The “Affirmative Consent” Trap

From Instapundit:

The “Affirmative Consent” Trap -- California lawmakers take on “rape culture” at the expense of rights

The reigning assumption in Sacramento—and Washington, D.C., for that matter—is that universities aren’t taking the problem of campus sexual assault seriously enough. A state audit released in June drew precisely that conclusion, and recommended that California’s state universities “do more to appropriately educate students on sexual harassment and sexual violence.” Every campus has a rape crisis center of some kind, with counselors on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Every campus police department offers rape defense programs. “Take Back the Night” programs are ubiquitous. Is more training and “education”—meaning more bureaucracy—really the answer?

Neither the legislature nor the state auditor seems to challenge the claim, unchanged and virtually unquestioned for nearly 30 years, that either one-in-four or one-in-five college students is a victim of sexual assault. As Heather Mac Donald has pointed out, if that figure is correct, “campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions.” But it’s almost certainly not accurate. “No crime, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20 or 25 percent, even over many years,” Mac Donald observes. Consider the one-in-four or one-in-five figure in light of the number of sexual assaults reported in the nation’s most crime-ridden cities. Mac Donald notes, for example, that the rape rate in New Orleans was .0234 percent in 2012.

Do the math, the conventional wisdom is a lie. Remember Sandra "The Slut" Fluke and her figures on birth control costs for a law student?