Ashe Schow: Here's a 1-in-5 campus assault statistic you won't see in the mainstream media

Brett T. | 10:27 PM on October 05, 2015

Is Washington Examiner opinion writer Ashe Schow the only writer brave enough (or interested enough) to tackle not the widely reported campus rape epidemic but rather schools’ seeming inability to comprehend the idea that not all rape claims are valid? Multiple lawsuits against Rolling Stone magazine and Columbia University (alma mater of “Mattress Girl” Emma Sulkowicz) would suggest they aren’t.

Who would lack the compassion to question a victim of sexual assault? This summer, the Washington Post devoted most of its front page to photos of women underneath the headline, “1 in 5 women say they were violated.” And this spring, as part of Vice President Joe Biden’s “It’s On Us” initiative, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan told students, “If somebody tells you they’ve been a victim of sexual assault, I want you to believe them.”

As Schow writes in the Washington Examiner today, a report by Harvard University suggests that 1 in 5 reported campus rapes is unfounded. Conducted as part of federal regulations, the study determined that “18.1 percent of reported rapes on campus were ‘unfounded,’ defined by Harvard police as ‘any report of a crime that is found to be false or baseless.'”

A second report released today by the University of Miami shows a similar 1-in-5 “unfounded” figure. Unlike most journalists reporting on the growing epidemic of campus sexual assault, Schow acknowledges caveats in interpreting the reports:

Another thing we don’t know from these statistics is any details about the reports. We’ve seen before that some accusations are wrong, stemming from regretted drunken hook-ups, but wouldn’t fall into the “unfounded” category because at the very least, some form of sex took place. And in some of those instances, the universities were under pressure to find students responsible, even if the evidence didn’t support the finding.

There has so far been radio silence from the mainstream media when it comes to the inconvenient statistics being revealed in these campus reports. Reports of sexual assault are up (slightly), but those numbers don’t coincide with the hysterical claims that 1-in-5 women are being sexually assaulted while in college.