SEEMS LIKELY: Psychology Today: Will More Men Be Falsely Accused Of Sexual Assault In 2015?

2014 was a landmark year with two high profile sexual assault hoaxes exposed. HBO’s “Girls” star Lena Dunham’s publisher has recently admitted that in her memoir “Not That Kind Of a Girl” the actress falsely claimed that a Republican named Barry raped her when she was a student at Oberlin College. In fact Barry had never met Lena. Meanwhile the University of Virginia Phi Kappa Psi gang rape yarn by a freshman student named Jackie has also unraveled. After these high profile sexual assault charges proved to be fictional, the difficult,unpleasant question must be asked is: how often do women make phony claims of sexual assault? . . .

Unfortunately sexual assault has been politicized since the 1980s, when feminists established that a subordinate at work was inherently being sexually harrassed if approached by a romantically interested or sexually suggestive superior. In this super-charged era, Republican President George H. W. Bush’s Department of Defense nominee John Tower and Republican Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon were both sacked for inappropriate sexual advances to women and Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas was accused in his contentious confirmation hearing of inappropriate behavior towards his assistant Anita Hill. In the heat of debate about allegations of improper conduct by men in high office, feminists famously railed that women don’t lie about such things. Then feminists grew silent when women’s rights supporting Democratic President Bill Clinton was accused of that very type of sexual harrassment.

Now, after a two decade truce, a new campaign by the United States Department of Education Office for Civil Rights has targeted college campuses, hysterically attempting to demonize men as potential sexual predators by bandying about propaganda that 20% of college women are victims of sexual assault. The state of California has reacted to this alleged epidemic of rape by passing the “Yes Means Yes” legislation that puts the government on every student’s date and in every student’s bedroom. The result of basing policy on bad statistics is a further poisoning of the relationships between men and women. More innocent men now face the very real prospect in 2015 of having their lives destroyed by false accusations of sexual assault.

This dangerous crisis of male-female relations is an opportunity for the Obama Administration to reverse course, tamp down the vigilante atmosphere and actually contribute positively to the discussion. Politically neutral social scientists should be commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services to study the incident of bogus claims versus true claims of sexual assault in a variety of urban, rural and college locations across the country to get impeccably reliable data. The Obama Administration “It’s On Us” campaign should be mothballed. The Office of Civil Rights should cease strong-arming universities into complying to ridiculous new standards to prosecute men for sexual assault claims. President Obama should announce that the 20% sexual assault claim that the campaign was based on was erroneous in lieu of the latest Justice Department study that showed a 0.61 percent incidence of female college students actually being assaulted.

By making a clean break from the misguided Office of Civil Rights offensive against men, President Obama can create a lasting legacy of de-politicizing this tempestuous subject by accurately identifying and targeting those who do assault women without falsely tarring and feathering innocent men.

Yeah, I don’t think that he’s interested in doing that.