There’s Nothing Academic About Campus Rape

“The price of a college education should never be the risk of a sexual assault,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., told a Senate hearing Wednesday. Too many colleges don’t treat rape, she observed, as “the violent felony that it actually is.” Her solution is the bipartisan Campus Accountability and Safety Act, or CASA, which would require college campuses to designate confidential advisers to victims of sexual assault and establish rules for campus investigations of sexual assaults.

Gillibrand means well; there’s no question about it. But Congress telling American universities how they should handle campus rape truly is an instance of the blind leading the blind. If the goal is to treat campus rape as the violent felony it is, don’t expect deans and assistant deans to conduct investigations — unless you want to over-politicize the process. If you want to treat rape as a crime, leave assault investigations to the police.

When you think about it, it doesn’t make any sense to treat rape differently just because it happened on a campus. Victim activists support allowing students to bypass the judicial system by appealing to university tribunals, which could result in perpetrators being expelled or removed from campus. “We’re going to throw him off campus,” Kevin O’Neill, executive director of the Fraternity and Sorority Political Action Committee, told me. If a sexual predator is kicked off campus but free to roam the streets, the public at large will be less safe. If victims file complaints with their colleges but not cops, sexual predators win.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, rape and sexual assault rates are greater for women ages 18 to 24 who are not in school (7.6 per 1,000) than they are for students (6.1 per 1,000). So you’ve got Congress looking to create an extra layer of enforcement for a population less at risk.

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