No rape crisis on our campuses: official

• Bettina Arndt
• 

  Columnist

  @thebettinaarndt

  

The survey found only 1.6 per cent of students reported being sexually assaulted in a university setting in 2015-16 — even using a broad definition that included being “tricked into sexual acts against their will” and including incidents during travel to and from campus. Most didn’t report the sexual assaults because they didn’t feel it was serious enough (40 per cent), or because they did not need any help (40 per cent).

• INQUIRER: Rape culture narrative on campus encourages fear and false allegations

All they came up with is a high incidence of low-level harassment — mainly involving staring and sexual jokes or comments. So there’s no rape crisis at all, although clearly it’s a good idea for proper support for the small numbers of women who allege sexual assault, and for sexual harassment to be discouraged.

Just watch as this good news is buried in a massive media blitz, particularly on Fairfax and the ABC, who have bought into the rape crisis narrative. We’ll be bombarded with horrific stories from submissions from rape “victims” describing their experiences — all solicited by the commission.

The problem is, they are not rape “victims”. They are accusers whose stories have never been tested in court — mainly date-rape cases, he-said, she-said stories revolving around sexual consent. Such cases often don’t result in convictions because juries won’t punish young men for these very serious crimes unless there is clear evidence of their guilt.

That’s what led to the trumped-up campaign. Feminists want these men convicted and are browbeating universities to sidestep the criminal justice system to ensure more men are punished.

The HRC has worked hard to find data that conforms to the “rape culture” narrative, having accepted $1m from Universities Australia to dig up evidence. What a disappointment for the organisation promoting the propaganda movie, The Hunting Ground, which provided $150,000 in seed funding for the survey.

The researchers did everything they could to produce evidence of the “rape epidemic”. One wonders why the tiny sexual assault figure of 1.6 per cent refers to a two-year period, from 2015 to 2016, when the harassment data is gathered in one year? Even the loose definition of assault didn’t do the trick: “a person forced, coerced, or tricked into sexual acts against their will or without their consent, including when they have withdrawn consent”.

And the report acknowledged the response rate of 9.7 per cent represents people “who were moti­vated to respond”.

All of this, plus years of publicity promoting the rape scare campaign and still such tiny numbers reporting sexual assault.

Universities were given these results ahead of time yet vice-chancellors last week indulged in virtue-signalling exercises proving their willingness to respond to the rape crisis. Their offices provided weasel-worded responses to questions concerning the risk that the campus rape scare might put off full-fee-paying overseas students. And all that time they knew the rape-crisis bubble had burst.