Wednesday, April 21, 2004

The "Cry Wolf" Syndrome has arrived.

And it's biting people in the ass.

The University of Colorado at Boulder’s ongoing sex scandal revolves around football players who are accused of "getting away" with raping up to 10 women over the past several years. Women are suing. Dozens of athletes and their families are devastated. The National Organization for Women is demanding the head coach be fired.

Legislators wonder if they should conduct their own investigation. The truth of the specific accusations has yet to be determined. But, through the cacophony of voices, Richard Grego wishes to express a differing opinion: Namely, that the CU campus promotes false awareness.

Grego, who told me his story via e-mail, claims he knows CU promotes false awareness because, he says, he used to sell the "lie."


When I was an MP, I was a witness in a rape case. The case failed because THERE WAS NO RAPE. Attempted rape, possibly, but I'm not a prosecutor. Everyone involved in the whole debacle was confronted with a plantiff who didn't care about the actual truth, she just wanted to make this guy suffer. And this guy was a shitbag, no doubt about it, but he wasn't a rapist. Not even close.

I'm willing to bet that almost everyone involved in that case is much more skeptical of any rape claims. "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" isn't just a child's bedtime story.

From 1997 to 2000, while an undergraduate, Grego served as "a peer educator" in the Colorado University Rape And Gender Educators (COURAGE), which is funded by CU, and so, sanctioned by it. The group’s stated mission: "to raise awareness about sexual assault, stalking, intimate partner violence and gender as it relates to those topics." In January, 1999, Grego’s work was even singled out and featured for praise by the Colorado Daily in its weekend edition.

Grego now calls his work a "lie" that encouraged unfounded accusations of assault. He writes, "We created at CU a culture of false awareness. … [S]ince I left the group I have suspected that many women have been making false allegations to obtain the attention, sympathy, kid-glove treatment, and power that comes with being a victim of sex assault."


My first year at Ft. Riley I had a rape case come across my desk involving a Private from the 1AD, 1st Brigade. The Plantiff and Defendant statements were all he said/she said stuff. What got to me was a witness statement which claimed that the witness had walked around the side of the building where the intercourse had taken place. When the witness came around the corner, the witness observed the Plantiff engaged in sexual intercourse ON TOP of the Defendant. The Witness stated that they observed the couple engage in intercourse for some time, and when the Plantiff noticed that she had an audience, she jumped off of the Defendant and began crying. The Plantiff pressed rape charges.

Everyone involved in that case is much more skeptical of rape claims.

Why does Grego say the awareness was false? For one thing, COURAGE and its "educators" aggressively promote "facts" such as "1 in 4 women … will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime." COURAGE claimed that the statistic came from the FBI. Thus, Grego explains, "with the credibility of both a large respected university and the police department, we told college kids, many of whom were 18-year[-old] freshmen, that women are being raped left and right." As a COURAGE educator, Grego "went to classes, dorms, fraternities, other groups, and many sororities."

Then Grego took a sociology class that used the much-cited "Mary Koss study" as a cautionary example of how not to do research. The Mary Koss study was a 1985 report published in Ms. Magazine that claimed 1 in 4 women had been raped, and based the claim on interviews Mary Koss conducted with some 7,000 female college students. The women were asked 10 questions; they were deemed to have been raped if any question elicited a "yes" response. One question was, "Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?"

The 1-in-4 figure ranked as the Number One Myth in "The Ten Most Common Feminist Myths" flyer from the Independent Women’s Forum, which was circulated amid controversy on campuses in 2001. IWF commented, "The researcher, Mary Koss, hand-picked by hard-line feminist Gloria Steinem, acknowledges that 73 percent of the young women she counted as rape victims were not aware they had been raped. Forty-three percent of them were dating their ‘attacker’ again."

Grego recognized the discredited "facts" as the ones he was "feeding" the student body. They had not come from the FBI but from a feminist study that was being ridiculed by those who taught statistics. He asked, "Can you imagine how I felt? I had been in essence lying to the students. I was stunned."

Grego claims that when he confronted the professional coordinator of COURAGE about the statistic, she told him that the cause of "raising awareness" about rape was more important than the questions surrounding Koss' study.

Grego decided to leave the group.


So long as the legal system immidiately assumes that the male is guilty, you will have people abusing the system. The growing amount of people who treat charges of rape with skepticism prove that the "Cry Wolf" syndrome is alive and well. And the more proof that rises, showing that the modern feminists care more about "raising awareness" than the actual truth, the larger the pool of skeptics grows.

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