I am sure you have heard the allegations that three members of Duke’s men’s lacrosse team raped a stripper they hired to dance for a party. The crime has shocked the university, the city of Durham, and the community at large. There have been several days’ worth of demonstrations in support of the victim and expressing community outrage against the crime. This is good.

But where have these demonstrators been? The last year for which there are data, 2004, there were 91 rapes reported in Durham ? where was the community outrage? Where were demonstrations supporting those victims and expressing outrage over those crimes? Why now?

I think the answer is, those rapes weren’t useful to the leftist activists. They were just rapes. For whatever reason I don’t understand, actual rapes don’t merit leftist demonstrations unless they also have some extra political outrage that can be inferred. (It’s even more puzzling to me because campus feminists are so keen to exaggerate the chances that a woman would get raped on campus.)

Last year, you’ll recall, the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill witnessed numerous protests over the assault of a gay man on Franklin Street. Many speakers and demonstrators used the occasion to push for changes to the state’s hate-crime laws. Mere days later, a woman was raped by two men on Franklin Street, and not one banner nor one demonstrator took the Pit in her behalf. Apparently the victim’s plight just didn’t fit within the political agenda. Why that is I don’t know; maybe without the political component the left doesn’t want to push for crime control, since law and order is ostensibly a conservative issue.

What prompts this post is this quotation in a Duke Chronicle article on the rape and reaction:

Some community members are calling the situation “the perfect storm”-a heated convergence of issues related to race, class and town-gown relations.

This rape, in other words, is noteworthy on campus because of the issue of race involved. Some drunks yelled racial slurs at the strippers, and the victim says her attackers were white. What the victim experienced seems tangential, however; without the “issue of race” (to hell with that, she was raped!) she may very well have been ignored, a statistic joining her 91 fellow suffers in 2004 without community acknowledgment. Here’s a sign from a rally that makes that point crystal clear:

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