Is there anything left to be learned about the mating habits of college students? For years, we have been subjected to a barrage of books about the rituals of drunken sex. In addition to Hooking Up and American Hook-up, there’s the recent Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus…
Can a GoFundMe Bring Back a Beloved Theme Park? Probably not. But that’s not stopping a man in my native Cleveland who wants to bring back the famous Geauga Lake theme park. He’s started a GoFundMe to raise $20 million bucks to start bringing the park back. That’s a fraction of price you’d need to…
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on September 22 formally rescinded the Obama administration’s commands that universities use unfair rules in sexual-misconduct investigations—rules that had the effect of finding more students guilty of sexual assault. And she appears also to be preparing for far…
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on September 22 formally rescinded the Obama administration’s commands that universities use unfair rules in sexual-misconduct investigations—rules that had the effect of finding more students guilty of sexual assault. And she appears also to be preparing for far…
American liberals think of themselves as champions of the excluded and ill-treated, friends of the little guy persecuted by the system. Their instinctive sympathy for the disadvantaged and overlooked is evidence of a charitable worldview and a peculiar inheritance of Christian humanism. For a…
The statistic that 1-in-5 college women are the victims of sexual assault is so ubiquitous, and advocates so insistent that "the science is settled," that it can lead to predictable outrage when different reports—like a new analysis from the American Association of University Women showing 89…
A piece of California legislation, unanimously approved by the state assembly and just waiting for the governor's pen, would relax the definition of rape to include any non-consensual sexual contact.
Federal agencies can't agree on what rape is. According to a July report from the Government Accountability Office, this interagency confusion misleads the American public. The report, requested by Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, revealed vast differences in how the Departments of Education,…
Brock Turner’s victim's account of her experience of sexual assault on the Stanford campus is now justly famous. The statement, running to more than 7,000 words, was released to the media on June 3, the day after Turner received a six-month jail sentence and probation for his three felony…
A panel on “Grappling with Campus Rape" was part of the "Hot Topic" program at the American Association of Law Schools annual meeting, held January 6-10 in midtown Manhattan. Indeed, that issue has been the focus of particularly intense polemics in academia. A number of law professors, even some…
Until very recently, The Scrapbook had not thought of any particular connection between Bill Cosby and Hillary Clinton. Of course, both are well known to the public—he as an entertainer, she as a politician—and they share a longtime interest in certain social issues and Democratic politics. You can…
There are two rival bills in Congress addressing campus sexual assault. A nominally bipartisan bill spearheaded by Democrats Claire McCaskill and Mark Warner focuses on heaping more requirements on schools to turn their disciplinary systems into witch-hunts. Republicans in the House of…
Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood recently gained notoriety when the Center for Medical Progress released a video of people at the abortion clinic picking through a dish of aborted baby parts in order to sell them. Now the Planned Parenthood affiliate is facing accusations of serious wrongdoing:
Washington Post reporter Nick Anderson’s response to our June 16 critique of his (and three of his colleagues’) very long front-page articles on June 12 as misleading readers about campus sexual assault is revealing, both for what it says and for what it does not.
Since 2012, the New York Times has led the way in systematically biased coverage of on-campus sexual assault allegations and how colleges are responding. The paper has relentlessly hyped the issue, has smeared quite possibly innocent students while omitting evidence that they were innocent, and has…
At a Manhattan fundraiser yesterday (as noted by The Hill), potential presidential candidate Hillary Clinton spoke of the rioting in Baltimore by invoking a theme of the Obama administration: the need for reform of the criminal justice system.
If anyone was unsure of the veracity of Rolling Stone's account of an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity, the final nail is now in the story's coffin. Sunday night, the Columbia School of Journalism released its much anticipated blistering report on the magazine's November…
Four months after the publication of an infamous Rolling Stone piece depicting a violent gang rape at one of the University of Virginia's fraternities, and the magazine's subsequent retraction due to numerous inconsistencies and gross journalistic malpractice (see Philip Terzian's "A Credulous…
There were two seemingly unrelated news stories last week that The Scrapbook has been pondering. The first is about another high-profile campus rape story that seems to be falling apart. A student named Emma Sulkowicz turned her alleged rape in August 2012 into an art project, carrying a mattress…
With nearly every passing day, yet another detail in last month’s sensational Rolling Stone article alleging gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house collapses under the weight of scrutiny. Its author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, has retreated into strategic silence; her editor, Will Dana,…
"In the last several years, allegations that college administrators mishandled complaints, or even discouraged victims from filing complaints, have cropped up at Columbia, Yale, Amherst and Vanderbilt, among dozens of other universities. The exact scope of the problem, though, remains muddy.…
Two weeks ago, Rolling Stone published a bombshell piece that rocked the academic world. In the story, author Sabrina Erdely detailed a horrific crime — a gang rape at one of the fraternities at the University of Virginia that allegedly took place two years ago.
Sexual liberation is having a nervous breakdown on college campuses. Conservatives should be cheering on its collapse; instead they sometimes sound as if they want to administer the victim smelling salts.
Alana Goodman of the Washington Free Beacon reports:
Two weeks ago, George Will wrote a column about how progressives have exaggerated the prevalence of rape on college campuses. The column was not well received by some or even, as a great many of the histrionic responses would indicate, well understood. Last week a press release landed in The…
Josh Rogin of the Daily Beast reports:
This week the Factual Feminist takes on the “rape culture” panic that is riling college campuses with help from the media, radical feminists, and too many politicians. Just as in the shameful panic over alleged child abuse at day care centers that sent innocent people to prison in the 1980s, false…
Vice President Joe Biden made the case last night at a Washington, D.C. hotel that abused women fear getting "raped again by the system." Biden made the comments in remarks to a fundraiser for the Volunteer Lawyers Project, which is co-chaired by his daughter.
A former Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill who briefly worked in the Obama administration has been accused of "drugging and sexually assaulting women," the Washington Post reports.
Support for Republican Todd Akin’s decision to stay in the Missouri Senate race has cratered and so has his favorability. Those findings come from two new polls conducted after Akin created a firestorm with his comment about “legitimate rape.”
Earlier this week, Senator Al Franken of Minnesota joined Vice President Joe Biden for a campaign event in Minnesota.
Democrats are trying to use Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin's bizarre and offensive comments about rape and pregnancy to smear GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan. And many journalists are playing along.
President Obama's Department of Justice recently released new regulations to prevent prison rape. "Sexual violence, against any victim, is an assault on human dignity and an affront to American values," Obama said when announcing the new initiative. "The Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA)…
In Flint, Michigan, Vice President Joe Biden suggested that more rapes and murders could occur if President Barack Obama's jobs bill is not passed.