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Students attending Carleton University this fall, women and men, will likely find themselves subject to propaganda aimed at convincing them the campus is rife with sexual predators.

Over the last few months a cadre of academics, outreach workers, student and union association members, and sexual assault survivors has been insisting that the university administration admit the campus is pervaded by a “rape culture.” They want that label included in policies the university is preparing as it tries to conform to the Ontario Liberal government’s diktats on sexual violence.

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The province requires that, by the end of the year, Ontario universities and colleges establish policies to comply with Bill 132, the Sexual Violence and Workplace Harassment Action Plan. The intent, supposedly, is to end sexual violence and harassment in educational institutions.

The concept, which has it roots in 1970s feminist ideology, was deployed by the government in a report on sexual violence entitled “It’s Never OK” that called for an end to “rape culture on campuses.” Rape culture was defined as one in which “dominant ideas, social practices, media images and societal institutions implicitly or explicitly condone sexual assault by normalizing or trivializing male sexual violence and by blaming survivors for their own abuse.”