© Australian Human Rights Commission photosteam.
What do senior university administrators chat about when they attend overseas conferences with others of their kind? Surely when vice-chancellors hobnob with American college presidents the conversation must sometimes stray to their troubles - particularly the costly business of managing the so-called "campus rape crisis."
So how come these smart leaders from the Australian higher education sector haven't twigged to the dangers ahead? Ripples from the fallout of the campus rape frenzy on American college campuses have travelled across the world. Back in the 1990s, there were campus protests with furious young women brandishing placards
claiming one in four students are raped. The alarmist 2015 propaganda movie
The Hunting Ground was screened across the country, showing serial rapists preying on college women.
By 2007, the activists had achieved their main goal, with Obama requiring all publicly-funded universities to set up tribunals for determining sexual assault cases.
So American universities got into the criminal investigation business,
with lower standards of proof greatly increasing the chances of conviction in date rape cases. Such cases remain a stumbling block in the highly successful and much needed feminist push for justice for rape victims. Rape allegations are now treated far more seriously, convictions are more common and attract far higher penalties. According to the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics, in my own state of New South Wales,
numbers of sexual assault convictions have almost doubled since 1995, and over 50 percent of such convictions receive prison sentences compared to about 10 percent of other crimes.
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