I’m in a strange position, because while I believe that rape is a seriously underreported crime, but I also have grave doubts about the percentage of rape reports that are actually true. Estimates by serious researchers without a big axe to grind put false allegations anywhere from sub-8% to over-21%, but even then it involved a lot of guesswork and assumptions. That less-than-8% could have beena mere 1%. The not-less-than-21% could easily have been way, way higher in practice but definitive evidence wasn’t available.
Which puts me in an ugly position because I don’t see a good public policy here. There’s often little evidence, and I don’t trust people’s word very often in such charged cases. And unfortunately, this is a situation where false positives and false negatives are hugely problematic.
One thing I am not happy with is that the Obama administration seems to want to deal with the situation on college campuses (and the evidence of an actual rape epidemic there is pretty thin) by encouraging colleges and universities to adopt kangaroo courts, even arguing that Title IX requires administrative actions inherently weighted towards complaining women - but they evidently don’t think the situation is serious enough to involve the police.
Nail. Hit on the head. I had a friend who was accused of rape when we were college age. After the dust settled, it was determined to be a false accusation (he had an ironclad alibi ), and the girl was both upset at him and also looking for victimhood status and enjoying the attention.
My second experience in the matter is that I served on the jury on a rape trial. All 12 of us believed that the accuser made up the story. We thought she did so out of vengeance coupled with a complete lack of ethics (she accused her landlord to get outof paying rent ). Note that this isn’t just my opinion; the entire jury came to the same conclusion.
To make matters worse, the defendant’s lawyer told me later that the county takes way too many questionable sexual assault trials to court, hinting that there is political pressure and professional gain to do so.
Hmmm…You don’t know how nasty people are? In a documentary I saw about a sex crime unit, the two cases of false accusation of rape shown were motivated by :
A domestic dispute.
Vengeance for not reimbursing a loan of about € 50.
Some people will go back at you in any way they can, for the most petty reasons imaginable, and the worst damage they can do, the better. I’m not sure why it would surprise anybody reading the papers. Some people will kill you over € 50.
That said, false accusations are apparently often used as a cover-up (don’t admit to spouse that you’re cheating on him with his best friend , accuse a random shmoe of rape instead) or even to protect the actual rapist (don’t tell the police it’s dad, accuse the neighbour instead). Some guy was freed after many years recently in France following such a situation : a 13-14 yo or so prefered to accuse some school employee of rape rather than the school bully of some sexual impropriety. She recanted well into adulthood. She first feared the bully, was pressured into giving a name by police/parents and picked him randomly, and latter didn’t dare to admit she had lied resulting in sending a guy behind bars for many years.
What is the metric whereby “false allegations” are measured. Demonstrably false? Deliberate lies? Misidentification? Insufficient evidence? Acquittals? Convicted of a lesser crime? Plea bargain? Depending on what you used to define, you could get any sort of statistic.
I think it never helps to exaggerate things or to distort them in anyway. One of the big problems is the persistent myth that college campuses perpetuate a “rape culture.” In fact, women on college campuses aged 18-24 are less likely to be raped than women who are not enrolled in college in that same cohort. Additionally, rapes in general have steadily gone down since the mid-1990s, from 5 per 1,000 to a little over 2.
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Do you have cites for these claims. I’m not saying I don’t believe you or anything but I’d heard very differently and would just like to find out more. Cheers.
She was sentenced to two months in jail and ordered to pay $90,000 in restitution to the man who spent four years in prison following his conviction based on her accusation.
That’s not a strange position at all; in fact, it should be “I believe that rape is a seriously underreported crime, *therefore *I have grave doubts about the percentage of rape reports that are actually true.”
i.e.: If you think that only 10% of rapes are reported, and if you think that for every 10 actual rapes, there is 1 false accusation, then math tells you that 50% of accusations are false (10 rapes x 10% reported = 1 true report; all false reports are reported by definition, so we now have 1 true and 1 false report).
If you simultaneously claim that only 10% of rapes are reported, and that only 2% of reports are false, by doing the math we can conclude that you’re claiming that for every single false report there are 500 real actual rapes. IMO, you can only believe that if you’re operating from a worldview where women are saints and men are beasts.
I don’t think the false-report percentage is 50%, precisely *because *I think the percentage of rapes that get reported is much higher than some activists claim: it may have been true at one time that 90% of rapes were unreported, but I think it’s crazy to think that decades of effort at making women feel safer in reporting victimization have not had an impact.
As it happens, the Bureau of Justice Statistics just released a report confirming what Martin Hyde said. (I’m using a Kindle so I can’t post links, but you should be able to find it by searching.) They found 6.1 incidents per 1,000 students versus 7.6 per 1,000 among non-students.
This week, a workshy twelve-year-old that I teach decided he’d accuse me of pushing him across the class and into a table. I guess I’m overdramatising if I claim that this might have meant I got fired from my job and lost my licence to teach and had to find menial labour for the rest of my working life with a conviction for assaulting a child on my record. Fortunately I can actually say “might have”, conditional past tense, because the other pupils in the class produced written statements to the effect that this kid had made it all up. But, you know, there really are people in the world who don’t consider ruining someone else’s life that big of a deal if it means they get their own way.
Or to put it another way: If you believe that there are men who are prepared to use their penis as an offensive weapon and condemn someone to a scarred psyche that could last a lifetime or even drive them to suicide, why would you find it hard to believe that someone was prepared to use a false allegation the same way?
When you’ve got several decades of stories of reporting victims being counseled not to press charges and investigations not even starting, it’s hard not to think so.
As I stated earlier, MANY of us (includng myself) are predisposed to believe stories that confirm what we already believe of the world.
SUPPOSE you read a story in the Washington Times (or saw a story on Fox News) that told of a kind, sweet Christian secretary who claimed she’d been abused and fired from her job at Apple Inc. for wearing a necklace with a cross on it. The story identifies the woman only by first name, identifies the abusive co-workers and managers by pseudonyms, and makes little effort to get any other side of the story.
It stands to reason that thousands of right-wing Christian activists would swallow this story hook, line and sinker, and would raise a huge fuss about it. TO put it mildly, the average liberal, secular Doper would raise an eyebrow or two and then start asking questions. “Wait- is that REALLY all there is to the story? Did it REALLY happen the way she says? Didn’t anybody else witness that and raise some objections? Isn’t there another side to this story?”
Now, I myself (a Catholic Republican) would have similar questions. But to people predisposed to think the world is now persecuting Christians, such a story might ring true- even if it were largely bogus.
It’s the same with “Jackie.” People who believe college campuses are hotbeds of rape and rich white male privilege were likely to swallow her story hook, line and sinker.
Thing is, we should ALWAYS ask questions when a story doesn’t sound kosher, regardless of whether the story teaches a lesson that we ourselves believe. We always have to remember that there are crackpots and BS artists on OUR side, whatever side that is.
I mean it’s not like rape along with theft and murder is one of the actions that every settled society on earth has criminalised since the dawn of civilisation. Rape was discovered in the 1970’s.
I honesly can’t tell if this is very wry sarcasm, or if you’re being serious.
Because rape has really not been universally seen as a crime throughout most of human history. You do realize that it was not until 1993 that marital rape was outlawed in all 50 US states, right?
Marital rape just speaks as to the scope of what we as society view as rape, traditionally it did not exist as a concept because marriage was seen as intrinsically consenting to sex. But I would say rape is essentially as universally recognized a crime as theft or murder. Now, how it is handled varies wildly and is pretty terrible for the woman in many countries, and in some parts of history rape was seen more as a “property crime against the father/husband” than it was a personal crime against the woman, but it was recognized as a crime way back in the Old Testament days.