A study shows that a program designed to teach college women how to resist unwanted sex almost halved the risk of rape on three college campuses. Here’s how a news report described the program:
The 12-hour resistance program, conducted in four sessions, taught women how to effectively assess the risk of sexual assault by men they knew, recognize the danger in coercive situations, get past emotional roadblocks to resist unwanted sexual behaviors and practice verbally resisting the behavior or actions. The program also spent two hours teaching self-defense strategies and included several hours bringing all the instruction together in a session on safe sex practices and effective communication about sex.
The overriding theme of the new program is to teach college women to just say “no.”
But that’s a big problem for the usual suspects. Kathleen Basile, a lead behavioral scientist in the division of violence prevention at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said this: “The main problem with a preventive approach that is focused on potential victims of sexual assault is that it puts the responsibility for preventing the assault on the potential victim, and does not acknowledge the role that potential perpetrators and the larger community play.” Basile said that the most pervasive myth about sexual assault is that victims bear some of the blame because of how they dressed, what they drank or some other way they put themselves at risk. “Sexual violence is never a victim’s fault,” she said.
Here we go again.
In this new program, no one is “blaming” women for being raped, and no one is giving license to the sociopaths who rape. The new program is designed to help women protect themselves from sociopaths, but extremists in the sexual grievance industry would prefer to withhold that protection in order to conform to some radical feminist orthodoxy. If we took a poll, I would bet that the vast majority of Americans would agree the extremists’ position is loony.
Put aside the usual caterwauling about “victim blaming,” the new program is disturbing in one very important sense: since women are able to half the number of “rapes” by learning to say no, this suggests that significant numbers of college men are being held responsible for sexual misconduct even though their “victims” have reasonable alternatives to engaging in the sex act but don’t exercise them. These men are not overcoming their “victims” with force despite their protests. They are stopping when their “victims” tell them they don’t want to have sex. In other words, a lot of men are being held responsible for “rape” that isn’t really rape.
What they really need to teach young women, and young men, is about the regret asymmetry that separates young men and women when it comes to sex.
[Ed. note: This article originally appeared at COTWA and is reprinted here with permission.]
