“We’re focusing on campus sexual assault, but we haven’t looked at the younger group.”

— Jacquelyn W. White, professor emerita of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro

The United States Senate has pulled a fast one under our noses. Claire McKaskill (D-Mo) proposed a new law, curiously titled the Teach Safe Relationships Act of 2015, which would reallocate educational funds toward teaching K-12 students “safe relationship behavior” because they can’t teach it all in freshman orientation.

Earlier this month, the Teach Safe Relationships Act was rolled into the Senate’s larger overhaul of a No Child Left Behind Act rewrite called the Every Child Achieves Act. That legislation, a bipartisan effort to update the major education law that expired in 2007, passed the Senate overwhelmingly.

In years past, the “disputed” question was whether public school students should be taught about sex at all. With this new variation, federal money will push schools to teach males how to alter their male-ish behaviors to avoid the “epidemic” of rape.

“Responsible sex education has long played an important role in the health and well-being of students, and we expect this will continue to be a part of the conversation as Congress works to replace No Child Left Behind,” Lauren Aronson, a spokeswoman for the committee, told The Huffington Post.

The Teach Safe Relationships Act is part of a growing movement among policymakers and experts to focus on rape prevention and consent education efforts for teens, following intense scrutiny of sexual assault among college students and in the military.

What experts?

Experts too say there’s not enough emphasis on the role of K-12 schools when it comes to stopping sexual violence.

Are our public schools hotbeds of rape as well as our colleges?  Is that what these experts are telling us? Well, not quite.  While Tyler Kingkade circumvents access to his experts by linking to himself and journal front pages, and avoiding any links to actual sources, it appears that the studies upon which he relies to show that the problem starts in K-12, like all the studies showing the existence of an epidemic, present a definitional problem:

A national conversation has emerged regarding the prevalence of and strategies for addressing sexual assault on college campuses. Sexual assault includes rape, sexual coercion, being forced to penetrate someone else, and unwanted sexual experiences including those without physical contact. (Emphasis added.)

Mark Bennett dug up this foundational definition for this study on children, grades K-12, giving rise to what Kingkade says “found that 10 percent of men in college have committed rape since age 14.”  Had Kingkade’s claim been remotely close to accurate, it would reflect a national nightmare, certainly demanding attention to stopping these 14-year-old rapists.

But it’s not accurate.  When “rape” includes “unwanted sexual experiences including those without physical contact,” it’s worse than merely incomprehensible, but a ridiculous sham designed to take a word that is loaded with horror, “rape,” and turn it into a joke.

For a long time, notions such as “stare rape” were good for a laugh as to the absurd lengths to which some would go to conflate the very serious crime of rape with stuff that some women would prefer some men not do, sometimes.

This, however, is no joke.  The federal government will redirect funding from teaching students physics to teaching boys to be feminist allies, passive males who will adhere to the tenets of political correctness.

Addressing sexual violence is a “public health concern,” said Dr. Heidi Zinzow, a psychology professor at Clemson University who has researched rape perpetrators.

“We need to get that education out there early on,” Zinzow said. “I think a lot of these men would think, ‘Oh what do I do instead, do I need to ask?’ They just dont even have the basic skills or know what the scripts could be. They need the social skills to know how to get consent.”

Notably, the emanations of the college rape epidemic, and the untethering of words like rape and sexual assault from any viable definitions is not merely spreading into criminal legislation, but filtering down into public school education as well.  The next obvious step will be the vilification of pre-college men who fail to adhere to the “social skills” being dictated for “healthy relationships.”

As we’re watching colleges simultaneously adopt incomprehensible conduct codes that allow for “rape” to be found based on sharing a beer or post-hoc regret, and eviscerate due process for the accused in the adjudication of these offenses against neo-feminist sensibilities, it must be recognized that high schools will be next, and downward from there.  It won’t be funny when little Billy is expelled in his sophomore year for looking too intently at Chelsea and giving her the sexual creeps.

The most inexplicable aspect of this latest round of definitional insanity, however, raised a very real question of how the study found a mere 20% of males rapists, given the definition of “unwanted sexual experiences including those without physical contact.”  This is so absurdly overbroad as to suggest that the number should be close to, if not at, 100%.  Who hasn’t had an unwanted sexual experience without physical contact?  Remember when that creepy girl gave you the eye, and you shuddered at the thought of it?  Yes, you were raped too, under this definition.

By hiding the substance of these claims deep within hidden and worthless self-links, definitions that defy any meaningful parameters, and diminishing the value of the words “rape” and “sexual assault” to the point of worthlessness, the epidemic on college campuses has been manufactured.

Given its success in concealing the fatuousness of its claims, it’s now coming to a public school near you.  If you thought it could be easily avoided by teaching your son (not your daughter, who Kingkade contends need not abide by the rules because they are definitionally the victim), not to “rape,” it merely shows that you haven’t kept abreast of what the word now reflects. Rape doesn’t mean rape. It doesn’t mean anything. And any young man can commit it without knowing, without even touching.

Update: Despite his refusal to provide the cite to the study to which he refers, Tyler Kingkade argues that the definition of rape isn’t the one given above, but was taken from the updated FBI definition.

The new definition of rape is: “The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”

But for the gap at the end about “without the consent of the victim,” it’s a perfectly fine definition.  Sure, it might be more neutral if the accuser wasn’t denominated victim, and if there was a criterion more provable than with the victim’s consent, but then, if the victim says so, who are we to judge?

Special thanks to Mikey Q for providing some links that Kingkade refused to provide. Hope they’re right, but if not, Kingkade has only himself to blame.