Risk awareness and college prep. The Associated Press story that ran on Tuesday’s front page must have horrified parents. An unprecedented study of sexual assaults at Washington State University revealed that nearly 10 percent of female students had been victims of attempted rape, with 8.5 percent of those surveyed saying they had been raped while enrolled at the school.

Those numbers are not out of line with studies at other universities and reflect less on WSU specifically than on the drinking and party culture that puts young men and women at risk at every college and university.

Parents have every right to expect schools to protect their students. But no school response can substitute for effective education at home. Young women need to understand how best to protect themselves and avoid risky situations. More importantly, young men must understand “no” always means no and that inebriation is not a license to rape.

Texas burp ‘em. Thirty years ago, a gambling scandal put two top Washington state legislators in prison and sent other politicians scattering from the issue.

In the immediate aftermath of “Gamscam,” as it was called, no one was betting that Washington would adopt a state lottery or allow full-scale casinos any time soon. Yet, look around.

To some minds, we’ve gone too far, creating a state revenue dependency fed by family decay. That may be an exaggeration, but there’s plenty of evidence that gambling is more temptation than many people can handle.

It’s clearly not a burden to lay on teenagers, yet a proposal in Olympia to raise the age threshold from 18 to 21 meets resistance on the grounds the state needs the lottery receipts — for education.

The lesson, it seems, is that gambling can be as addictive to governments as to gamblers.