Dear Prudence Meets Due Process: Former Slate advice columnist and Atlantic essayist Emily Yoffe takes on the campus rape crisis.

• Author: Soave, Robby
• Position: Interview

"There is no doubt that until recently, many women's claims of sexual assault were reflexively and widely disregarded," journalist Emily Yoffe wrote in a three-part series published in September at The Atlantic. "But many of the remedies that have been pushed on campus in recent years are unjust to men, infantilize women, and ultimately undermine the legitimacy of the fight against sexual violence."

These problems, Yoffe explains, are rooted in a set of directives from the Obama-era Department of Education, which nudged college administrators to adopt new procedures for adjudicating sexual assault disputes under Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in higher education. While the goal of such changes may have been to protect victims and bring perpetrators to justice, the rules have in practice made it vastly more difficult for the mistakenly or maliciously accused to clear their names, obtain legal assistance, confront their accusers, or even make sense of the specific charges against them. What's more, Yoffe shows, many of these efforts were predicated on junk statistics and misconceptions about how human beings cope with unpleasant experiences.

The same week Yoffe's trio of articles went live, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced her intention to address some of these issues--a significant victory for supporters of reform. But this arena is fraught, as Yoffe has discovered. When in 2013 she wrote a piece encouraging young women to avoid the punch bowl at parties, it received a "wave of denunciation." Daring to suggest that campus assault claims be subjected to basic scrutiny, she says, can get a person branded a "rape apologist" or worse. But "I didn't get into journalism to be intimidated about writing about difficult issues," she adds.

Yoffe, 62, recently became an Atlantic contributing editor, following a nine-year stint answering letters for Slate's popular "Dear Prudence" advice column. In September, she sat down with Associate Editor Robby Soave, who covers many of the same topics at Reason, for an animated conversation about her work and why it's worth the risk of backlash.

Reason: Betsy DeVos recently announced that she wants to chart a new direction regarding the department's guidance to colleges on dealing with sexual harassment and assault. What was your takeaway from that announcement?

Emily Yoffe: For one thing, I was surprised. I kind of thought given Trump's own problems in this area that they might stay away from this. It's very strange to have an administration led by a president I find absolutely loathsome and a disaster for this country, and to listen to a speech by his secretary of education and find myself agreeing with many of the things she had to say.

I think a danger is that it just becomes a response to the Trump administration. Schools say, "We will resist," and there's a possibility that the worst excesses will get entrenched just because of who the messenger is.

The simple narrative is, "Trump doesn't think consent is important, so he's changing these guidelines to help people like him get off the hook for sexual assault." What's missing from that story?

The problem [with rape adjudications on college campuses] hasn't penetrated the public consciousness. This three-part series of mine just ran in The Atlantic, and as we were working on the first part, which was mostly about due process--how we got here and how things have gone off the rails--I said to my editor, "Isn't this kind of old? Don't people already know this?" But he was right. People don't know that a young man can be expelled from college without ever having received specific written notice of what he's alleged to have done wrong. They don't know that virtually any encounter with a sexual element, including a joke, can get someone in deep trouble.

You cover some of the really bad science that has gone unchallenged, like the idea that of course people who are traumatized are not going to recall things correctly. Can you talk about that?

This is the so-called neurobiology of sexual assaults. I've talked to scientists who actually do study memory and response to trauma. They say they believe this is a return to the "recovered memory" scandals of the '80s and '90s [in which therapists convinced people they had been suppressing memories of childhood abuse that never actually occurred], dressed up and given a neurobiology gloss.

The federal government [under Barack Obama] started saying everyone on campus must be trained in the neurobiology of trauma. Often there would be a little footnote to a study, so I'd go look at the study, and it would have...