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I am a feminist. I have marched at the barricades, subscribed to Ms. magazine, and knocked on many a door in support of progressive candidates committed to women's rights. Until a month ago, I would have expressed unqualified support for Title IX and for the Violence Against Women Act. But that was before my son, a senior at a small liberal-arts college in New England, was charged-by an ex-girlfriend-with alleged acts of "nonconsensual sex" that supposedly occurred during the course of their relationship a few years earlier. What followed was a nightmare-a fall through Alice's looking-glass into a world that I could not possibly have believed existed, least of all behind the ivy-covered walls thought to protect an ostensible dedication to enlightenment and intellectual betterment. It began with a text of desperation. "CALL ME. URGENT. NOW."

The World Health Organisation is very fond of statistics and, in a report commissioned by the organisation and co-authored by two women, it is claimed that almost 38 per cent of all women murder victims were killed by intimate partners and 42 per cent of women who have been victims of physical or sexual violence by a partner suffer injuries as a result. The article exploits one high-profile gang rape in India and a celebrity cook's marital spat as somehow emblematic of this "wave of violence" against women. What the two authors forgot to mention is that 41 per cent of all forcible rape charges instituted by women are false and motivated by providing an alibi (serving the complainant's need to provide a plausible explanation for a consensual sexual encounter that might otherwise damage her reputation), for revenge (false rape reports having been used for centuries as a means of retaliation against rejecting males, Aristotle himself mentioning a few examples in his handbook on midwifery) and as an attention/sympathy-procuring device (this being the least harmful reason for which false rape charges are made in that no rape assailant is ever identified but which still plays into the hands of feminists and their shrill claims of rampant misogyny).