Bettina Arndt: University life rife with invented assault claims

Accused male students are seemingly denied the course of natural justice and have their education careers ruined due to stringent reporting of sexual assault at universities, writes Bettina Arndt.

Teal independents are showing their feminist credentials by demanding that universities “do more” about sexual assault on campus.

“All of us women who have attended tertiary facilities in Australia know someone who has been raped while at university,” announced Dr Monique Ryan. Well, perhaps in your circles, Monique.

Then Allegra Spender was on ABC radio jumping on board the national broadcaster’s latest questionable claim that 275 people are sexually assaulted on our campuses each week.

Is that disinformation or simply misinformation? This wild 275 headline figure has provided useful propaganda for media stories supporting Education Minister Jason Clare’s recent attack on the universities.

The ABC attributes the statistic to the 2021 National Student Safety Survey. Yet Universities Australia, which ran the survey, said the 275 a week claim was not in their survey results.

It appears to have come from End Rape On Campus activist group who extrapolated from the tiny 2.7 per cent of the student population who bothered to answer the survey and applied it to the whole student population.

(Funnily enough, they got it wrong by using 1.3 million for the student population, when government statistics show 1.6 million is nearer the mark. Those pesky activists could have claimed 339 rapes a week if they’d got their sums right!).

The manufactured statistic was derived from a dubious statistical manoeuvre specifically warned against by the Australian Human Rights Commission which ran the previous survey. The commission stressed the respondents were “self-selected”, which means these responses “cannot be regarded as representative of the Australian university student population as a whole”. It’s like counting different car models in a smash repair shop and using it to warn drivers about comparative vehicle safety.

Australian National University students are angry about high levels of sexual harassment and assault on campus.

Note that this calculation was based on the tiny 1.1 per cent of students answering the survey who claimed to have been sexually assaulted in the previous year – including any sexual contact such as being kissed as well as any sexual activity involving drugs or alcohol.

About half of these assaults weren’t actually on campus but took place in private homes and other outside locations. So, they weren’t campus sexual assaults at all.

The activist group’s 275-a-week concoction was endlessly quoted not only by the ABC but by all manner of feminist groups.

Jason Clare has responded by giving End Rape On Campus just what they always wanted – namely an “expert” independent taskforce.

And who’s got the gig to run this show? Patty Kinnersly, the CEO of domestic violence organisation Our Watch.

She is to be given oversight of the massive sexual assault and harassment bureaucracy running rampant in our universities.

Such an oversight body had long been a goal for the activist groups. They worked on Malcolm Turnbull’s education minister, Simon Birmingham, who had the taskforce on the drawing board before Turnbull was turfed out and Birmingham lost his job.

When that happened, the minister’s adviser sent an email to one of the activists saying: “We were so close!”.

With this Labor government so keen to act as a feminist lapdog, times are good for the campus activists. In the name of keeping women safe on campus, the taskforce will require universities to be transparent about their responses to sexual violence incidents, promote more training of students and staff in “respectful behaviour”, more information about where to report incidents, and more accessible-complaint processes.

Sanctions will be applied to recalcitrant universities. It’s enough to drive vice-chancellors to drink. They’ve seemingly already had years of bending over backwards trying to appease this whole circus.

Patty Kinnersly, Our Watch CEO. Picture: Gary Ramage

In the year following the release of the previous (2016) survey – which, as I explained at the time, showed universities were very safe places for young women – the sector introduced 800 initiatives against sexual violence, rolling out respectful relationships and sexual consent programs, specialist counselling, first responder training and safety apps.

The list goes on.

Most worrying of all was the truly Kafkaesque complaints system set in place across the university sector, with accused students instantly suspended from university and facing committees held in private, denying accused men normal legal protections.

Countless male students have had their education destroyed and lives ruined.

Universities did all this but still it was never enough.

Earlier this month, ANU students held their sixth annual rally against the “ongoing crisis of sexual violence at the university”. One student was reported in a local newspaper as saying that when she first planned to go to the ANU, her friends were horrified: “How could I possibly be safe if I move to ANU?”.

Universities quake in fear that they will find themselves in this cruel spotlight, under attack for some claimed failure in their efforts to keep women safe. Such is the state of terror that one university recently banned the use of their normal email system for discussion of sexual assault and harassment matters.

All such communication must now be printed out and placed into yellow envelopes to be delivered by internal couriers. Is it any wonder that many of the bosses of our university are ready to throw in the towel?

Bettina Arndt blogs on Substack