Called a rapist: Second-year George Lawlor fears for his future at Warwick University after being ostracised and bullied for challenging a student union drive to hold rape awareness sessions

Pity today’s male undergraduate, tasked with navigating his way through the thorny thicket of university gender politics.

For surely Oliver Cromwell himself, history’s most notorious puritan, would have admired the zeal of the new generation of self-styled feminist campaigners, with all their fury over perceived grievances.

The latest target of their rage is George Lawlor, a second-year politics and sociology student at Warwick University, who dared to question the effectiveness of sexual consent workshops run on his campus.

The brainchild of the Left-wing National Union of Students, these consent classes are being rolled out across the higher education sector.

Oxford and Cambridge hold mandatory sexual consent workshops for students during Freshers’ week to discuss ‘myths and misunderstandings’ around rape and harassment.

But Lawlor made the mistake of challenging the feminist orthodoxy by writing on an internet blog that he was offended by the invitation to attend since the vast majority of men ‘don’t have to be taught not to be a rapist’.

Brainwashing

He claimed — and, I believe, quite rightly — that this student union initiative would do nothing to address the real issue of sexual crimes against women, since every workshop would ‘just be an echo chamber of people pointing out the obvious and others nodding’.

But the validity of George Lawlor’s points did nothing to quell the tempest that engulfed him. Like someone labelled a heretic in the 17th century or a Communist in Fifties McCarthyite Washington, he was deemed to have offended the dogma of our times.

So he was subjected to a relentless campaign of personal vilification, abused on a bus travelling to the university and hounded out of a bar in Leamington. So ferocious was the condemnation that he even stopped attending lectures.

Some might say that George Lawlor had wilfully tried to pick a fight with the hardline feminists and their fellow travellers, particularly because — to accompany his blog article — he posed for a selfie photograph holding up a placard with the slogan: ‘This is not what a rapist looks like.’

To his detractors, he was pandering to stereotypes; after all, there is no Identikit image for a rapist, not on the basis of age or colour or size or height or affluence or attractiveness.

But the feminist argument is wrong on several levels.

Lawlor should be allowed to express his opinion, no matter how offensive some people find it, without ending up a pariah.

Universities are meant to be citadels of open debate, not hermetically sealed fortresses of brainwashing.

Nor should they be free of humour. With his placard, Lawlor was poking fun at that sanctimonious T-shirt campaign entitled ‘This is what a feminist looks like’, run last year by the self-appointed pressure group the Fawcett Society, attracting support from politicians such as Ed Miliband and celebrities including Benedict Cumberbatch.

But those engaged at the forefront of gender politics do not tend to appreciate people challenging their viewpoint.

I am not remotely under-estimating the seriousness of rape and sexual assault. Apart from murder, they are among the darkest crimes known to humanity. But it is precisely because they are so serious that they should not be used as vehicles for doctrinaire point-scoring or political power games.

Sadly, that is what seems to be happening in this case.

For decades, the repugnant theory that ‘all men are rapists’ has lain at the heart of radical feminism, and statistics are quoted to support the tenor of that argument.

Considerable coverage was given to an American study this year that suggested nearly one-third of male students had admitted they would act on ‘intentions to force a woman to have sexual intercourse’ if they could get away with it.

Shocking, certainly — but then it emerged the sample size was not 10,000 men or even 1,000, but just 73 students.

Writing in a blog, Mr Lawlor (pictured) argued that the overwhelming majority of people ‘don’t have to be taught to not be a rapist’ – and that men inclined to commit the crime would be unlikely to attend such a workshop

Another U.S. campus study — this time of a large number of students — found nearly a quarter of female undergraduates said they were victims of sexual assault and misconduct.

Yet when that disturbing figure is examined, it should be noted the average response rate to the survey was just 19 per cent, sparking worries that the result was artificially skewed because hundreds of thousands of students did not reply, and it is thought that victims are more likely to take part in such a study.

As George Lawlor had the temerity to point out, the view that all men have the potential to be sexual attackers seems to prevail within the student union movement in Britain, prompting the demand that men should undergo ‘re-education’ in order to quell any criminally sexual urges.

But this is all a lot of nonsense. The overwhelming majority of men are not rapists, just as they are not violent criminals or fraudsters or thieves.

There would rightly be outrage if the police invited all men in a certain neighbourhood to attend an anti-burglary or anti-car theft workshop, so why is it any different for sexual crimes?

Dogmatic

Even with a minor offence such as speeding, the only people who are sent on ‘speed awareness workshops’ are those who have actually been caught speeding.

Contrary to the idea that rape awareness classes can lead to greater understanding between the sexes, I think that they can actually promote friction and suspicion.

Students — who should be enjoying the freedoms that come with exploring adult life for the first time — can find themselves thrown into an atmosphere of distrust.

Indeed, as the mother of a son in his early 20s, I often feel anxious for young men as they embark on relationships, because of the social and legal minefield that the dogmatic feminists have created.

I just don’t think consent workshops are the most sensible path to forming healthy relationships between the sexes.

Besides, if they are voluntary, as is often the case, one questions whether the men who attend them are likely to be the ones at risk of going on to sexually assault women.

The other point to make in all this is about the language of modern gender politics.

The idea of sexual ‘consent’ has become such a shibboleth that little consideration is given to what might go on even if consent has been agreed.

Only this week we learned that scandal-ridden Tory activist Mark Clarke is said to have dislocated the jaw of one of his lovers by slapping her during a ‘consensual sex session’. The blow was so hard that she ended up in hospital.

People took to Twitter to express their anger (pictured) after Mr Lawlor wrote a blog about 'consent workshops'

Degrading

Any mature adult knows that sexual ethics involve far more than just ticking a box marked ‘consent’ before you begin — then doing what the heck you like. But a dangerous assumption seems to be growing that sex can be brutal or degrading just so long as you’ve sought and obtained the magic word ‘yes’.

The truth is sex is not a business transaction, like signing a mobile phone contract. It should be about love, emotions and two people treating each other with kindness and respect.

The pernicious effect of this simplistic concentration on consent is that an ‘anything goes’ culture surrounds sex in modern feminist circles.

Those who are deemed not sufficiently liberated or ‘sex positive’ — who might question the ethics of consensual activities such as prostitution, for example — are lambasted for ‘shaming’ other women.

There is no easy answer to the troubling questions of modern sexuality and how men and women should interact in an age of internet pornography and online apps such as Tinder that allow couples to ‘hook up’ at the touch of a button.

But what doesn’t help the sexes find an accommodation is for a man who declines to go to a university seminar being vilified as a ‘rapist’ by self-righteous critics whose own obsession with ‘consent’ is dangerously flawed.

George Lawlor does not deserve the abuse heaped on him for making his brave trumpet blast against the prevailing creed.