate last month that although universities cosset students more than they used to, that’s what they have to do, because today’s undergraduates are more puerile than their predecessors. “Perhaps overprogrammed children engineered to the specifications of college admissions offices no longer experience the risks and challenges that breed maturity,” he wrote. But “if college students are children, then they should be protected like children.” 

Another reason students resort to the quasi-medicalized terminology of trauma is that it forces administrators to respond. Universities are in a double bind. They’re required by two civil-rights statutes, Title VII and Title IX, to ensure that their campuses don’t create a “hostile environment” for women and other groups subject to harassment. However, universities are not supposed to go too far in suppressing free speech, either. If a university cancels a talk or punishes a professor and a lawsuit ensues, history suggests that the university will lose. But if officials don’t censure or don’t prevent speech that may inflict psychological damage on a member of a protected class, they risk fostering a hostile environment and prompting an investigation. As a result, students who say they feel unsafe are more likely to be heard than students who demand censorship on other grounds.

The theory that vulnerable students should be guaranteed psychological security has roots in a body of legal thought elaborated in the 1980s and 1990s and still read today. Feminist and anti-racist legal scholars argued that the First Amendment should not safeguard language that inflicted emotional injury through racist or sexist stigmatization. One scholar, Mari J. Matsuda, was particularly insistent that college students not be subjected to “the violence of the word” because many of them “are away from home for the first time and at a vulnerable stage of psychological development.” If they’re targeted and the university does nothing to help them, they will be “left to their own resources in coping with the damage wrought.” That might have, she wrote, “lifelong repercussions.”


Read the entire piece HERE: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/judith-shulevitz-hiding-from-scary-ideas.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1&referrer=

Society

How my mother’s fanatical feminist views tore us apart, by the daughter of The Color Purple author – Alice Walker

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Alice Walker’s daughter Rebecca speaking her truth…and the truth of so many other women:

I know many women are shocked by my views. They expect the daughter of Alice Walker to deliver a very different message. Yes, feminism has undoubtedly given women opportunities.

It’s helped open the doors for us at schools, universities and in the workplace. But what about the problems it’s caused for my contemporaries?

   
What about the children?

The ease with which people can get divorced these days doesn’t take into account the toll on children. That’s all part of the unfinished business of feminism.

Then there is the issue of not having children. Even now, I meet women in their 30s who are ambivalent about having a family. They say things like: ‘I’d like a child. If it happens, it happens.’ I tell them: ‘Go home and get on with it because your window of opportunity is very small.’ As I know only too well.

 

Then I meet women in their 40s who are devastated because they spent two decades working on a PhD or becoming a partner in a law firm, and they missed out on having a family. Thanks to the feminist movement, they discounted their biological clocks. They’ve missed the opportunity and they’re bereft.

Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating.

But far from taking responsibility for any of this, the leaders of the women’s movement close ranks against anyone who dares to question them  –  as I have learned to my cost. I don’t want to hurt my mother, but I cannot stay silent. I believe feminism is an experiment, and all experiments need to be assessed on their results. Then, when you see huge mistakes have been paid, you need to make alterations.

Read the entire piece HERE: 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1021293/How-mothers-fanatical-feminist-views-tore-apart-daughter-The-Color-Purple-author.html

Society

CNN’s New Rape Documentary Relies On Myths, Not Facts

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 An excerpt from this article: http://dailycaller.com/2015/03/19/cnns-new-rape-documentary-relies-on-myths-not-facts/

“The Hunting Ground,” a newly released documentary about sexual assault on college campuses, is earning rave reviews, drawing the attention of D.C. lawmakers, and could even have an effect on the upcoming NFL draft. Though currently showing in just a few theaters, it will reach reach a huge audience by the end of the year when it is shown on CNN. But the way the film handles sexual assault statistics and individual allegations of rape raises three crucial questions about whether the film warrants the effusive response it has garnered.

As its title suggests, “The Hunting Ground” presents America’s college campuses as hotbeds of sexual assault where predatory rapists can act with impunity because schools are unwilling to do anything to address the problem. The film’s strength is built on an almost overwhelming deluge of personal accounts by women (and a few men) who recount suffering violent rapes and then struggling to obtain justice.

Annie Clark, one of the central figures of the documentary, says she was told by an administrator that “rape is like a football game,” where she should think back on what she could have done differently to avoid the rape. Another girl, Lizzy Seeberg, is said to have killed herself after Notre Dame police moved too slowly in investigating her alleged rape at the hands of a football player.

A close watching of the film, however, shows that it relies on several questionable facts to make its case, and sometimes misleads the viewer in a way that calls the entire film’s legitimacy and reliability into question.

One In Five, Or 0.6 Percent?

Crucial to the documentary’s strength is the claim that rape is virtually routine on college campuses, and that its frequency calls for drastic action. Within the first few minutes, the documentary touts the statistic that “16 to 20 percent” of women are raped while at college. The stat is extremely popular among activists, and even the White House has cited it. Sometimes the number is pushed even higher: There is a national anti-rape organization named One in Four. John Foubert, an Oklahoma State professor and One in Four’s founder, appears in “The Hunting Ground,” where he emphasizes that college is an exceptionally unsafe place for women.

The one in five figure, however, is very shaky. It primarily comes from the Campus Sexual Assault Study, conducted from 2005 to 2007. In that study, researchers conducted interviews with 5,446 undergraduate women, and found that 19 percent of them had experienced a successful or attempted sexual assault.

Case closed?  Not quite. First of all, the survey is based on interviews with students from just two large four-year universities, one in the South and one in the Midwest. That’s hardly a sample that can be generalized to every one of the country’s 4,000+ colleges and universities.

Second, the survey was conducted online and had a low response rate, clearly inviting the possibility that women who had actually been sexually assaulted were more likely to take and complete the survey in the first place.

Third, the survey covered not just rape and similar levels of assault, but all types of unwanted sexual contact, which could include unwanted kissing or fondling. Such activities are bad, but also far different from rape.

Fuzzy questions also allow for the number to be inflated. A big chunk of the supposed sexual assaults were classified as such because those surveyed said they had sex when they didn’t want to while under the influence of alcohol. While surveyors likely intended this question to only include those who were so drunk that they were incapable of understanding what was going on, the question leaves ample room for those surveyed to include any sexual encounter while intoxicated.

How common is sexual assault on campus, then? A more rigorous 2014 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the Department of Justice found that female college students between the ages of 18 and 24 were raped at a rate of 6.1 per 1,000 — or, about 0.6 percent each year. Not only that, but contrary to claims that college campuses are exceptionally unsafe for women, the bureau found that women of the same age who were not in college were about 20 percent more likely to be raped in a given year.

Are Only 11 Percent Of Reported Rapes True? By Their Logic, Yes …

The movie also engages in statistical sleight of hand when it comes to the thorny issue of false rape accusations. According to the film, only 2 to 8 percent of rape claims are found to be false, with the implication that between 92 and 98 percent are true, and that universities should be more willing to implicitly believe accusers. David Lisak, a retired UMass-Boston professor who is quoted as an expert several times in the film, authored a paper finding that about 6 percent of rape accusations at a particular university were false.

But the statistics are actually far less clear than that. Lisak’s paper, for instance, only classifies a rape as “false” if investigators, following a rigorous investigation, found clear evidence that a rape was totally fabricated (such evidence as a rock-solid alibi for the accused, or physical evidence that shows the accuser was lying).

A similar situation exists with FBI data, where research has classified about 8 percent of rape reports as “unfounded” (the highest of the eight crimes tracked in the FBI’s annual crime index). Police only classify a rape report as “unfounded” when strong evidence exists that no crime ever happened.

What these stats don’t account for are the huge number of cases where there isn’t substantial evidence that a rape claim is true or false. In Lisak’s sample, for instance, more than 50 percent of cases were investigated and then closed without pursuing a prosecution due to lack of evidence, an uncooperative witness, or other shortcomings. While not all of these cases are actually false, they also likely aren’t all true, or else they could be prosecuted.

The upshot: Saying that only 2-8 percent of rape reports are false is like saying that only 11 percent are true because that’s the number that ultimately end in a successful criminal conviction.

Read the rest here: http://dailycaller.com/2015/03/19/cnns-new-rape-documentary-relies-on-myths-not-facts/