I have no idea what to title this

A George Will column from yesterday has been roundly criticized for suggesting that rape victims enjoy a "coveted status" on college campuses. What a horrible thing to say! It's a good thing Will didn't.

Here's the precise sentence in question: 

Colleges and universities are … learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous ("micro-aggressions," often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.

Will states that victimhood in general is a status symbol—not explicitly being a sexual assault/rape victim. The mention of microaggressions directly beforehand supports this reading, as does his later statement that "the newest campus idea for preventing victimizations … is 'trigger warnings.'" 

I'm not defending Will's column overall. But if you're going to decry something, decry the actual thing. Critics of Will only weaken valid points by hyperbolizing or distorting what he wrote. Take the idea that one in five women will be raped in college. Here's Will on that:

The statistics are: One in five women is sexually assaulted while in college, and only 12 percent of assaults are reported. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12 percent reporting rate is correct, the 20 percent assault rate is preposterous. Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute notes, for example, that in the four years 2009 to 2012 there were 98 reported sexual assaults at Ohio State. That would be 12 percent of 817 total out of a female student population of approximately 28,000, for a sexual assault rate of approximately 2.9 percent—too high but nowhere near 20?percent.

And here's how Erin Gloria Ryan at Jezebel interprets that: 

Rape is underreported, here is how many women reported being raped, therefore rape is overreported. These reports are flawed! Can't you tell by these flawed reports? Your honor, I rest my case.

But Will doesn't discount the premise that rape is underreported. In fact, he extrapolates based on that premise. Likewise, he doesn't conclude that rapes are overreported. He concludes that the one-in-five statistic may be inflated. 

That statistic has been the source of much argument. As The Washignton Post noted recently, the source is an online survey of students at two universities. The kind of people eager to ridicule those speaking about sexual assault 

Crimes like rape and sex trafficking are obviously terrible. Nothing in this post should be interpreted as denying that. But it's precisely because I take sex crimes (and preventing them) seriously that I don't believe in hyperbolizing about them. Hyperbole and half-truths can be easily dismantled. And when they are, so too will the credibility awarded those speaking in their service. In the long run, you can't win by lying. 

A friend of mine wrote along these lines yesterday, in regard to another Internet controversy. It's not directly analagous here, but relevant I think. He points out that attention and outrage are finite, and those ever-eager to raise the victimhood stakes will squander their issue's share of these precious commodoties. Exaggeratedly aggreived victimhood, he writes, 

…is indicative of privilege, the privilege enjoyed by people who don't care that they diminish our capacity to generate outrage when they blithely throw around terms like "the pro-rape left" to describe feminist women, who have so overused the term misogynist that people don't take it seriously anymore, who have started controversies over such minor or nonexistent slights so many times that potential allies roll their eyes at us and stay away in droves. …

Only the comfortable could care so little about actually winning that they sacrifice real political gain to self-aggrandize. Those who are not privileged require actual results, which means that they care, desperately, about political efficacy…

In an anti-Will column in the Chicago Tribune, Heidi Stevens writes: "If you deny the truth because it doesn't fit your agenda, you're not a journalist. You're a propagandist." I guess that makes everyone citing the one-in-five statistic a propagandist, then. Why do they insist on this? The real rape numbers are high enough. One in 10 or 20 or 100 college women being raped would still be a travesty.