October 5, 2015



The Crime Of Being Male On Campus

That's what the government's abuse of Title IX in order to railroad men amounts to.

For example, from Ashe Schow's WashEx column on the government's dictates for colleges to adopt an overly broad definition of sexual assault:

A male student [was] suspended for a year because he sent multiple Instagram follow requests to a female student and once looked at her on campus.

No, this is not a joke. Yes, this really happened.

Schow explains:

Colleges are treating accusations as if the accused were a potential rapist, even when the accusation involves nothing more than requesting social media connections one too many times.

Schow asks the question about the Instagram example and another example she gives:

Even if these behaviors were inappropriate, is a one-year suspension justified instead of, say, someone simply telling the kid to stop? Most college kids who get that kind of warning from an authority figure would be thoroughly frightened enough to stop. But disrupting their life for a year over social media requests and what could have been an errant look? On today's college campuses, anything deemed offensive can be used as a weapon against college men in accusations of sexual assault and harassment. And colleges, under pressure from the federal government to find students responsible, have created pseudo-court systems that eviscerate due process in order to get those findings. "Herein lies the problem with campus tribunals determining if a crime of sexual misconduct was committed," Lau said. "[S]tudents can be wrongly accused because the accusation becomes the proof or, simply, because the definitions are too broad and too ambiguous; students can be accused months or even years after the incident; and those wrongly accused are denied due process."

This is not the country we're supposed to be.

Sadly, I predict that it will take some sort of tragedy for this to be overturned. Beyond an individual male's future being ruined. I hope that's not the case, but I suspect it might be.

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