ANDREA PEYSER: ‘Rape culture’ leads to manhunts on campus.

Cellphone records showed that the gals, who claimed to be passed out on the night in question, sent text messages to Peloe and later joked about the case. Members of a grand jury declined to indict him for a crime. The case should have ended there.

It was just getting started.

Moms and dads, be afraid for your sons. All across America, men are getting snared in what feminist activists and leftists call a “rape culture’’ that supposedly exists on college campuses.

In April, the Obama administration released a report concluding that nearly 1 in 5 women attending institutions of higher education become victims of unwanted sex acts. Legislation has been proposed in the Senate to tackle this “epidemic.”

Never mind that one of the sources of the 1-in-5 statistic was a 2007 online survey in which some respondents, who were rewarded with $10 gift certificates, equated drunken hookups and men’s attempts at stealing kisses as examples of sexual assault, according to Christina Hoff Sommers, resident scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. She spoke out against the nonsensical notion that huge numbers of women are being sexually assaulted on campuses at a June panel conducted in Washington by the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative think tank.

“I think this is a war on men that started a long time ago in gender studies classes and in women’s advocacy groups eager to believe that men are toxic,’’ Hoff Sommers told me. She believes that a more reliable statistic was contained in a 2003 report by the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, which found that 1 in 40 college and university students are sexually assaulted. Still too many? Yes. But that does not excuse what happened to Ethan Peloe.

If I were in charge of recruiting at pretty much any college in America, I’d be getting worried. It’s already hard to get enough men to attend.