Even though you haven’t raped anybody, or thought about raping anybody, or know anything about other rapes that may or may not involve perpetrators who resemble you in ways obvious and less so, you can still be singled out for unilateral persecution by college administrators if you remind a rape victim of the stranger who actually attacked her.

That’s the message one female attorney is sending with a piece in the Harvard Law Review that deals, in part, with the woeful due process double standard that separates alleged college rape victims from their alleged attackers… or innocent bystanders who happen to superficially resemble them.

Harvard law professor Janet Halley’s piece, “Trading the Megaphone for the Gavel in Title IX Enforcement,” describes one of Halley’s experiences assisting a male college student in Oregon who was never accused of rape — rather, he was simply accused of too greatly resembling the actual rapist for the victim’s emotional well-being.

I recently assisted a young man who was subjected by administrators at his small liberal arts university in Oregon to a month-long investigation into all his campus relationships, seeking information about his possible sexual misconduct in them (an immense invasion of his and his friends’ privacy), and who was ordered to stay away from a fellow student (cutting him off from his housing, his campus job, and educational opportunity) — all because he reminded her of the man who had raped her months before and thousands of miles away. He was found to be completely innocent of any sexual misconduct and was informed of the basis of the complaint against him only by accident and off-hand. But the stay-away order remained in place, and was so broadly drawn up that he was at constant risk of violating it and coming under discipline for that. When the duty to prevent a “sexually hostile environment” is interpreted this expansively, it is affirmatively indifferent to the restrained person’s complete and total innocence of any misconduct whatsoever.

In other words, victim zero — the actual rape victim, that is — holds supreme prerogative in creating, from thin air, other victims, even for a goal as foreign to the law as catharsis.

College administrations, in recent months, have embraced this lazy, rigor-free approach to keeping up appearances when it comes to advocating for the rights of alleged rape victims. Under this approach, the rights of the rape victim trump the rights of all others.

“These cases are becoming increasingly easy. Interim measures and environmental security provisions are justified as ‘merely administrative,’ the equivalent of determining that more lights should be installed on campus walkways or that food safety certificates should be required for all vending machines. And like merely administrative acts conducive to public safety, they follow a strict liability model. But ending or hobbling someone’s access to education should be much harder than that,” writes Halley.

“It may well be that the only effective way to convince people that this tendency is dangerous is to point to the rights they invade: rights to privacy, to autonomy, to due process. But the tendency itself is due for scrutiny.”

Until colleges begin to face damaging lawsuits from bystanders caught in the crossfire of their knee-jerk responses to rape allegations — responses that increasingly deny everyone but the alleged victim of their due process — don’t hold your breath for their administrators to scrutinize their ill-conceived policies.