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From the beginning of time to the Rape of the Sabine Women at the founding of Rome right up to the present era of what calls itself higher education, predatory young men and scatterbrained young women always have had a talent for finding each other. Lately these same old circumstances are being framed as a national scandal, fueling more righteous posturing by the indignation industry.

Thousands of people are marching around wearing T-shirts or carrying signs emblazoned "I am Jane Doe." But they're not Jane Doe -- not even close. For they're sober.

Jane Doe is, of course, the student at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., who, according to the general account, got drunk at a bar two years ago, visited a friend at a fraternity house, drank more and took drugs with him there, and agreed to have sex with him and another man before more men joined in and she lost consciousness while she was being used. For a while she shrugged it off but eventually realized that it became rape once she lost consciousness and the ability to consent, even though she had consented at first.

So now she is suing some of the men she believes to have been her abusers and wants to press criminal charges after all, and the governor and attorney general of New York, enmeshed in election campaigns, want to signify their own righteousness. They and those protesting on Jane Doe's behalf are sure that everyone connected with the fraternity should be imprisoned. As the Queen of Hearts said, "Sentence first, verdict afterwards."

Proving criminality in situations that begin with consensual intimate contact is always difficult and tawdry, but it can be a lot easier when due process of law and the presumption of innocence are cast aside, as they are being cast aside here, with the accuser's identity being concealed while the accused are identified.

But determining criminal guilt isn't most important here. What's most important is to try to alter the behavior of the predators and scatterbrains.

Cornell University has gotten a clue, if belatedly. It has banned parties at fraternity houses for the remainder of the academic year, apparently presuming that it can enforce the new rule. The university will hire counselors to assist students who claim to have been assaulted. But it's not enough. 

Cornell and all colleges and universities should simply prohibit on-campus fraternity houses, as some long have done, since giving young men their own enclosed playpen, with no independent supervision, liberates their predatory, mob, and criminal instincts. The 1978 movie "Animal House" was a hysterical parody of the excesses for which college fraternities long have been noted. What happened at Cornell was not funny.

And it's not just Cornell. Sexual assaults are common in college, and quite apart from fraternities. Connecticut's Hearst newspapers reported the other day that there were dozens of rape complaints last year at colleges in the state, with Yale University leading the list.     

Unfortunately danger is part of growing up and learning how to be safe physically and emotionally. There is no learning without being at least bruised. But young women must understand that no one can protect them as well as they can protect themselves.

You can't blame people for being assaulted; blame for assaults belongs to the assaulters. But you can blame people for putting themselves at risk as Cornell's Jane Doe did disastrously. Any young woman in college who gets drunk and high and enters a fraternity house is begging for trouble. Any young woman in college who is sober and enters a fraternity house is asking for trouble.

But of course many people will not always know better. While the Jane Doe controversy was exploding in the United States, a young man in Britain did his own Jane Doe imitation. He climbed a fence at a wildlife park, tried socializing with the tiger on the other side, and was fatally mauled. He was as innocent as Jane Doe, and as foolish.

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