In a recent opinion piece regarding George Will's appearance at Miami University, Mr. Scheren concludes with the outstanding observation that, "Regardless of the accuracy of statistics, the role of government, or any other excuse given, rape should never be included as a tool in an argument. For this reason, George Will was out of line." I applaud this understanding. And yet, Mr. Scheren and Miami's President Hodge both are congratulating Miami on giving this man a platform to further "public debate." This is a dubious justification for a bad decision.
What Will did in his national opinion piece was to smear by grimy implication every single rape victim who has the guts to stand up and declare herself in order to protest rape and its attendant abuses. According to Will, we should assess all survivors as potential members of the class of "proliferating victims" who are questing after the "coveted status that confers privileges."
Will has thereby thrown mud on the extraordinary courage it takes to publicly state one has been raped, and made it that much harder for the next victim to stand up and report. During his appearance at your school, he made this worse by saying to a rape survivor's face that only "real" rape victims deserve our support, reinforcing the notion that there exists some large pool of women who are fabricating their claims of assault.
Yet all credible studies of rape reporting put the percentage of false reports at between one and eight percent (e.g., Lisak et al. 2010; Levitt et al. 2013).
Will further attacked the anti-rape movement with his "statistical" analysis, whereby he cast doubt (doubt gleefully taken up by rape apologists everywhere) on the twenty percent incidence of sexual assault.
But Will's statistics were extremely sloppy, as was demonstrated by the flyers handed out at his presentation (which were based upon this article. Will's analysis confused the total number of rapes on and off campus with the lesser number that a school is required to report; he further confused reporting to college authorities with reporting to law enforcement.
When this confusion is corrected for, the numbers turn out to be exactly what so many studies confirm - about one in five college women will suffer sexual assault.
A Pulitzer-prize winner really must make sure he has his statistics right, especially when he is attacking a movement that has as its only goal the reduction of the appalling amount of violence against young women and men.
Both Mr. Scheren and President Hodge congratulate Miami University for "sparking debate" by inviting Will, but Will's kind of argument about rape and rape victims does not spark debate - it sparks victim silencing. The fact that over 100 students protested Will's appearance is not something that University administrators should be proud of "sparking."
We don't need to invite a thug to Thanksgiving dinner and watch him beat up Uncle Joe so that we can all have a healthy debate about the value of family and the sanctity of the home.
The administration merely forced anti-rape activists to work overtime in order to try to counteract Will's pernicious influence and horrible "misery queen" stereotype. We don't need this kind of debate; we need solutions to the problem of sexual violence.
The vast majority of rapes on college campuses are committed by a small group of men, who commit their crimes over and over because they have been given a "social license to operate" by our culture (Lisak 2002; McWhorter, 2009). When you tar survivors with the filth of doubt, as Will has, you empower rapists and you validate their license to operate.
When you pay a rape apologist $48,000 to come to your campus because you just couldn't say no to a donor, you send a message that money matters more than the women in your student body.
Civilized people don't tolerate Holocaust deniers, because denying the Holocaust is a kind of obscenity that reduces that bonfire of courage and sacrifice and human suffering to a question to be debated. Will and his ilk of rape apologists have done the same.
They have politicized what should not be a partisan issue, and in doing so, have slandered the extremely brave young women and men who are on the front lines of this battle.
What President Hodge and everyone else should be doing is shunning rape apologists - Mr. Will included - and helping to change the culture that allow rapists to victimize so many of our young people.
Sincerely,
Author, attorney and ally to the Title IX Movement
Kelly Moore
ksmoore777@gmail.com