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View Full Version : An Example Of My POV Regarding Facts



Kathianne
12-15-2014, 03:43 AM
I'm hoping this example, which I hope covers common ground, illustrates what I've been arguing in a couple of threads. Common Wisdom, opinion, and 'facts' need to be identified and categorized.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/12/14/campus-rape-uva-crisis-rolling-stone-politics-column/20397277/


<section id="module-position-NvCX3Xkqm3w" class="storytopbar-bucket story-headline-module" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22.3999996185303px;">The great campus rape hoax: Column

</section>Glenn Harlan Reynolds6:03 p.m. EST December 14, 2014



Americans have been living through an enormously sensationalized college rape hoax, but as the evidence accumulates it's becoming clear that the entire thing was just a bunch of media hype and political opportunism.

No, I'm not talking about the Rolling Stone's lurid and now-exploded (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/12/11/the-full-demise-of-rolling-stones-rape-story/) fraternity gang-rape story. Whatever the truth behind that story, it's now clear that basically nothing that Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely told us happened, actually happened. But the hoax is much bigger than one overwrought and perhaps entirely fictional tale of campus goings-on.

For months we've been told that there's a burgeoning "epidemic" of rape on college campuses, that the system for dealing with campus rape is "broken" and that we need new federal legislation (of course!) to deal with this disaster. Before the Rolling Stonestory imploded, Sens. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., were citing the Virginia gang rape as evidence of the problem, but now that the story has been exposed as bogus, they're telling us that, regardless of that isolated incident (http://www.chicagotribune.com/sns-wp-blm-news-bc-assault09-20141209-story.html), there's still a huge campus rape problem that needs to be addressed as soon as possible.

And that's the real college rape hoax. Because the truth is that there's no epidemic outbreak of college rape. In fact, rape on college campuses (http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/more-evidence-that-1-in-5-college-women-have-not-been-sexually-assaulted/article/2557262) is — like rapeeverywhere else (http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/29/justice/us-violent-crime/) in America — plummeting in frequency. And that 1-in-5 college rape number you keep hearing in the press? It's thoroughly bogus, too. (Even the authors (http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/20434/)of that study say that "We don't think one in five is a nationally representative statistic," because it sampled only two schools.)

Sen, Gillibrand also says (http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/11/bjs-rate-of-sexual-assault-shows-sharp-d) that "women are at a greater risk of sexual assault as soon as they step onto a college campus."
The truth — and, since she's a politician, maybe that shouldn't be such a surprise — is exactly the opposite. According to the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics (http://thefederalist.com/2014/12/11/new-doj-data-on-sexual-assaults-college-students-are-actually-less-likely-to-be-victimized/), the rate of rape and sexual assault is lower for college students (at 6.1 per 1,000) than for non-students (7.6 per 1,000). (Note: not 1 in 5). What's more, between 1997 and 2013, rape against women dropped by about 50%, in keeping with a more general drop in violent crime nationally.
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