Campus lies, damned lies and statistics

New efforts to manufacture a campus rape crisis.

What does it say about our country that a student writing to me doesn’t dare give his name for fear his letter could be traced back to him?

Concerned Student wrote to me last month after being asked to complete the National Student Safety Survey, which has just been distributed to over 400,000 random students on our campuses:

“As I was completing the survey, I was shocked and alarmed at how the survey had seemingly been deliberately constructed in a way likely to produce results that will exaggerate perceived rates of sexual violence on campus and thereby distort and manipulate public opinion and policy. The authors have applied definitions of sexual assault and harassment that are so broad they conflate normal interactions between men and women with heinous and brutal acts of violence. This is an injustice to survivors.”

Concerned Student very helpfully sent screen shots of all the questions he responded to in the survey. And he’s on the money. The National Safety Survey is all about cooking the books – asking biased, leading questions aimed at proving there’s a rape crisis on our campuses.

The activists are having another go following their disappointment over the 2016 million-dollar survey from Australian Human Rights Commission which found only 0.8 percent of students reported any type of “sexual assault” per year, even including incidents such as a grope from a stranger on the train to university. The AHRC disguised these disappointing results by claiming widespread campus “sexual violence” which was actually mainly low-grade harassment like “unwanted staring”. Universities were bullied into establishing a huge industry staffed by Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment (SASH) bureaucrats and counsellors, supporting secretive committees running kangaroo courts adjudicating sexual assault.

Every year activists run more campaigns claiming universities are not doing enough. Just two months ago a group of protesters interrupted a speech by ANU Vice Chancellor Brian Schmidt, claiming the university had done nothing to protect students from the dangers of SASH. “Your Nobel Prize isn’t helping you now!” screamed one protester. Schmidt groveled to the students saying he was prepared to put in unlimited resources to address the problem. “But there’s no easy fix. It’s a wicked problem.”

Let’s face it. It ain’t easy wiping out unwanted staring. But now this righteous man will have to battle new scourges - “loitering” and “invading personal space”.

The new blight of loitering

These are the latest additions to the ever-expanding definition of sexual harassment included in the new survey. To make Brian Schmidt’s wicked problem even more challenging, “inappropriate staring” is now just “staring”. It’s hard to imagine any student who could say they have never been subjected to staring. And even if they have never been stared at themselves, surely everyone could tick the box asking if they had witnessed this happening to anyone else on campus?

Who could deny experiencing someone “making comments or asking intrusive questions about your private life, body or physical appearance”? As we know, one person’s compliment is another’s intrusive question in an era where even using the wrong pronoun could be seen as an inappropriate comment on a private life. Tricky stuff, indeed.

It gets worse. The section on harassment of students now includes, “Making requests for sex or repeated invitations to go out on a date.” So, apparently you are only allowed to ask once for a date – twice is harassment.

But isn’t “making requests for sex” exactly what the feminists demand in their new enthusiastic consent laws? The new survey labels that as harassment yet all sexual acts including kissing are now deemed sexual assault if your partner “made no effort to check whether you agreed or not.”

Powell doesn’t pull her punches

It is all pretty confusing. But none of this should come as a surprise when you consider who is in charge of this survey. Meet self-described “feminist criminologist” Dr Anastasia Powell who has built her career on promoting feminist views on enthusiastic consent and similar issues. Interesting that University Australia happily promotes the fact they are funding advocacy research through the choice of this ideologically driven scholar.

Even though enthusiastic consent is not yet law in most Australian states, Powell and colleagues have slipped this into the survey, which is bound to greatly expand the number of events students regard as sexual assault. Students are told that any sexual experience, including a kiss, which lacks that prior check for consent is now sexual assault. Ditto intoxicated sex of any kind. The survey defines all sexual acts as assault if you were “affected by drugs or alcohol.”

Anytime, anywhere, to anyone.

Concerned Student isn’t a sexual assault survivor, so he wasn’t able to send through all the questions that apply for self-defined victims. I’ve been making strenuous efforts to get hold of the whole survey but unsurprisingly, Universities Australia is keeping that firmly under wraps. I sent through a series of questions asking why they were withholding this information. Their response was simply to state the survey and results will be published early 2022: “Universities Australia is committed to transparency, and the public release of the results, along with the survey instrument, is testament to that.”

Please contact me if you happen to have answered the survey or know someone who did. From the questions we do have available it looks like there’s been another big shift. While the previous survey asked questions about events taking place in 2015-16, in the new survey the timing seems to be open-ended – the events could have happened anytime. So, a mature age student could report on any event from 30-40 years ago, but their experiences claimed as evidence of our current campus rape crisis. Neat, isn’t it?

Similarly, the new survey appears to not be confined to campus events but includes sexual acts happening anywhere to the student, and not just involving other students as perpetrators. The survey explicitly and repeatedly invites responses about non-campus incidents. “We’re interested in all of your experiences – whether they happened in ways connected to your university, or at other times and places in your life.”

The survey also asks students to report on not only their own experiences but also if another student from their university “told you, or you suspected, that they may have been sexually assaulted in a university context.” So, the data will include not just hearsay evidence – say, something you read in a student newsletter - but students’ own fanciful assumptions about what might have happened to another person.

Similarly, they are asked if they had witnessed another person being sexually harassed. The survey itself points out that sexual harassment is about conduct which the recipient regards as unwelcome, or leaves them offended, humiliated or intimated. Yet they assume that it’s ok for one person to make that decision for another. Wow, this is taking manipulation of data to a whole new level.

Target audience well prepared

This new survey hits campuses after four years of solid propaganda telling students they are facing a rape crisis, compulsory sexual consent courses for staff and students, endless misinformation in the media promoting the idea that young women are at risk. Students today are far more likely to see themselves as victims than they were when the first survey came out. Back then, the self-selected students who answered the survey were an unrepresentative 10 per cent of the total sample. Now End Rape on Campus activists will be hoping for a far better turn out as reward for their constant advocacy.

Universities Australia is rightly stating the results from the two surveys can’t be compared, given that so much about the survey has changed. But what’s the bet that next year our biased media will use this manipulated data to scream blue murder about increased sexual violence and the mighty SASH industry will have their hands out seeking more money to tackle the growing crisis?

In 2017, I was the only journalist in Australia to report we should be celebrating the good news from the AHRC survey – that there was no rape crisis on our campuses. At that time, I was very fortunate to have the assistance of Chris Lloyd, professor of business statistics at Melbourne University, to ensure I analyzed the results of the survey accurately. I asked Chris to compared key questions in the current survey to the previous one.

“Universities Australia claim to be serious about measuring levels of sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus. Ambiguously worded surveys with very low response rates are no way to achieve this,” said Chris, adding, “I cannot see anything scientifically useful emerging from what I have seen of this new survey.”

The young men in the firing line

As Concerned Student points out, we need to consider the impact of this survey on the way young men and women relate to each other – messages bound to be reinforced in the endless campus propaganda promoting the rape crisis.

“It is encouraging young women to perceive any uncomfortable or awkward sexual experience as a violent sexual violation, and it is casting benevolently intentioned young men as sexual predators. How many men will undeservingly have their lives and reputations shattered because of this rhetoric?’’

That’s so right. Listen to fiery young American journalist, Ashe Schow. I chatted to her on thinkspot last week about her work exposing what’s happening at America’s campus tribunals. Here’s a brief extract where she explains that letting false accusers go free simply teaches young women that it’s totally fine to ruin a young man’s life.

Here’s the full video - Please like it, promote it and subscribe to my channel.

I hope you’ll find the time to listen to my long conversation with Ashe exposing the price being paid by male students as a result of this never-ending campaign to encourage women to redefine disappointing sexual misadventures as sexual assault.

For their sakes, we all have to find ways to speak out and expose this malicious, ongoing social engineering.