Rape rates on colleges are LOWER than outside of college:
I think this feeds back into it, actually.
Consider a medium-sized city where there are fender-benders and mild accidents every day for years. In this case, no one really pays them heed, because it's accepted as a part of life.
Now imagine the same city, which has miraculously gone years without so much as a fender-bender. Then, one day, a light collision occurs, which doesn't even require a trip to the auto-body shop (which is good, because by this point all of those shops have closed), but because it's so freakishly rare it's huge news. Newspapers and radio stations are running lengthy pieces devoted to it, and editorials are exclaiming "How could this happen?!" Politicians/community leaders and making promises left and right for how they'll stop a fender-bender from ever happening again. There's extreme focus on this situation, where someone in NYC wouldn't even bother to glance if it were to happen there.
And so it happens in this case. As the rate of rapes on campuses continue to fall, each instance (or at least claim) gets more attention, both because of rarity in part because there are more resources available for said attention. The more attention each individual instance gets, the larger the call for someone to do something, and the larger the call the heavier the response. It's some weird inverse of conflict escalation ("If we wear bullet proof vests they'll get hollow-point bullets, if we use thick shields they'll get grenades", etc.)
That said, I do agree with your cynicism. Because of the above, it gives those who would use bad situations to increase their own power/position/money a nice target, someone they can vilify without repercussions even if the accused is found to be completely innocent.
(For those about to lash out, please know that I'm not saying rape is on the same severity level as a fender bender; that was merely a car-related example--as is /. tradition--of how the frequency of an event can inversely affect the proportion of the response.)