Unis respond strongly, yet differently, to sexual assault report

“University Sexual Assault Report is a Fraud of a Study”
Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun
August 2, 2017

“WE should all be shocked,” groaned Australian National University boss Brian Schmidt, who reporters said was “emotional” and “visibly upset”.

Schmidt was tearing up over a Human Rights Commission report, released on Tuesday, which claimed 51 per cent of Australian university students were sexually harassed last year.

And, yes, we should be shocked and visibly upset — shocked and upset that the commission perpetrated such a hoax. We should be shocked and upset that not one university boss had the brains or guts to call out this fraud of a study.

We should also be furious that Education Minister Simon Birmingham treated these joke findings as serious, demanding universities take action when he should instead demand the HRC apologise for smearing and damaging the universities that earn us $20 billion a year from foreign students.

Ask yourself: is it remotely likely that 51 per cent of all university students, male and female, were sexually harassed last year?

Is it likely that 6.9 per cent of our university students were sexually assaulted over the past two years — nearly 30 times the reported rate of violent South Africa?

There’s only one real scandal exposed by this study — that our universities must lack academics with the most basic research skills to spot how the taxpayer-funded HRC cooked the books. Yes, the HRC has once more invented a scandal that’s been lapped up by an unquestioning media, producing headlines such as, “Alarming rate of university sexual assaults revealed”.

Here’s how it did it. First the HRC, universities and activists spent more than a year on an emotional publicity campaign to hype the alleged threat of sexual assault on campus. Then, having primed students for outrage, our 39 universities asked them to fill in an online survey to report how often they’d allegedly been harassed or assaulted.

I say “allegedly” because none of the claims was tested.

But here is the real problem with this survey: fewer than 10 per cent of students responded. As the HRC admits: “The survey data has been derived from a sample of the target population who were motivated to respond and made an autonomous decision to do so. It may not necessarily be representative of the entire student population.”

They’re not kidding.

Only the most motivated students responded, which presumably includes activist students, ideologues and identity warriors, as well as women and men who have indeed been harassed or abused. But 90 per cent of students couldn’t be bothered responding, perhaps because most didn’t think there was a problem that needed fixing.

That means the results could be exaggerated as much as tenfold.

Nor does the fraud stop there. The researchers also defined sexual harassment so broadly that the most trivial or accidental behaviour was included. Even “inappropriate staring or leering” was counted as harassment and, bingo, it worked. Mere stares or leers generated a third of all the complaints.

What exactly is “inappropriate staring”, anyway? Does it include gawking at an angry female student with a purple mohawk and a “F— Abbott” T-shirt? Or checking out a male with a peroxide do and bared abs? Almost 20 per cent of the complaints were about “sexually suggestive jokes” and another 14 per cent about “intrusive questions” about the student’s private life. Even “inappropriate displays of the body” qualified as harassment.

So this is the crisis? Seriously?

The survey’s definition of sexual assaults is also broad and includes being “tricked into sexual acts against their will or without their consent, including when they have withdrawn their consent”.

No wonder that 40 per cent of students who said they’d been sexually assaulted also said they thought it wasn’t serious enough to tell the university, and another 40 per cent said they hadn’t needed help.

And still that’s not the full con.

Only one in four of the alleged sexual assaults — 1.6 per cent of students over two years — actually occurred on campus or going to and from university. Doesn’t that suggest that students are actually safer at university than anywhere else?

And why are assaults on students travelling to and from campus blamed on universities? Why not blame the public transport system?

Why? Because this is one more way the HRC could inflate the statistics to paint universities as cesspits of rape and sexual predators.

This survey is a disgrace. The failure of universities to call it out shows that reason no longer rules and the victim culture is king.

Scrap the Human Rights Commission. And buy some backbones for our university bosses.