Matthew Stewart. Academic Questions. Volume 29, Issue 2, June 2016.
In November 2014, Rolling Stone published an article about a gang rape at the University of Virginia that turned out to be fictitious. This highly publicized exposé of bias confirmation masquerading as journalism should have prompted a re-think on the part of activists who had typically proffered the story as evidence of their claims of a “campus rape culture.” But whatever the fallout from the article, it has not included a slowdown in implementing new university protocols adopted in line with the assumption that a raging epidemic of sexual assaults is coursing through American college campuses. Nor have the radicals and activists who sustain the myth of widespread campus sexual assault slowed their efforts or moderated their rhetoric. On the contrary, increasing numbers of students are stating that the alarming statistics on the frequency of assault today must be true, for they keep seeing them in the media and hearing them from campus authorities. And while skeptics have argued against the myth and protested the changes it has engendered, others have adopted the thought that while the problem of sexual assault might not be as bad as advocates claimed, it must surely be a whole lot worse than they themselves once believed, so sweeping changes are justified, even desirable.
True Believers and Moral Panics
Assertions that sexual assault constitutes a serious problem on America’s college campuses surfaced over thirty years ago as one component of second-wave feminism. The crime was said to be underestimated, underreported, and poorly handled by authorities, who too often dismissed or downplayed the charges brought by victims. While some would have gone so far as to say that sexual assault on campus was a crisis that demanded a vigorous and concerted response, few would have used the word epidemic, and fewer still would have asserted that one in four or one in five women are the victims of sexual assault while attending college, as today’s claimants insist. Concern with campus sex crimes has waxed and waned in public consciousness and the media since that time, never disappearing but seeming dormant for relatively long periods, only to come to an unprecedented boil in the last few years. Many people now simply accept the one-in-four/one-in-five claim, including those who work on college campuses and thus should know better. Spurred by activists and responding to dubious studies of campus sexual assault, governmental agencies and university bureaucracies have made deleterious changes to campus governance. There is no shortage of True Believers, and an inquisitorial mentality is being promulgated in response to the problem of campus sexual assault.
Coincidentally, during this same thirty-year period the study of “moral panics” emerged as a discreet area of academic specialization, finding a home in departments of sociology, criminology, and psychology, and becoming an established term within the social sciences. The concept has already generated numerous case studies and theoretical considerations. In the words of the late British criminologist Jason Ditton, moral panic is “far and away the most influential sociological concept to have been generated in the second half of the twentieth century.” The term has entered into the lexicon of media pundits, opinion makers, and journalists, and made inroads into middlebrow discourse. It has occasionally been applied to the alleged campus rape crisis in a loose and commonsense manner in popular media, but, despite its evident ripeness for consideration, “moral panic” remains missing from the academic sociology devoted to that problem. Even as magazines, newspapers, radio and television programming, and the Internet have filled with coverage of the extraordinary claim that one in four or one in five college women is sexually assaulted, those who study moral panics at a professional level have not analyzed the alleged crisis in academic studies of moral panic.
Moral Entrepreneurs and Folk Devils
A moral panic exists when blame for a real or perceived problem is attached to a specified group of wrongdoers (the moral dimension), and the supposed threat posed by this group is exaggerated, often wildly, beyond the threat that these wrongdoers actually pose (the element of panic). Thus the existence of a disproportional reaction can be seen as a sine qua non in the identification of moral panics. In a commonly used term of the field, supposed evildoers are referred to as “folk devils,” a suggestive bit of jargon if ever there was. And those who foment the panic are called “moral entrepreneurs.” Early on, the social scientists who theorized the phenomenon emphasized: (1) the sense of righteous indignation that accompanies the panic, outstripping even fear as the primary emotional response to the folk devils, and (2) the rapid onset of a disaster mentality even though no actual disaster occurs.
Moral panics may occasionally arise from sheer fabrication—think of colonial Salem, where witch trials were held and people were falsely convicted and executed. In modern times, there was a wave of false accusations of child abuse in day care centers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While it is important to be attentive to the character of those who have the care of children, nothing can rationally account for the sudden abandonment of ordinary skepticism and the seemingly willful hysterical belief in contradictory and phantasmagorical testimony indulged in during that panic. Similarly, although it is right to be aware of problems that can arise from casual sex and hookups, the same abandonment of common sense combined with righteous insistence is being played out today on American campuses and in the media in the name of an alleged sexual assault crisis. Recalling the wrongful convictions and long prison sentences of innocent workers during the day care witch hunt, we may conclude that while great harm does not always come from moral panics, too often it does.
Phenomena that have been identified as moral panics by social scientists include the already-mentioned day care calamity, the war on drugs, flag burning, the run-up to the Iraq War, sex trafficking, crack babies, satanic ritual abuse, fear of street crime, fear of AIDS victims, fear of LSD-induced brain damage, fear of video games and role-playing games, Islamophobia, and—Stanley Cohen’s Ur study in the field—fear of British mods and rockers of the 1960s. Not among the phenomena studied as a moral panic: the alleged epidemic of campus sexual assaults. A search of the library holdings at the R1 university where I teach turns up over three thousand articles, books, and conference proceedings in response to the search term “moral panic”—not one of which analyzes allegations of widespread collegiate sex crimes. Collegiate sex crimes have been widely examined from other viewpoints, however, which illustrates that the topic is not invisible to academics. But it evidently cannot be researched as a moral panic.
Again, how can this be? Prima facie the topic is serious enough to merit analysis. It is centered in the very institutions where social scientists ply their trade. The allegations have occasioned the intervention of the federal government in institutional governance, most seriously by requiring strict changes in campus judicial proceedings that even many feminists have protested as unjust. Many student life functionaries have found new duties and powers; campus programs have been introduced and revised in response to the alleged epidemic; student-student, student-faculty, and faculty-faculty relations have been affected; and on some campuses the social climate has been altered by the insistence that a rape culture flourishes and must be stamped out.
The Academic Moral Tribe
When a claim is made that American university women are assaulted at over what is twice the rate during the long-lived civil wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—commonly referred to with the ugly epithet “Rape Capital of the World”—why wouldn’t at least some moral panic scholars sense something dubious and look into the matter?
Even the authors of the sexual assault studies routinely used to make exaggerated claims warn against too easily accepting their findings as universal. As the 2015 Report on the AAU Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct puts it: “Overall, these comparisons [of several recent studies] illustrate that estimates such as ‘1 in 5’ or ‘1 in 4’ as a global rate, across all IHEs [institutions of higher education] is at least oversimplistic, if not misleading. None of the studies which generate estimates for specific IHEs are nationally representative. The above results show that the rates vary greatly across institutions.” Such cautions are tossed aside by True Believers, as are the results of the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2014 National Crime Victimization Survey, which found that university women are sexually assaulted at a slightly lower rate than their peers outside of college.
Furthermore, a substantial number of cogent articles have been published that systematically debunk the one-in-four/five figures, some of them coming from left-leaning sources, including authors who identify as feminists. Debunking claims of a campus sexual assault crisis can be found in flagship newspapers, serious websites, and intellectual magazines. Heather Mac Donald’s 2008 takedown of the “campus sexual-assault industry” in City Journal is a locus classicus. Problems of definition, methodology, and statistical validity have been cogently cited.
From the point of view of moral panic studies, the criterion of disproportionality can clearly be demonstrated, the moral dimension is self-evidently present, and academic analyses of the alleged rape crisis as a moral panic should be appearing in sociological journals. But they are not. Why?
The short answer is that social science departments, editorial boards, and professional organizations form a “tribal moral community.” In 2011 Jonathan Haidt, a self-described liberal, delivered a keynote speech at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, challenging members to confront the left-wing assumptions and biases that pervade the profession. According to Haidt, “if a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community. They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” Haidt was addressing social psychologists, but his remarks apply to many social science fields, whose leftward tilt is well documented. The tribal moral community of social scientists has created a political and moral orthodoxy that “binds and blinds” the profession, limiting research. Professional “blindness” explains why cogent critiques of the alleged campus sexual assault crisis can be found in opinion journals and online but not in academic journals.
The list of phenomena that have been studied as cases of moral panic is heavily biased toward Left and Left-libertarian causes and conclusions. Benighted moral entrepreneurs are located within the ranks of hidebound traditionalists, right-wing moralizers, and reactionary fearmongers, while the maligned folk devils exist among the marginalized, underprivileged, or vexed and longsuffering forces of progressivism. As the sociologist Christian Smith has concluded, sociologists are governed by a grand narrative of “Liberal Progress” according to which they are driven to “dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitation, and irrational traditionalism.”
Social Science vs. Sacred Values
To question the rape crisis mythology would necessarily put the social scientist at odds with sacred values entrenched in the campus Left, especially certain strains of academic feminism, various progressive advocacy groups, and student life administrators and staff of the social justice ilk. It would also require many social scientists to confront their own sacred values, likewise aligned with progressivist causes, academic feminism, and fascination with victim status. The maligned folk devils are young men (a category often narrowed to “frat boys,” “jocks,” or, in the characterization of a recent Boston University hire, “white boys”) and the overwrought moral entrepreneurs are often found teaching women’s studies or working the social justice side of the street in student affairs. As Heather Mac Donald explains, most campuses now have an entrenched “rape industry” whose interests in self-perpetuation are obvious to the neutral observer, but who many social scientists consider natural allies in the fight for progress.
It is one thing to acknowledge, as happened in the 1970s and 1980s, that acquaintance rape is a phenomenon to take seriously, that it is more common than once was generally recognized, and that its victims should be heard and helped. That sort of enlightenment can be embraced by anyone without risk of cognitive dissonance, but contemporary moral entrepreneurs now demand something different, and they do so in a campus climate of ever-expanding indignation and self-righteousness. Ready-made dudgeon exists in pockets on nearly every campus and amounts to a pervasive ethos at some. Believe-the-victim has morphed from a tonic exhortation to take women seriously into an absolutist decree, while the status of victim has been broadened enormously and adopted by a surprising number of students as a spurious standing from which to exert power in the form of conjuring guilt. Second-wave feminist Susan Brownmiller, whose 1975 Against Our Will is the foundational text of the previous generation’s anti-rape movement, has stated that the new movement “doesn’t accept reality.”
Noted civil libertarian lawyer Harvey Silverglate has put it this way: “The definition of ‘sexual assault’ has become so broad as to encompass nearly all romantic contact. A sexual advance is considered ‘unwelcome’ on subjective, rather than objective, grounds. In other words, if a complainant feels she was violated, then she was.” Wise though it is, even Silverglate’s explanation does not fully account for the factor of regret that is bound to arise in an environment that combines emotional immaturity with drinking, drug use, and casual hooking up. Rationalizing and ego-saving, the human mind often transforms behavior we regret into acts forced upon us.
For some social scientists the very idea of applying the basic formulae to identify a moral panic to the alleged rape crisis is tantamount to a thought crime. The possibility that a panic could be generated by moral entrepreneurs on the left and centered in their own institutions is so disruptive of the tribal weltanschauung that it must be ignored or suppressed, despite its ripeness for academic analysis. If someone produces a study of the alleged campus sexual assault crisis as a moral panic, is there a social science journal that would publish it? Anyone who can envision undertaking such a study may be put off from it if he believes it will never appear in a peer-reviewed journal whose editorial standards are governed by the tribal elders of the Left.
Federal Fallout
In the case of the alleged campus sexual assault epidemic, the fallout from the moral panic is serious. Ignoring common sense and the Department of Justice findings mentioned above, brandishing instead debunked statistics as indisputable truth, the present administration has ridden its white horse—well fed from the trough of Department of Education bureaucratic overreach—onto the academic scene to trample the old practices of campus adjudication and insist on their own. While some colleges may have employed practices in need of revision, to many in the academy, including, thanks be, civil liberties feminists and others ordinarily identified with the political Left, the self-styled progressive federal knights look far more like bullies than saviors.
In the wake of speeches and statements that gave credence to the one-in-four/five figures, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to the presidents of colleges and universities in 2011, mandating that their institutions investigate and adjudicate allegations of sexual assault in accordance to protocols aligned with a “preponderance of the evidence” standard to determine guilt. Further, it subsequently issued a list of colleges and universities targeted for investigation of Title IX noncompliance with regard to their handling of sexual assault allegations. At the time of this writing, that list includes ninety-four institutions—certainly enough to send a message to others that they could be next.23 The perceived threat, apart from stigmatization and bad PR, is the usual one forthcoming from such bureaucracies: withdrawal of federal funding from institutions that fail to toe the line. With the exception of a tiny number of private colleges that had already decided to forego federal funding, it is safe to conclude that there will be none willing to risk noncompliance.
Fortunately, critics from within academe have called attention to this ill-conceived federal push. Some have seen it as essentially a set of instructions for finding young men guilty of sex crimes. “Presumed Guilty” is the title of a September 2014 Chronicle of Higher Education article that presents the histories of men found guilty in highly subjective cases, often with thin evidence that would not pass the former and more appropriate standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” and usually without the opportunity to mount a proper defense. In the words of Alan Dershowitz, his own university’s policy response to the new federal mandates “was written by people who think sexual assault is so heinous a crime that even innocence is not a defense.” The number of such cases is growing, but they are being documented online and in print and opposition for the defense has been organized.
Dershowitz’s remark was made in the wake of an October 2014 Boston Globe op-ed, wherein he was joined by twenty-seven other members and emeriti of the Harvard Law School faculty in protesting Harvard’s policy, undoubtedly constructed by the administration with a view to quieting campus activists and keeping the federal bureaucracy off its back. Anyone unfamiliar with the basic criticisms of the federally mandated response to the sex assault moral panic will benefit by reading this succinct set of objections, which typifies what opponents of the new mandates and procedures have said about how they undermine and even eliminate basic due process. A hallmark of moral panics is the propensity with which otherwise right-thinking people are willing to abandon basic civility and the rule of law in the name of achieving their righteously conceived social objectives. Moral panics foster the inquisitorial.
The Stakes
There remains a great deal at stake. In their thorough anatomy of moral panics, sociologists Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda stipulate that volatility is a key feature of the concept. Simply put, like a fad or other such collective behavior, a moral panic heats up quickly but usually subsides just as suddenly. Admittedly, quick and sudden are subjective terms. For those falsely accused during the day care panic nothing about the end of their travails would have seemed sudden; likewise for the growing number of young men expelled from universities without the benefit of due process. But from a more disinterested point of view, Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s observation seems correct. It is optimistic in its implication that rationality and better judgment will rise to the top if given enough time. American institutions have not been overwhelmed by crack babies, as predicted in multiple media outlets and worried over by politicians in the 1980s. Satanic ritual abuse, once a media staple, has also disappeared from public consciousness.
Nevertheless, complacency should not be the offspring of optimism, for, as Goode and Ben-Yehuda point out, moral panics often become “routinized” or “institutionalized” even if their white-hot lifespan is short. After the panic diminishes, after the moral entrepreneurs lose their audience and the media moves on to something else sensational, the panic’s effects “remain in place in the form of social movement organizations, legislation, enforcement practices, informal interpersonal norms or practices for punishing transgressors.” Looking around America’s campuses, one sees Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s observation being fulfilled in each particular, and it is hard not to conclude that the panic is well on its way to being “institutionalized.” Thus it remains regrettable that social scientists show no interest in performing a rigorous analysis of the moral panic that is besetting their own institutions. One must conclude that tribal moral ethics stand in their way and the tribal elders are letting down their peers and initiates alike.