Christopher Rufo Foments a School-Rape Panic The right's boy wonder finds a new cause.
The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo is the boy wonder of the right, having burst onto the scene as a fervent critic of left-wing pedagogy’s encroachment on the workplace and schools. The strange logic of partisanship has transmuted his role into something far more bizarre: He is now fomenting a panic about sexual abuse in public schools.
-----------------------------
The most remarkable passage in Rufo’s piece is where it turns to remedies. Rufo complains that “only 15 states had adopted policies to regulate ‘grooming behaviors’ by school employees and only 18 states require ‘awareness and prevention training on sexual abuse or misconduct by school personnel against students.’” If there is a crisis, there must be bureaucratic solutions. He proposes that “public schools should have mandatory screening, training, and reporting requirements for all staff.”
Yes — Chris Rufo, the man who is famous for denouncing anti-racism training, seems to be demanding sexual-assault awareness-training mandates for every local school. And this may well become the conservative position as a convoluted result of him digging in to vindicate a campaign of Twitter trolling.
The upside is that, if schools do accede to his demands, the sexual-assault training will provide Rufo with plenty of grist for his next outrage campaign. He can expose the feminist conspiracy to indoctrinate teachers in “rape culture” theory via its insidious training. He may even seize some obscure strand of feminist theory he can associate with these trainings and turn it into a Fox News bogeyman.
The most unfathomable aspect of this story may be the simple fact that Rufo works for a think tank.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/christopher-rufo-foments-a-school-rape-panic.html
