SPIKED: Rolling Stone‘s Rape Hoax Speaks to a New Hysteria on U.S. College Campuses

Posted: December 14, 2014 | Author: Pundit Planet | Filed under: Censorship, Education, Health and Social Issues, U.S. News | Tags: Jann Wenner, North American fraternity and sorority housing, Phi Kappa Psi, Rape, Rolling Stone, Sexual abuse, Sexual assault, University of Virginia |5 Comments

The Unravelling of the Rolling Stone Article is Not an Isolated Event

Sean Collins reports: For years now, academics and activists, backed by university administrators and government officials, have promoted the idea that there is a rape epidemic on US campuses, enabled by a ‘rape culture’ that pervades social life. This notion has created a frenzied and highly emotional atmosphere in colleges, with accusations flying and campus tribunals handing down sentences for what are essentially criminal acts. The stunning news that Rolling Stone now disowns its story that claimed a female student was gang-raped at a University of Virginia (UVA) fraternity shows that the drive to root out ‘rape culture’ is spinning out of control.

“We’re living through a full-blown panic, akin to the daycare sexual abuse scandals of the 1980s and early 1990s, with bad consequences for both women and men.”

The Rolling Stone article, written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, described in graphic terms how a young woman, ‘Jackie’, was lured by her date to a room in a fraternity, where she was allegedly raped by seven men, as part of a premeditated initiation ceremony. The terrible details included: smashing Jackie through a plate-glass table, cutting her badly; the men laughing in response to her cries, and saying things like ‘grab its motherfucking leg’; the men calling each other names like Armpit and Blanket. Appearing after a three-hour ordeal, three friends discourage Jackie from reporting this to the police or the university, or from going to a hospital, because they fear they will be banned from future parties at this fraternity.

After some began to raise questions, an investigation by the Washington Post unearthed details that contradicted the story: the fraternity didn’t hold a party on the date cited by Jackie; the man named as the alleged attacker belonged to a different fraternity, and he says he never met Jackie; no member of the fraternity worked as a lifeguard, as Jackie claimed her attacker did; the fraternity doesn’t have a pledging or initiation process in Autumn, when the alleged attack was said to have occurred; a male friend of Jackie says she was not found in a bloody dress that night, nor did he or others try to dissuade her from reporting an assault…(read more)

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