The Democrats war to frighten women continues, with Sen. Robert Casey repeating the absurd claim that 20 percent of American women will be raped in their lifetime. In an OP-ED in today's Daily Times, Casey writes:

One in five: that’s how many women will be raped in their lifetime. One in six: that’s how many women will be victims of stalking in their lifetime. 1.3 million: that’s how many women were raped in 2009. Twenty-four people per minute are victims of sexual assault, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner in the United States, and women are disproportionately affected by these crimes.

Casey goes on to push the popular Democrat meme that on college campus sexual assault is rampant:

According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, young women age 20 to 24 also experience the highest rates of rape and sexual assault, followed by those 16 to 19.

This is quite simply ridiculous. As Heather MacDonald explains in this piece, which begins:

Imagine that there were a “terrible and alarming trend” of sexual violence on college campuses against female students. Imagine that 20 percent of college women were victims of rape or attempted rape — a rate of sexual assault astronomically higher than anything seen in America’s most violent cities (in Detroit, for example, there were 36.8 rapes per 100,000 inhabitants in 2009, a rate of 0.037 percent). If 18-year-old girls were in fact walking into such a grotesque maelstrom of sexual violence when they first picked up their dormitory room key, parents and students alike would have demanded a radical restructuring of college life years ago. There would have been a huge surge in all-girls colleges to protect female students from these outrageous levels of sexual violence; those colleges that did still admit boys and girls together would have been forced to prove to worried parents that the boys they were admitting were not rapists — perhaps allowing parents to interview these aspiring monks before they were accepted. Just to be on the safe side, administrators would provide round-the-clock protection for their female students.

Instead, over the last decade or so, the proportion of female students in co-ed colleges has skyrocketed, so that there are now more girls than boys in most of the nation’s co-ed schools. Parents relentlessly push their daughters into the most prestigious schools they can get into; competition among female students to enroll in co-ed colleges has never been higher. None of those girls demand bodyguards as a condition of acceptance; instead, their parents feel fortunate to cough up tens of thousands of dollars a year to keep their daughters on campus, where they are free to boogie through as many drunken frat parties as they can before passing out from overinhalation of Kahlua and Crème.

Who sounds like they have a better handle on this issue more sensible? The hysterical senior senator from Pennsylvania or MacDonald, one of the nation's foremost experts on crime and policing?

But don't blame Bob Casey. He's running for reelection and he is, as I've been told by a number of political insiders, a bit of a dim bulb. Maybe he really believes this claptrap. (Yes, forget hard FBI crime statistics when you can rely on some agenda-driven, politically-motivated survey.) But its obvious, Democrat strategists are pushing the "women as victims" theme to the limit in this election year.

It's gotten to the point where the federal government is requiring universities to lower their standards in finding male students guilty of sexual misconduct on campus. KC Johnson, the professor who first exposed the incredibly bad investigation and ideological thinking that led to the Duke Men's Lacrosse members being falsely charged with a crime that never happened, writes about the U.S. Department of Education's new edict.

This is appalling and especially so, in a country that is supposed to cherish due process and the rights of the accused.

The Democrats are attempting to manufacture a crisis, where none exists. If they don't like the behavior of college students, their binge drinking and drunken hook-ups, they should move to outlaw coed education. Not criminalize the entire male college-age population.