More than 17,000 students attend the University at Albany-SUNY. Feminists insist that 1-in-5 college women are victims of rape on campus, and this statistic presents a bit of a problem for Carol Stenger, director of the university’s Advocacy Center for Sexual Assault. Last year there were only 28 reports of sexual assault at SUNY-Albany and it doesn’t require advanced math skills to realize that 28-in-17,000 is a long way from 1-in-5. This didn’t seem to faze Ms. Stenger, who spoke of the need to “increase reporting” of sexual assault and declared: “We know the national statistics. It’s happening everywhere.”

Is it really “happening”? Is there a “campus rape epidemic” to such an extent that 1-in-5 college women are victimized? If so, then we would expect that the sexual assault “awareness” efforts of feminists, augmented by the enforcement authority of the federal Department of Education and a White House Task Force, would bring these cases to light and confirm those “national statistics” of which Ms. Stenger spoke. The reports at SUNY-Albany are clearly insufficient, as Ashe Schow of the Washington Examiner explains:

There weren’t the thousands of reports that Stenger seems to want in order to fall in line with debunked national statistics (the claim that 1 in 5 women will be sexually assaulted while in college), either.

In the past year, Albany had 28 reports of sexual assault, twice as many as it had before Stenger opened her advocacy center. . . .

For the record, those 28 reports don’t break down to what alarmist national statistics say they should.

“Nine of them were from students who asked the university not to take action. Six resulted in disciplinary proceedings that led to two student expulsions and one persona non grata order against a nonstudent,” the [Albany, N.Y.] Times Union reported. “Six were from third parties (when reached, the alleged victims either denied any violence occurred or declined to speak). Four involved assailants whose identities were unknown. Three were outside the university’s jurisdiction.”

In other words, Ms. Stenger’s official “advocacy” resulted in a doubling in the number of sexual assault reports, but only five of those 28 reports (18%) warranted disciplinary proceedings against students, with a sixth disciplinary case involving a non-student. SUNY-Albany expelled exactly two students, out of a total campus population of more than 17,000, for sexual misconduct. Certainly, the situation at SUNY-Albany does not confirm feminist claims of a “campus rape epidemic” victimizing 1-of-5 female students, nor can any college or university in the country produce such documented confirmation.

Feminists invented a non-existent “crisis” for political reasons — perhaps hoping to use these claims to generate campus support for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign — and are now confronted with an absence of proof. Those who have exaggerated the prevalence of sexual assault to create a fictitious “campus rape epidemic” have also inspired journalists to begin scrutinizing the actual number of reported assaults. What if more newspaper reporters began asking the kinds of questions Bethany Bump of the Albany Times-Union asked Carol Stenger?

What if reporters began filing Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain documents from state university officials that would allow some realistic estimation of the actual rate of sexual assault on campus? We are beginning to see a trickle of reporting like that, and how long before the journalistic trickle becomes a factual flood that washes away this “rape epidemic” myth created by feminist fearmongers?

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Did you hear about the boy growing up with a Marxist lesbian feminist mother?









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