Saturday, October 27, 2007

A University Gets it Right for Once

We read:

"The University of Maryland is under fire for denying activists from the Clothesline Project, a campus rape-awareness event, permission to publicly name alleged rapists. The university cites the danger of lawsuits from those named, and that's certainly a reasonable fear. Yet the university should also oppose naming alleged rapists because it could defame and harm innocent men.

A significant percentage of allegations of sexual assault are false. According to a study conducted by former Purdue sociologist Eugene J. Kanin and published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, in more than 40 percent of the cases reviewed, the complainants eventually admitted that no rape had occurred. Mr. Kanin also studied rape allegations in two large midwestern universities and found that 50 percent of the allegations were recanted by the accuser.

Source