Topic: WorldNetDaily
Joseph Farah rants in a Dec. 1 column:
The latest study shows that 15 percent female freshmen are raped their first year at college or university.
It’s a shocking statistic.
But it gets worse.
These freshman women are raped, according to the study, while they are incapacitated by drug or alcohol use.
But still it gets worse.
Do you realize that many colleges and universities don’t require – and even discourage – that local police departments investigate rapes, preferring that reports are merely filed with campus police?
Still it gets worse.
Do you realize the federal government spends tens of millions of your hard-earned tax dollars on programs telling students how to reduce sexual assaults but never mentions even once that excessive drinking is the leading factor in campus rapes?
How is this possible?
The answer is “political correctness.”[...]
If the statistics are right, then college campuses, run by the most “progressive” minds in the country, are the least safe place for young women in America. To me, any parent who believes the statistics would be out of his or her mind sending his or her daughter off to college.
What Farah won't tell you: Rape and alcohol are also problems at private Christian schools, including the one to which Farah sent at least one of his daughters.
The New Republic reported last year about issues of rape at Patrick Henry College, a homeschooler-friendly right-wing Christian school in exurban Washington D.C. -- close enough to Farah's home in wealthy Fairfax County, Va., that at least one of his daughters, Alyssa, attended college there. According to the New Republic, Patrick Henry has a rather callous attitude toward female students who have been sexually assaulted, tending to blame the victim, especially if she had been drinking, and failing to hold of the alleged male perpetrators accountable for their actions.
An independent review of the allegations conducted by the school's alumni association found that the school officials had stonewalled the investigation and misled about the number of sexual assaults involving students, and that half of Patrick Henry students don't understand that nonconsensual behavior is a key component of sexual assault.
This investigation may or may not have played a role in the abrupt resignation of college president Graham Walker a couple months after the independent review came out. (Walker's rampant homophobia that stood out at a place already notoriously unfriendly to gays and an overall authoritarian attitude that included threatening journalism students out of reporting an unflattering story about a professor at the school probably didn't help matters either.)
But as we noted, you didn't read about this story at WND. Why? Farah is a huge booster of the school -- he even devoted a column to begging readers to donate to it -- and its founder and chancellor, Michael Farris, is close enough to Farah that at one point he had his own WND column. One WND article touted how the school has "Ivy League-caliber scholastics paired with a distinctly Christian worldview." The author of that article? Alyssa Farah.
Are parents equally out of their minds to send their daughters to a school with as callous an attitude toward victims of sexual assault as Patrick Henry College has been demonstrated to have? Farah doesn't seem to want to answer that question.
