Heather MacDonald writes in City Journal about rape on college campuses.  Apparently, it’s an epidemic that’s been going on for twenty years, when a study suggested that one in four college women would be raped or assaulted while in college.  What MacDonald found when researching, though, is that college administrators don’t do the one thing they should be doing.  They don’t ask female students to modify their behavior.  She says that most…

…alleged rapes could be avoided if the girls took certain steps: don’t get into bed with a guy when you are very drunk, don’t take off your clothes, don’t get involved in oral sex, and so on. Such advice is fully consistent with female empowerment. It recognizes that girls have the power to stop “campus rape.” It treats them as moral agents able to control their fates.

But when I suggest to campus sexual assault administrators that they could stop what Koss calls the “rape pandemic” overnight if they persuaded girls to exercise more prudence, I inevitably receive responses like the following (these are my interlocutors’ actual words): “I am uncomfortable with the idea of ‘recommending that female students exercise more modesty and restraint’ - this indicates that if they are raped it could be their fault - it is never their fault.”

MacDonald suggests that administrators answer this way because “these self-professed women’s advocates really do believe that a drunken hookup is rape, and yet are withholding from women the simplest, surest way to prevent being raped, simply in order to preserve the principle of male fault. If the latter situation actually prevails, I conclude that the campus rape movement is purely political, interested solely in casting men as the evil perpetrators of the patriarchy rather than in most effectively protecting potential victims of a traumatic crime.”

Is she right?