There was a time when rape and sexual assault were considered some of the most abhorrent crimes imaginable. No more.

Now, at least on college campuses, rape and sexual assault are considered mere disciplinary matters, no different than plagiarism or theft from a dorm. To non-college students, they are considered crimes.

You would think the issue was being taken seriously, given the mattress-carrying demonstrations and numerous marches with hand-made signs spouting catchy slogans like "non-consensual sex is rape." But according to the activists, the solution to this problem — this so-called rape culture — is not to send serious crimes to the police, but to campus courts where the worst an accused student can face is expulsion.

The "seriousness" of the issue is addressed not by prosecuting and punishing offenses appropriately, but by removing due process rights from accused students. The preferred method is to take the word of all accusers as gospel, lower the burden of proof, and presume guilt on the part of the accused. This all makes it much easier to brand young men as "rapists" without having to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

And yet, by doing so, activists, the federal government and colleges have implied that rape and sexual assault are different from all other crimes. By refusing to turn accusations over to the police, activists are implying that rape and sexual assault are not police matters — at least for college students — and can therefore be handled by the same people teaching philosophy or fisheries sciences. They also risk leaving potential rapists free to rape others.

Why would an anti-rape activist behave this way? After discussions with feminist professors and campus administrators whose federal funding may depend on producing a few guilty men every now and, it's not impossible to imagine that a student's feelings of regret and guilt from a drunken hook-up turn into full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder. It's hard to know just how many cases are like this, but it's not hard to see why activists wouldn't want the police involved.

That's not to say every rape on campus amounts to a he said/she said situation (an incident at Vanderbilt University provides a sad example of why police should handle the investigations), but when rape accusations are treated no more seriously than those of cheating on a test, it muddies the water.

Alexandra Brodsky admitted as much during a recent panel in Washington, D.C., saying that "The point of school decision-making is not to be a sort of local police, you know, criminal justice equivalent, but to ensure that a student can continue to learn despite facing gender-based violence."

Except that gender-based violence is a crime, not a disciplinary matter. And expelling an accused student doesn't actually help the accuser, since her alleged attacker is now roaming the streets outside of campus, potentially endangering other women.

Activists insist that campus hearings with limited or non-existent due process rights are necessary to correct the wrongs perpetrated against women in the past. If their ultimate goal is to reduce sexual assaults, they're failing, since bad people are going to do what bad people do.

But where they will succeed is in reducing the number of drunken hookups, but not for the reasons they want. Their theories would teach men not to have sex with any woman who has had even one drink (even if both have been drinking) because that is rape. In practice, however, this creates more gynophobia, as young men are more likely to avoid women for fear that one will bring an accusation against them for what they thought was a consensual encounter.

It's a distinction activists might not care about, but it is important. If the desired goal is equality, swinging the pendulum so that one gender is fearful of the other is not the way to go.