ASHE SCHOW: Bob Casey doesn’t get why numbers are important.

Sen. Bob Casey, in an interview with USA Today about his campus sexual assault bill, claimed that knowing just how many women are sexually assaulted “is important.”

Casey had been asked whether Congress accepts the myth that one-in-five women will be sexually assaulted while in college. Casey immediately followed up his claim that the exact number is important by suggesting the number didn’t really matter.

“The number is important. Even if the argument proves true that it’s not (valid) — that it’s one in six, one in seven, one in ten, one in 20 ­— that is still way too high,” Casey said. “I have four daughters, two in college. So this hits people in a very personal way. We could spend all day debating numbers. I’m much more concerned about taking action.”

(I wonder what Casey would have said if he had four sons at risk of being wrongly accused.)

In any event, the number truly is important, because it dictates (or should dictate) what action is taken. Of course one sexual assault is too many, but if the one-in-five number is true, then the draconian policies being enacted on college campuses (the guilty-until-proven-innocent-maybe mentality and mandated question-and-answer sessions during sexual activity) probably don’t go far enough.

Numbers that high would suggest that college is the most dangerous place for women in America. It would recommend a return to sex-segregated colleges, or even the abolition of higher education.

But the fact that women are now outpacing men when it comes to college graduation belies the notion that college is a hotbed of sex crime on par with the world’s most dangerous countries. If it were that dangerous, women would be stupid to step foot on any college campus.

But if the number were closer to say, 0.61 percent of women being sexually assaulted annually — a bit more than one in 164 — then such draconian measures are obvious overreactions. “Bystander awareness” programs might be fine for the problem we’re actually dealing with, but not the evisceration of due process rights for accused students, which creates entirely new problems while failing to solve the original, much-exaggerated one.

Never let a fake crisis go to waste.