Five years ago, the Australian Human Rights Commission conducted a million-dollar survey to try to find evidence of a rape crisis on campus. It proved a huge letdown for the activists because all they found was a lot of unwanted staring and tiny rates of sexual assault. I was the only journalist in Australia to suggest we should be celebrating our safe universities whilst mainstream media beat up a new narrative about widespread campus ‘sexual violence’ which activists used to bully universities into setting up the kangaroo courts, implementing sexual consent courses and the like. 

Now they’ve tried again, and contrary to what has appeared in the media this week, the results are even more disappointing for the feminists. The latest survey published last Wednesday was a dud, with sexual harassment rates less than a third of those reported in 2015-16 (8 per cent compared to 26 per cent), and minimal rates of assault (1.1 per cent for the year surveyed compared to the earlier figure of 0.8 per cent). 

What a joke, given that they’d done everything they could to expand the definitions of sexual misconduct, as I explained in this blog last year. The latest survey included as harassment such items as staring, making comments about your private life or physical appearance, and repeated requests to go on a date.

Enthusiastic consent featured in defining sexual assault, with all sexual acts including kissing deemed assault if your partner ‘made no effort to check whether you agreed or not’ and including all sexual acts as assault if you were ‘affected by drugs or alcohol’.

The response rate for the survey was just 11.6 per cent – 43,819 self-selected responses from those invited to participate, who were in turn just part of the 1.6 million university students in this country. So, the new report is based on a piddling 2.7 per cent of the student population.

Not that the statistics matter two hoots when our blinkered media remains determined to sing from the feminist songbook. They carefully shifted the goal posts, highlighting such critical matters as the newly discovered peak sexual assault rates for pansexual students and claiming one in three students experienced sexual assault over their lifetimes, a figure which no doubt includes all the drunken schoolkid gropes that feature in Contos’s testimonials – nothing to do with the supposed campus rape crisis.

Not a single one of the so-called reporters bothered to look at official sexual assault rates for this age group. The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Personal Safety Survey shows sexual harassment rates for 18-24-year-olds of 27.3 per cent and sexual assault at 3.4 per cent – making it very clear that our universities are extremely safe compared to the general community.

For the last two days graduates across Australia have been receiving emails from Vice Chancellors apologising for the ongoing crisis and promising to do better. How about all you Australian graduates spend a few minutes writing to these snivelling leaders of your former institute of higher learning to tell them that we’ve had enough? Call out their lack of integrity in participating in this farcical misrepresentation of the important issue of the safety of our universities. And urge them to put a stop to this ongoing, contrived campaign to demonise the next generation of vulnerable young men.

Read more of Bettina Arndt on Substack.