I spent hours yesterday fighting a deeply unpopular battle: publicly defending George Lawlor, a student who has been vilified as a “rapist” and “misogynist” – simply for declining to attend an optional ‘I Heart Consent’ sexual consent seminar.

Lawlor, 19, a second year politics and sociology undergraduate at Warwick University, caused a storm last month when he wrote about his decision, and was photographed holding a sign that read ‘this is not what a rapist looks like.’

Within hours, the trigger-happy Feminist Outrage Army once again roared to war on social media, with many tweeters smearing him as a misogynist.

Yesterday, Lawlor reported that the venom has bled from the digital screens of social media into daily life, where he's been physically threatened in bars, bullied on public transport and is now too afraid to attend lectures.

Warwick University

“In real life, the bus to university was the worst,” he said. “I heard people saying, ‘I really want to hit that kid’. It was really scary, it got really nasty.

“In a bar, six guys just crowded round me and started shouting at me, calling me a rapist, a misogynist, and threatening me. I had to get out of there. I don’t want to play the victim card, but afterwards I cried.”

“I wouldn't change what I did, but I'm incredibly worried that it has utterly destroyed any chances I have of getting a good job,” Lawlor confided to me.

My spirited defence of George Lawlor on @LBC @NickFerrariLBC 100% caller support for George follows https://t.co/sbLyUXjGpa — Martin Daubney (@MartinDaubney) November 23, 2015

This strikes me as both tragic and unfair. Remember, Lawlor isn’t a sex offender, and has broken no law. He simply declined to attend a sexual consent seminar, and for that his reputation has been dragged through the mud.

Over the past month, I've got to know Lawlor well. He's a decent, well-mannered, erudite, and quiet young man – a million miles away from a woman-hating Neanderthal.

Sadly, Lawlor's case is an accident that has been waiting to happen. All too often the dialogue around consent on campus is one where men are the “problem” and women are the “victims” – and the solution lies in realigning men.

Lawlor's experience is just one manifestation of how university life is becoming increasingly challenging for men. From Nobel Laureate to humble undergraduates – see Sir Tim Hunt’s ”the problem with women” comments – anyone who dares to challenge the PC narrative heads straight into the iron maiden.

The situation is becoming so severe that some young male students are now becoming too scared to even go near women on campus – just in case.

Sir Tim Hun Credit: AP

For the past two months, I’ve immersed myself in the highly-secretive (and oft-maligned) world of the MGTOWs – the Men Going Their Own Way.

To my sadness, if not surprise, I discovered a rapidly-growing, global army of men who have concluded that sex, relationships, marriage and fathering children in the modern world is simply “too risky”.

The MGTOWs feel the “gynocentric” system is stacked against men, so they’re quietly opting out, preferring instead to retreat into their man caves to indulge in video games, porn, self-improvement through study or the gym. They're finding the comfort of male-only friends, usually online (but not for sex).

Despite the fact they are usually sexual pacifists who have figured “the only way to win the game is to not play”, for their viewpoints these men are variously dismissed as “toxic misogynists” or ridiculed as “a cult for lonely virgins”.

Increasingly, these men are of university age.

"Younger men are now being treated like dangerous sexual predators and suspects. This is an appalling situation.” Miles Groth, Wagner College

One is David Sherratt, 18, a chemistry student at Cardiff University, who told me, “Hook-up sex is too risky for words. Girls can wake up the next day and claim you raped them. I’m genuinely too scared to go near a woman — just in case. At university, I’m made to feel like a rapist all the time”.

This sentiment was echoed by three other student MGTOWs I spoke with, as well as globally-respected British and American academics.

Miles Groth, professor of psychology at Wagner College in New York, has seen an increasingly anti-man sentiment take grip on campus over the last 20 years.

“Due to the new politically correct atmosphere on campuses, and widely circulated statistics such as one in five American college women will be sexually assaulted, the younger men are now being treated like dangerous sexual predators and suspects,” he says. “This is an appalling situation.”

"Too often the dialogue is men are the “problem” and women are the “victims” – and the solution lies in realigning men."

My MGTOW crusade has calcified something I’ve long suspected: British universities are fostering a mindset where men are discouraged, and sometimes even reviled – but could it actually put men off attending altogether, or drop out once they are there?

Erin Pizzey, veteran founder of the women’s domestic-violence charity Refuge, believes so, saying, “Is there any wonder these men are disengaging?”

Consent classes are popping up on campuses across the country

We already know that men are now a minority on most British campuses and the gender gap is at a record high. While women have outnumbered men in admissions for years, 2014 figures show that the gap has widened to nearly 58,000, with women making up more than half of students in two-thirds of subject areas.

That gap is increasing: over 90,000 more women than men have applied to university this year and in England young women are now 36 per cent more likely to apply.

Partly, the switch to coursework-based assessment has meant that men are performing worse at all levels of education pre-University.

But the demonisation of men on campus is now a serious business, and one that keeps Gender Studies academics in work and diversity officers in seats of power.

Yet despite anecdotally-driven, politically motivated and deeply unscientific studies – such as the NUS’s ‘That’s what she said’ paper – there is little, if any, proof that our Unis are somehow more dangerous than they’ve ever been, or that actual violent sexual assaults are increasing.

Instead, it appears the continuing “war” on campus lad culture is bearing fruit in the form of men turning their backs on University in ever increasing numbers.

After experiences like George Lawlor's, how many more teenage boys will look at this sorry spectacle and think, ‘What’s the point even bothering to apply?’