FNC Report: College Sex Crime ‘Courts’ Dismiss Due Process

Male college students accused of rape after casual alcohol and sex hook-ups have been handed over to campus feminist sex crime “courts” that provide little to nothing in the way of due process.

In Fox News Reporting: The Truth About Sex & College, host Martha MacCallum explores the so-called “rape epidemic” on college campuses that has been hyped by President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and other political leaders such as Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand – who invited mattress-carrying rape accuser and sex tape producer Emma Sulkowicz to the State of the Union address in January.

Militant feminist professors and administrators at schools such as Occidental College have used a “guidance” letter sent out by Obama’s Department of Education, which threatens to strip federal funding from colleges that do not treat accusations of sexual assault according to its own politicized perspective, to form their own tribunals. These “courts,” however, have charged the students facing them without allowing them the advice of counsel of their own and the opportunity to face their accuser or to introduce relevant evidence such as texts that suggest a consensual sexual relationship.

Senior attorney at Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and former U.S. Education Department attorney Hans Bader appeared in the special report.

“The Obama administration is misdirecting federal rape awareness funding by focusing on colleges rather than other settings where the rape rate is much, much higher, based on a fictional campus rape epidemic,” he observes to Breitbart News in an email statement. “The net result is to shortchange rape victims who need help.”

“[I]n an April 4, 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR)…declared that schools cannot use a clear-and-convincing standard of proof typical in school disciplinary procedures for sexual harassment or sexual assault cases,” Bader noted in a prior Examiner article, observing the Department’s insistence on the use of the “preponderance of evidence” standard to resolve these cases.

“’Preponderance of the evidence’ means that if a school thinks there is as little as a 51 per[cent] chance that the accused is guilty, the accused must still be disciplined,” he wrote, adding, “The Education Department’s position was based on a mistaken understanding of who is subject to Title IX, the federal law banning schools from committing sex discrimination. Title IX’s requirements apply to schools, not individual students.”

Writing at National Review, Kevin Williamson notes the rape rate – across all age categories, including young people – has actually declined by 64% over the last 20 years.

“President Obama, who gives every indication of being committed to the bitter end to his belief in the omnipotence of his merest utterance, gave a speech in which he affirmed his position that rape is wicked and that we should discourage it,” Williamson writes. “Instead of giving a content-free speech, he should have directed his Department of Justice to put together some definitive data on the question.”

He continues:

The fictitious rape epidemic is necessary to support the fiction of ‘rape culture,’ by which feminists mean anything other than an actual rape culture, for example the culture of the Pakistani immigrant community in Rotherham in the United Kingdom. ‘Rape culture’ simply means speech or thought that feminists disapprove of and wish to suppress, and the concept has been deployed in the cause of, inter alia, bringing disciplinary action against a Harvard student who wrote a satire of feminist rhetoric, forbidding politically unpopular speakers from speaking on campuses, and encouraging what often has turned out to be headlong and grotesquely unjust rushes to judgment, as in the case of the Duke lacrosse team. Feminism is about political power, and not the Susan B. Anthony (‘positively voted the Republican ticket — straight’) full-citizenship model of political power but rather one dominated by a very small band of narrow ideologues still operating under the daft influence of such theorists as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, each of whom in her way equated political opposition to feminism with rape.

The fact that many of these so-called campus “sex crimes” occur after a night of heavy drinking and subsequent poor judgment on the part of both parties is also spun by college campus feminists to favor their politics rather than to finding usable information.

Williamson notes:

For example, feminists energetically protest that advising women to take such precautionary measures as moderating their alcohol intake at college parties is a species of rape-culture victim-blaming (rather than reasonable advice), and so it is no surprise that, as the DoJ notes, many surveys inquire of rape victims whether they believed their attackers to have been under the influence of drugs or alcohol but decline to ask the victims whether they were under the influence. Evidence very strongly suggests that rapists frequently use intoxicants, openly or surreptitiously, as part of a strategy conceived with malice aforethought to render their victims vulnerable. It might be useful to know how often this is the case and how often it works or fails to work, but we will not know if we refuse to ask the question.

“But if your interest were in making opposition to feminist political priorities a quasi-criminal offense and using the horrific crime of rape as a cultural and political cudgel, then you’d be doing about what we’re doing right now,” Williamson concludes.