Misinterpreting College Sex Assault Stats, & Accusers (mostly female) who are charged for intentionally filing a false rape report
September is false allegation month, and SOS is focusing on college males that are falsely accused, and denied a fair hearing/due process to defend their innocence. Below is Malik St. Hilaire’s story of what it feels like to endure a false allegation. “I just had a lot of pain in me.”
To read Yale University’s latest report on its sexual assault investigations, one might think the school is a hotbed of sexual violence against female undergraduates. The report from Yale’s Deputy Provost for Health Affairs & Academic Integrity, Stephanie Spangler, shows that 50 undergraduate females reported being sexually assaulted in the first six months of 2018. With a female undergraduate population of around 2,700, that means that roughly 1.85% have been sexually assaulted. That’s a violent crime rate around twice as high as that of Detroit, which the FBI rates as the nation’s most dangerous city. Spangler seems almost excited about the numbers, but as always with the Spangler Report, the details don’t match the apocalyptic topline. Spangler notes that the university “uses a more expansive definition of sexual assault” than does either Connecticut state law or the federal government (through Clery Act requirements). The university has never offered an explanation as to why it does so. Minding the Campus has broken down each of the previous Spangler documents.
mindingthecampus.org By Johnson dailywire.com By Schow Yale Ordered To Release Sex Assault Training Material
A potential draft of new federal campus sexual assault policies was leaked this week, so expect a new round of false and misleading statistics to be shared by those who claim due process “protects rapists” and “hurts victims.” I’ve taken down every one of these statistics before – sometimes many, many times – but it’s time to debunk them all in one place. So here we go…1-in-5 (or 1-in-4 or 1-in-3) Women Will Be Sexually Assaulted During College These studies are often not nationally representative, are often produced by women’s organizations determined to find women as oppressed victims in America, and are self-reported – a notoriously unreliable form of data. The Majority Of Campus Rapes Are Committed By A Small Number Of Men. This ‘study’ by David Lisak was debunked. It claims that “90%” of rapes on campus are perpetrated by a few men. For starters, Lisak didn’t conduct the study himself, but used data from studies conducted by former grad students, who didn’t limit their data to college students. False Accusations Are Rare. That statistic is wildly misleading, as it only applies to accusations made to police that are proven false. Proving a negative is often impossible, especially in a “we had sex but it was consensual” situation. On college campuses, there is no punishment for a false accusation, and thus no fear, as there is with lying to the police.
dailywire.com By Ashe Schow
While we are often told to “believe women” – and are assured no one would lie about being raped, false reports do happen. In Port Clinton, Ohio, some 20% of sexual assault reports are classified as false. That’s nearly twice as many as the highest (misleading) claim that just 2% to 10% are false. As I’ve explained previously, that number comes from claims that are proven false, which may be just as difficult to prove as cases that are true. While some cases may not yield enough evidence, or the accuser does not want to pursue charges, Carpenter said good police work will snuff out a false claim. “If you do the investigation the right way you should have collected enough information to find the truth.” The bottom line is we must be honest about statistics and the realities of this crime. People lie about the worst things imaginable, mostly because no one wants to disbelieve them. But that means that sometimes the real victim is the person being falsely accused.
dailywire.com By Ashe Schow COP Says Ohio Player Wrongly Accused
The 19-year-old Long Island woman — who claimed she was raped by two Sacred Heart University football players, then admitted months later to police that she lied to impress a prospective boyfriend, then claimed on the witness stand she was forced to have sex without her consent. Until finally she pleaded guilty to criminal charges, admitting her deceit to a judge — stood handcuffed Thursday morning, rolling her eyes as one of the now former players poured out his heart in court. “I went from being a college student to sitting at home being expelled with no way to clear my name,” Malik St. Hilaire said in a Bridgeport courtroom as he stood near Yovino, “I just hope she knows what she has done to me, my life will never be the same. I did nothing wrong, but everything has been altered because of this.” A statement was read for the other falsely accused student, “The last almost two years have been definitely my most difficult of my life- The roller coaster of emotions; fear, anger, sadness, embarrassment, depression, anxiety and the list goes on. She accused me of what I believe to be a horrendous, horrific crime out of her own selfish concerns.“I lost my scholarship, my dream of continuing to play football and now I am in debt $30,000 and I’m simply trying to get ahead as best as I can.” False accusations happen. False accusations ruin lives.
simplejustice.us By Greenfield thehour.com By Tepfer
Betsy DeVos’s Education Department was busy this time last year. Her team crafted a message, and a temporary fix, for the anti-due process Obama era Title IX guidelines. Obama’s 2011 guidelines pressured colleges and universities to adjudicate sexual misconduct claims internally and, as was increasingly apparent in the years that followed, too often inefficiently and unfairly. Last July, DeVos held an emotional summit. Students falsely accused of sexual assault presented a case for reform or rescission of the existing federal guidance. Last September DeVos rescinded Obama’s “Dear Colleague” letter, (that never went through Congress’ mandated notice-and-comment period.) To replace it, her team gave administrators the option to adjust their procedures: Schools could use a slightly tougher standard of proof and a longer decision deadline if they chose. DeVos also promised a proper notice-and-comment process before issuing any binding guidance down the road.
More than three-fourths of the college officials recently surveyed by the consultancy firm APCO Worldwide said they had no intention to alter their internal policies on sexual misconduct. Of the 100 general counsels and communications officials who responded 64 said that they would ignore DeVos’s request for input as to what sort of binding policy should replace the rescinded guidance. Only 8 percent said they viewed her proposed changes positively.
Prominent Title IX consultants and attorneys have long predicted the resistance to change that the survey reveals. “That’s what I’ve been saying all along,” said Title IX attorney Andrew Miltenberg. “I think this is an issue that we’re not going to be able to legislate away.”
weeklystandard.com By Alice Lloyd
In 2011 a Title IX business was born by Brett Sokolow. Brett called it, The Association of Title IX Administrators, or ATIXA for short. For a hefty sum, colleges write checks to ATIXA to attend their weekend seminars, learn how to address accusations of campus sex assault, and receive support as needed. Previously, ATIXA’s training material provided procedures to ensure a finding of guilt for accused students. Recently ATIXA released a position statement to guide schools… For SOS, ATIXA’S position statement is almost comical, because it’s based in part on David Lisak’s thoroughly-debunked rape study. And I am surprised that ATIXA would discredit their own position statement by quoting Lisak’s proven debunked study. “By including Lisak’s study, ATIXA supports the kind of pseudo-science that has propagated the “rape culture” hysteria. Lisak’s entire thesis was based on the claims of ’76 non-traditional students who were not living on a college campus.’ Lisak’s survey data doesn’t even mention campus sexual assault, and the respondents weren’t screened to determine whether they were students or not. His survey included the responses of 1,882 subjects from the pooled data — all men— whose ages ranged from 18 to 71.“ Assuming they reflected the demographics of the university, most would have been part-time students, many of whom would also be holding down jobs away from campus.’ David Lisak’s ‘study is scientifically unsound, and has nothing to do with college campuses, despite it being used specifically for that purpose.”
dailywire.com By Ashe Schow
Sacred Heart former student, Nikki Yovino was charged with filing a false report to law enforcement and evidence tampering. Yovino 19, faced up to six years in prison. She had pleaded not guilty, but on the morning that jury selection was to begin, Yovino took a plea deal to spend one year behind bars. The case’s racial element -Yovino’s white and the two men she accused are black has kept many following and reporting on her case. BET and the Root picked up how a “lying white woman” falsely accused two black men, who ended up leaving the school…and Alice True, an activist who runs the blog Help Save Our Sons said, “It’s difficult enough for African American males to achieve the dream of successfully getting into college and reaching their goal of obtaining a diploma. And then to have their college dream derailed due to a sex romp that Nikki agreed to, only to accuse afterwards, with her rash inflammatory false statements, is plain dishonest.”
buzzfeed.com By Tyler Kingkade
A case that helped jump-start a wave of campus sexual assault activism across America has ended in a big win for the UNC Chapel Hill complainants. Among those celebrating is former UNC student Andrea Pino, the co-founder of the national organization End Rape on Campus and the best-known of the five women behind the complaint. But her victory comes with an asterisk. While Andrea Pino’s role in the UNC complaint propelled her to national visibility, there are also serious questions, unanswered and largely unasked, about the credibility of her own story of sexual assault. The Campus Rape Frenzy, describes Pino’s complaint against UNC as “the highest-profile questionable Title IX claim.” While the authors stop short of calling Pino’s story a hoax, they note that it has startling parallels to that of Jackie, the faux victim in Rolling Stone‘s retracted story of a brutal fraternity rape at the University of Virginia…A TitleIX activist advocating for campus sexual assault survivors said this about Andrea Pino. “There have been some of us who have been frustrated for years by her web of lies.” Danielle*, who has interacted personally with Pino on a number of occasions, told me that she began to suspect her of being untruthful shortly after the Title IX complaint was filed. “I noticed that her ‘story’ became more and more graphic each time she told it to the press,” Danielle wrote. “She also loved being ‘in the limelight’ so much more than other survivors. And then other students began to tell me discrepancies in her story, such as the fact that the date she says it happened was when the dorms were closed for a break, so she could not have returned to her dorm room. Several students shared that her story was a ‘mash-up’ of three other students’ stories.” Danielle believes there is a “conspiracy of silence” that shields Pino’s credibility problems. “Many people in the movement are aware,” she wrote, “as well as some in the press whom I’ve spoken with.” She says that “there are powerful pressures to keep silent about potential hoaxers, and this hurts the movement in the long run.”
reason.com By Cathy Young
Recently, a female college student from Long Island, New York, [Nikki Yovino] was sentenced to one year in prison for falsely reporting to the police that she was sexually assaulted by two male students at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut. Until recently, Title IX complainants who lodged false claims of sexual misconduct have done so largely with impunity. The Sacred Heart case illustrates a turning point in the campus sexual assault dialogue. It marks one of the first cases in which a court severely punished a female college student for a false accusation of sexual assault. While female students have previously been prosecuted for false reports of sexual assault, they have typically received sentences of probation. Not anymore. In addition to the Sacred Heart case, it was just reported that a Michigan judge sentenced a woman [Mary Zolkowski] to forty-five days in jail for falsely reporting that she was raped in a parking lot at Delta College near Bay City, Michigan. Whether in the criminal justice system or in campus proceedings, false allegations destroy lives – especially allegations as serious as sexual assault. Monetary settlements intended to compensate for reputational harm address only a portion of the impact of false accusations. However, complacency to this injustice is not the answer. The falsely accused should seek remedies available to them by the law.
kjk.com By Susan Stone and Kristina Supler