Democratic Senators Slam George Will For 'Antiquated' Column On Campus Rape

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/12/george-will-rape-column_n_5488164.html?1402588160


Laura Bassett
Democratic Senators Slam George Will For 'Antiquated' Column On Campus Rape
Posted: 06/12/2014 11:49 am EDT Updated: 1 hour ago


A group of Democratic senators penned a scathing letter to conservative Washington Post columnist George Will on Thursday, sharply rebuking Will for casting doubt on the prevalence of campus sexual assault in his June 6 column.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and three of his Democratic colleagues, Sens. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), Tammy Baldwin (Wis.) and Robert Casey (Pa.), said they read Will's controversial sexual assault column "with dismay."

"Your thesis and statistics fly in the face of everything we know about this issue," the senators wrote. "More egregiously, you trivialize the scourge of sexual assault, putting the phrase in scare quotes and treating this crime as a socially acceptable phenomenon. It is in fact a spreading epidemic, and you legitimize the myths that victims and victim advocates have worked tirelessly for decades to combat."

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Blumenthal has worked on the issue of campus rape for years and recently drafted a "bill of rights" for college sexual assault survivors. He and his colleagues blasted Will for opining on the epidemic without talking to any actual victims.

"The culture you described is so antiquated, so counterintuitive and so contrary to anything we heard that we hope you will make an effort to hear the stories survivors bravely shared with us about the struggles they face in addressing what has happened to them -- often with little meaningful assistance from authorities expected to help them," the lawmakers wrote. "In this instance, your writing, which purports to be based on accurate facts and figures, has not only shown a fundamental disrespect to survivors, but also includes a harmful rhetoric that has made addressing this issue so difficult."

Will did not respond to a request for comment.