Balko asks the same question I did at the beginning of the UVA Hoax story. And it is not restricted to Campus Rape Culture as an issue. In virtually all the major advocacy issues from way back in the days of Missing Children, One Paycheck Away from Homelessness, and Satanic Rituals at Day Care Centers through to the Mortgage Foreclosures through to Campus Rape Culture, it seems to me that the advocates always go for the most salacious or glaring stories for their headlines; stories which then have to be retracted or abandoned because they turned out to be simply false in their particulars or were materially different than represented.
For example, during the wave of mortgage defaults at the height of the Great Recession, the popular storyline was that the recession itself was the fault of ruthless and greedy banks and that the mortgages being defaulted on were generally the result of mortgage mills where mortgage lenders guilelessly deceived borrowers into borrowing more than they could afford. But time and again, the cases that were brought forward as exemplars of this narrative, collapsed under inspection. The borrowers lied about their income, they made bad decisions, they admitted to not reading the loan documents, they acknowledged being warned about balloon payments but were confident that the market would rise or that they would get that pay raise, they had nothing set aside in case of joblessness, etc. Undoubtedly ruthless or incompetent mortgage companies were an element in the whole process but also undoubtedly the narrative was far too simplistic. Lenders were at fault but so were borrowers and so were government policies encouraging such loans and so was failure on the part of regulators, etc. What was striking was how rarely advocates could produce sympathetic victims, the details of whose stories actually matched the narrative.
So I don’t think that the issue is why do third wave feminists produce such flawed headline stories. The issue is why do movement advocates produce such flawed headline cases AND why do journalists not perform a better job of vetting the cases in the first place.
I think the second issue is easy to answer. Journalists, on the whole, tend to be broadly receptive to the belief systems of progressive advocates. They already believe in the issue and are as subject to confirmation bias as everyone else. More than that though, investigative journalism is an expensive process and harder to justify in an environment with collapsing revenues as is the case with mainstream media. The vetting does not occur because it already appeals to the journalists' prior beliefs and because they don’t have the time and money to do the vetting themselves. Far easier to simply believe and trust that someone somewhere else has already done the due diligence.
But why do movement advocates produce such flawed cases? Confirmation bias is certainly part of it, as with the journalist advocates. They see what they want to see and ignore all the rest. In all these stories there is a common theme of having failed to obtain a 360 degree picture and a failure to obtain the other side’s story. I think some of Balko’s observations are also true; 1) The advocates are inexperienced; 2) Availability Bias; 3) Advocates want emblematic cases that don’t actually exist in the messy real world; 4) a version of Münchausen Syndrome by Proxy among victims wanting their fifteen minutes of fame; 5) Signalling by advocates, i.e. the more they champion a flawed case, the more they signal their commitment to their cause.
I think there are a three other possible explanations which are prosaic. These three explanations are 1) Innumeracy, 2) Epistemological Isolation, and 3) Conflicting Goals.
Among movement advocates and advocate journalists, there seems to be a pervasive innumeracy in the sense of failing to understand maths, and particularly failing to understand statistics. In many of these cases numbers and statistics are introduced which conflict with one another and/or on their face are improbable. Not to be alert to such numerical improbabilities requires a profound insensitivity to numeracy. Why this profound innumeracy exists I don’t know, but it is very much in evidence.
Perhaps epistemological isolation is just a variant of confirmation bias, but I think it is a separate issue. There frequently appears to be a significant element of epistemological isolation among both the advocates and the journalists. They are so focused on the issue at hand that they fail to take into account information from outside a very narrow range of individuals. It is not simply a failure to listen to alternative arguments but a function of not being in a position to hear alternative arguments in the first place. They live in an echo chamber repeating the same information again and again, the simple repetition lending credence to that which they already believe.
Finally, conflicting goals. When UVA came along, it was on top of the Hofstra Case and the Duke Lacrosse Case, both of which turned out to be hoaxes. I did a quick search at that time to see how common gang rapes (the heart of the UVA accusation) were in US universities. Way more than you would want but the search was revealing. At that time, and working strictly from recollection, there were perhaps a half dozen cases wending their way through the system. One at William Paterson University in New Jersey (subsequently dismissed by a Grand Jury), one in Florida, one at Vanderbilt, one at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and a couple of others. In all these instances, the case was brought to law enforcement authorities and pursued by those authorities. Virtually all the accused were minorities. Nearly half of the accused were non-students. Virtually all the students accused were athletes on teams that were major revenue generators for the universities.
If you are an advocate journalist wanting to write a story about sexual violence on university campuses, there was plenty of raw material. But if you used the raw material, you would be goring other oxen such as minorities or privileged campus athletes. My guess is that the real stories that fit the campus violence narrative were rejected because they were problematic. If you can’t write about the real stories that are well documented because they raise other issues you don’t want to address, perhaps it leaves you with so few cases, that what remains is inherently weak.
I come back to my original point. I don’t think that the issue is unique to those promulgating the campus rape culture narrative. They are just a current and prominent example of a deeper process. I think movement advocates are predisposed to bringing forward weak cases for the following reasons (amalgamating Balko’s analysis with my own).
1) Movement Advocates are inexperienced in making their caseWhile all the above might be true, I suspect there is a simpler, more basic issue. We have solved all the obvious problems. People have enough to eat, the air is clean as is the water, we have removed most of the big toxins such as lead from the environment, we have passed laws and enforce them regarding the most obvious examples of discrimination, people receive twelve years of education, they have access to good health services, etc. Yes, there are always exceptions and failures here and there. But by and large, and certainly compared to the rest of the world, we have solved the obvious problems.
2) Movement Advocates want emblematic cases that don’t actually exist in the messy real world
3) Movement Advocates are prone to being taken in by a version of Münchausen Syndrome by Proxy among victims wanting their fifteen minutes of fame
4) Movement Advocates use weak cases as a form of signaling, i.e. the more they champion a flawed case, the more they signal their commitment to their cause
5) Movement Advocates on average display weak numeracy skills
6) Movement Advocates suffer epistemological isolation shielding them from information that might contradict their world view
7) Movement Advocates are prone to having conflicting goals which forces them to reject the cases that actually most strongly support their position
The ones that remain are much, much more complex and we don’t know how to fix them. Mental health, substance abuse, incapacity to exercise basic self-control and self-discipline; these are at the root of many of the remaining problems that go under the headline of poverty and inequality and unfairness. But those issues, while demanding attention, are both complex and systemic in nature. This, I think, has two consequences. Donor fatigue and indifferentiation. People already give a lot in volunteer time and volunteer money and they see much being spent by the government on the fundamental and obvious problems. How are you going to convince them to give more than they already do or to divert what they are giving to your preferred agenda? The more startling and dramatic the story, the better. At least, I think that is what is going through the minds of the advocates. They want to know, How do we break through? Similarly, when the obvious problems have been resolved and the remaining ones are impossibly complex, How do we break through? With engaging, though too often improbable, stories.
Seen from this perspective, the incapacity to produce credible stories to support advocacy narratives is a testament to progress rather than simply the stupidity or the fraudulent conniving of advocates.
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