Kangaroo court casualties

I became involved when the university was refusing to allow him on campus for a few weeks of practical course to complete his degree. Sorting that out took endless argy bargy but even when we won that round and he completed his studies, the university refused to give him his degree until the criminal matter was heard. It's just nuts since universities allow convicted felons to do courses – and here was a kid accused of the most trivial case of alleged sexual touching and they ban him from the campus.

After the magistrate tossed out the case the university decided to conduct their own investigation. The farce was never ending.

Since I last wrote about Andrew, he has managed to graduate and finally escape. He is now a full-fledged pharmacist, happily employed a long way from his former university and blessed with an eight-month baby daughter. A very welcome turnaround from the misery of his final university days.

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There's a bunch of other cases which I haven't documented here, but I did want to mention one disturbing trend. It's striking how many of the accused students are from overseas, including many Asians. There's American data suggesting the same is happening there – the black, Asian, or Hispanic male who doesn't quite fit in the mainstream culture is easily targeted by campus accusations. These kids then really flounder, not knowing how to defend themselves, cut off from their own culture and often not even wanting to tell their families about this disaster they are facing. It's tragic.

One Asian student found himself threatened with a false rape accusation when he refused to resuscitate a past relationship with a crazy girl who broke up with him and then had a look at the dating scene, wasn't impressed and wanted him back again. He wasn't interested but she threatened to cry rape if he refused to see her again. Sure enough, he ended up being charged with a number of sexual assault allegations, despite having phone recordings of her threats. He spent years in limbo, unable to leave the country to finish his PhD research because he was on bail.

How is it possible that this treatment of vulnerable Asian students passes unnoticed in our hypervigilant culture, which is always so ready to issue accusations of racism? The fact is no one is compiling any information at all about the treatment of falsely accused men at our universities. That's a taboo topic – the spotlight, as always, is on "victims".

I recently found myself chatting at lunch to Heather Wilson, the co-founder of the crowdfunding site GiveSendGo. The platform was set up as a platform for campaigns deemed too controversial for GoFundMe and gained world-wide fame after the site raised $8 million to help the Canadian truckers. But naturally the woke media disapproves of them because they are Christian and, more particularly, since their open door policy means they won't exclude the "right wing extremist groups" that the media loves to hate.

I told her the story of starting a GoFundMe campaign early last year to help a tutor at a Melbourne university – a young man I called "Chris" who'd been falsely accused of sexual assault. The day after we started the fundraising, we received notice from GoFundMe saying they were removing my account because my fundraiser was deemed "prohibited conduct" and all donations would be refunded.

Naturally I was outraged and looked for an alternate platform – ending up at GiveSendGo which we've now used successfully to run a number of campaigns. Heather was very pleased her company had provided us with the opportunity to raise money for my important causes.