Campus zealots hound student who questioned anti-rape lesson
A STUDENT has been driven out of lectures and bars with shouts of ‘rapist’ after he dared to question the effectiveness of ‘consent workshops’.
George Lawlor, 19, fears for his future at Warwick University after being ostracised and bullied for challenging a student union drive to hold rape awareness sessions.
Writing in a blog, he argued that the overwhelming majority of people ‘don’t have to be taught to not be a rapist’ – and that men inclined to commit the crime would be unlikely to attend such a workshop. He added that he found his invitation to one of the sessions ‘incredibly hurtful’.
But in the latest example of politically correct intolerance in universities, the student faced a fierce backlash from radical feminists. He was attacked on Twitter and Facebook by student activists branding him a ‘rapist’ and ‘misogynist’.
Mr Lawlor, who studies politics and sociology, fears the furore will affect his academic work – and his future career.
The abuse was so bad that he stopped going to lectures. He told the Daily Mail: ‘I was expecting a reaction, but I was not prepared for just how horrible it was. I remember putting it online and told a few people, who were…saying there would be a backlash.’
In the piece, ‘Why I don’t need consent lessons’, Mr Lawlor said he ‘loved consent’ but that organisers were ‘pointing out the obvious’ and ‘thinking they’ve saved the world’ by making men listen to lectures about rape.
He posed with a sign reading, ‘This is not what a rapist looks like’, to highlight that most rightthinking people know where the boundaries are. But he was called ‘classist’ and ‘racist’ by people who thought he was commenting on what the physical appearance of a ‘typical’ rapist was.
The article was covered on news sites in the US, all over Europe and in Australia. Mr Lawlor said Warwick student paper The Boar ‘got all their writers together to gang up’ on him with two onesided articles.
He added: ‘In real life, the bus to university was the worst…I heard people talking to each other saying, “I really want to hit that kid”. It got really nasty.
‘There was one guy messaging me on Facebook for over a week, calling me names like racist, rapist … I’ve stopped going to lectures and seminars because of the perceived threat.’
He said he was driven out of a bar in Leamington after some students overheard his friend mention his name.
Mr Lawlor’s critique of the National Union of Students’ initiative, published on student news website The Tab, came after he was invited to an I Heart Consent workshop via Facebook. The sessions are being rolled out with the aim of enabling students to talk openly about consent. Oxford and Cambridge have scheduled them into freshers’ timetables and other universities are running voluntary workshops.
Mr Lawlor said many fellow students had told him they agreed with the article but were afraid to back him publicly. He said: ‘When you search my name all you find is my name next to the word “rapist”. If you want to be a doctor or a lawyer you don’t want to risk having this sort of reputation … so there’s a fear that stops people talking freely.’
Warwick students’ union recently banned human rights campaigner Maryam Namazie over fears she might criticise Islam.
Two red-top tabloids are also banned.
‘Stops people talking freely’