THIS PARTICULAR MORAL PANIC APPEARS TO BE SUBSIDING: Newsweek highlights the ‘other side’ of campus sexual assault debate.
Newsweek has generally provided positive coverage for those insisting campus sexual assault is rampant at American colleges and universities. They’ve written uncritically about severely flawed studies alleging that one in three men would rape if they could get away with it (debunked here) and one in four or five women allegedly being sexually assaulted while in college (debunked here).
But on Thursday, the magazine published an article that tells the other side of the campus sexual assault debate — the side where accused men (and a couple of women) have no due process rights and are branded as rapists without being able to properly defend themselves.
Newsweek’s Max Kutner told the story of Paul Nungesser, who was accused of raping mattress-toter Emma Sulkowicz and of other sexual misconduct by some of her friends. In each instance, Nungesser was cleared of wrongdoing (including one accusation that was less plausible than Sulkowicz’s). He was even interviewed by police in relation to Sulkowicz’s accusation, but the investigation went no further. . . .
Newsweek also tells the story of several other men who have been accused but who paint a much different picture of what occurred during the alleged rape. For one accused student, S. Tim Yusuf, the accusation against him in 1992 paved the way for a landmark court case cited by many accused students now.
Yusuf had been accused of sexual harassment, but was able to provide evidence that he wasn’t anywhere near his accuser at the time of the alleged incident. The school didn’t allow him to submit that evidence and suspended him for one semester. Twenty years later, and schools are still refusing accused students the ability to provide evidence in their defense, or if it is allowed, that evidence is then twisted as evidence of wrongdoing.
Newsweek also spoke to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s Samantha Harris, who suggested that previously, women who made sexual assault accusations were not taken seriously, but that now, “a growing number of people are starting to be concerned that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.”
Well, that’s because it has. And it’s not so much “swung” as “shoved by man-hating feminists trying to create a ‘war on women’ narrative for Hillary.”