According to a recent announcement influenced by Vice President Joe Biden’s crusade, members of the Obama administration are no longer visiting universities that are “insufficiently serious” about issues of sexual misconduct.
An article from The Washington Post claims that top members of Barack Obama’s administration will no longer visit universities whose leaders hold lax attitudes about sexual misconduct.
According to White House officials, top members of the administration — including the president, the vice president, their wives and members of the Cabinet — will not visit institutions whose leaders they consider insufficiently serious about pursuing sexual-assault allegations and punishing perpetrators. Biden said in an interview that he would like the federal government to “take away their money” if a college or university fails to change its ways.
President Obama certainly isn’t a newcomer to the discussion on the issue of sexual misconduct on campuses. At the 2015 Grammy’s, Obama echoed the claim that nearly 20% of American women have been a victim of rape. “Right now, nearly one in five women in America has been a victim of rape or attempted rape, and more than one in four women has experienced some form of domestic violence,” he said. “It’s not OK, and it has to stop.”
However, this claim has been frequently disputed. In an article from Time entitled “6 Feminist Myths That Will Not Die,” Christina Hoff Sommers rebuked the tired statistic by citing the author of the original study’s claim that “the estimated 19% sexual assault rate among college women is based on a survey at two large four-year universities” meaning that it “might not accurately reflect our nation’s colleges overall.” The study’s authors also claimed that “the survey had a large non-response rate, with the clear possibility that those who had been victimized were more apt to have completed the questionnaire, resulting in an inflated prevalence figure.”
Despite the Obama administration’s insistence on the controversial statistic, others have continued to fight back. “The truth is that sexual assault, properly defined so as not to embrace other things that are not assault—such as disagreements between couples, sexuality that is consented to at the time but regretted later, and so on—is quite rare,” claimed Steven Svoboda of the National Coalition for Men. “To artificially inflate a number, presumably for political reasons, so that a problem of sexual assault can be claimed to be worse than it in fact is, is deplorable.”
Tom Ciccotta writes about Free Speech and Intellectual Diversity for Breitbart. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or on Facebook. You can email him at tciccotta@breitbart.com
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