In a lot of threads on rape on this board, people will often claim that the meaning of rape has been so broadened and stretched (probably by “the feminists”) into meaning sex that the woman regrets the morning after.
My question is, does this ever happen? Is there any evidence for it, or is this more of a fear that guys have, of having sex with a woman who may regret it and then falsely charge him with rape? I’m kind of doubtful it really happens considering how hard it is for many women to report rapes that actually do occur.
ETA: Er, this should say the morning after sex…I’m not sure how to edit thread titles, though.
I was stunned to learn in a previous debate that approximately 40% of rape accusations are false. The statistics came from the FBI as well as a study done by Purdue University.
The study specifically states:
All three of those motivations would serve for a person to change their mind after consensual sex and file charges against their partner. I’m leery making it about women, but the vast majority of rape accusations are made by women against men.
There was a column several months ago in Savage Love (you can reach it through The Onion, but I’m at work and can’t pull it up) with a letter from a man who was falsely accused of rape by a young woman. IIRC, she was out for sympathy and possibly an alibi. She picked his name out of thin air, and the poor man was ostracized by his friends and threatened by strangers. Even after the woman recanted, the damage was done.
As I consider rape such a serious crime, I have absolutely no sympathy for those who make false accusations. At the very least, they should face severe civil penalties for defamation of character and criminal charges for filing a false report.
Defamation of Character is entirely inadequate in such cases. False accusations of Rape or Pedophilia are the Nuclear Weapons of DoC. They’re meant to completely destroy the other person’s reputation and life. Legal and Civil charges against such things should be a lot more serious.
Do such things happen? All the time. Hell, pre-modern era, all a woman had to do was go to her family and say that she was raped by (fill in the blanks) and more than likely, the man would be killed. Or at very least, be driven from his community. Up until our lifetimes, making a false accusation against a black man was sure to get the man lynched and gain the woman a lot of sympathy.
Modern techniques to document rape have probably stopped a lot of cases from happening where no sex transpired. But it’s also opened the door to “proving” cases where the man has had sex with the woman (thus providing genetic evidence) and it turns out that she’s a nutbag.
Hell, I was repeatedly falsely accused of assaulting my ex-wife, when all along, it was SHE who was regularly physically assaulting ME. I guess I’m lucky that I got out before she reached into the WMD bag and accused me of raping her.
Lucky? I don’t think you were lucky. I think you were wise. You made the decision to get out of there before she could come up with new ways to harm you.
I have friends who’ve been raped, and years later, they still wear the emotional scars. So, when a person uses an accusation of rape to harm another - and in doing so makes it difficult for those who really have been raped to be taken seriously - I shake with anger.
But, it’s not a universal given that any woman accusing any man of rape will destroy the man’s life. As much as a black man - or any man of color - would have been lynched, black women had no recourse when they were raped by white men. In those instances, it’s all about the relative racial and social power held by the people in question.
To return to Freudian Slit’s OP, it happens, and any occurrence is abhorrent.
Because rape can be accomplished without violence, a woman can present with no trauma and still have been raped. If she didn’t wash afterwards, there’s almost certainly enough material to provide DNA evidence of intercourse - especially if he didn’t wear a condom. From there, it’s his word against hers. If it was rough, consensual sex? There’s that much more evidence - bruises, scratches, et cetera - for her to use against him.
Considering that most of the women who file false charges do it on the spur of the moment and haven’t thought out their stories very well, good interview techniques by the police will probably discover inconsistencies. Inconsistencies lead to doubt, doubt leads to more questions, questions hopefully lead to the truth. In the Purdue study, 41% of women filing reports of rape voluntarily confessed to making false accusations.
It’s my fervent hope that those were all of the ones making false charges, and that no others slipped through.
Oh, and let’s not forget the infamous Duke Lacrosse Team rape case. It’s difficult to speculate on the woman’s motivation. She was previously diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She’d been taking drugs that night. She’d recently had sex with multiple partners. And she told a security guard at the strip club she worked that she was going to get some money out of the men at that party.
Some years back a male student named Austin Donnellan had sex with Ms X at her drunken instigation. The next day Ms X soberly reconsidered her consent, arguing that he should have known that she had a history of finding him unattractive and therefore shouldn’t have read a come-on into the words “Fuck me!” which AIUI she didn’t dispute she had uttered. The college authorities were all for quietly kicking him out, but he made enough of a fuss for it to go to criminal trial, where a jury eventually acquitted him of rape.
I’m sure it happens sometimes, but the reason you hear about it so much is the same reason we’re always having threads about how men shouldn’t have to pay child support if they don’t feel like it – there are a lot of men* out there who are just big whiners and can’t stand the fact that society doesn’t allow them to have sex with any woman they want with no consequences.
I am genuinely sorry for any innocent man who has ever been falsely accused of rape, but I won’t pretend to feel bad that some men now worry that something horrible might happen to them if they wind up going home with a woman they’ve just met.
On these supposedly enlightened boards I’ve seen plenty of victim blaming when rape cases come up – including at least one case where the accused was found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt at trial – but somehow similar criticism of men’s careless sexual behavior never seems to be an issue when we start talking about bad things that happen to them. False rape accusations against specific named men** could be reduced if more men were willing to take reasonable precautions like not having sex with women they barely know, or women they have good cause to believe are drunk and/or psycho. Yet somehow this sort of behavior never seems to be likened to walking around a “bad” neighborhood with a wad of $100 bills in your hand, leaving the keys in your fancy car with the doors unlocked and the ignition running, or whatever other offensive analogy people come up with to blame rape victims for being raped.
Again, I think it’s a terrible thing for anyone to be falsely accused of a crime they did not commit, but I also think there are plenty of men who worry about this because they are creeps. For those who aren’t creeps but are just worried that they can’t have casual sex with total Age of Aquarius type freedom and no possibility of negative social repercussions, well, that’s what it’s been like for women since the dawn of civilization. Cry me a river.
*Note how I chose the words “a lot” instead of “all”. That is because I do not mean “all”, or even “most”. I point this out because I am certain that some idiot is going to want to try to accuse me of calling all men rapists or something.
**There are false rape reports where a woman claims that she was attacked by an unknown assailant, and these are sometimes wrongly conflated with cases where a woman points the finger at a specific man. The former is still very bad, but at least it isn’t intended to make trouble for a particular innocent person.
Edit to add: The phony victim in the Duke case didn’t “change her mind” after having consensual sex with the lacrosse team, so that’s not what the OP is talking about. I can’t help but wonder how sorry people here would have felt for her if she had really been raped – I feel pretty certain there’d have been a lot of talk about how a smart woman wouldn’t have been stripping for a bunch of drunk college athletes in the first place. But once the truth came out people felt awfully sorry for those poor innocent boys who deliberately put themselves in an alcohol-soaked sexual situation with a strange woman.
I don’t doubt that false rape accusations exist after consensual sex. Of course they do. But I’ve never met someone who was falsely accused of rape or a woman who was charged with filing false rape charges (though the latter would be harder to find, I suppose). I have met several women who didn’t recognize their rapes as such the morning after (or even the month after), or who did but either a) knew they wouldn’t have a case, b) decided pressing charges would be more trouble than it was worth and didn’t want to be branded a victim or pariah by their social circle, or c) took the first steps in filing charges and didn’t make it past the initial interview.
The linked study does bring up the fact that the cases discussed ‘are declared false only because the complainant admitted they are false,’ but points out that these women were made aware that they could pay a fine or do jail time for filing the charges, and that they recanted after a relatively short period of time. The tone of the intro, this positing of ‘the feminists’ as some giant debate team, doesn’t sit well with me.
The definition of rape has expanded, and rightly so. There was a thread a while back that made it clear some posters are skeptical that spousal rape is even a crime. ‘Date rape’ is sometimes presented as a casual alternative to ‘stranger rape.’ It’s sort of concerning when rape stats are mentioned and the knee-jerk reaction isn’t ‘My god, how can this still be happening in a civilized nation?’ rather than ‘Well, you know, lots of those are false, or women who just changed their minds the next day.’
In case I wasn’t clear, I don’t think the Duke lacrosse team deserved what happened to them at all. I just think it’s interesting how men aren’t held responsible for these bad decisions the way women are.
What bad decision, exactly? Hiring a stripper? It may be morally suspect, but it’s wholly legal and permissable within the bounds of contemporary society. Hell, it’s a staple of bachelor’s parties, at least in Hollywood Myth. I have no idea about the fact.
My college Marriage & Family class sure got interesting the day we had a local rape counselor visit. We discussed rape and intoxication and ended up debated stuff what happens when the man and woman are both drunk or when only the man is drunk. Surely if it’s rape when a man takes advantage of a women too drunk to give consent then the reverse must also be true. If both are drunk, then is the rapist the one with the lower BAC? Eventually the counselor said that a man who was that drunk would be unable to maintain an erection:dubious:. She did admit that nobody at the center had any training on how to deal with a male victimised by female. There was nothing in our textbooks or supplementary material dealing with it either. Plenty of stuff on males on male sex crime though.
It’s a good point that if we can say to a woman, “You didn’t deserve to be raped, but you probably shouldn’t have been in that guy’s apartment wearing that past midnight,” why can’t we say, “You didn’t deserve a false accusation of rape, but you shouldn’t have had sex with a woman who was so drunk out of her mind she could barely stand up.” I don’t think anyone deserves either thing to happen but I suppose both genders need to act responsibly.
Yeah, I know that I’ve read a lot of cases, both on the boards and in books/articles, where it seems like something is obviously rape to me, but others conclude it’s ambiguous.
I can’t remember the name of the case now, but there was one where a man and woman met in a bar, she drove him to his place and then wanted to leave. He ended up taking her car keys, so she went up with him to his apartment. She felt threatened, they ended up having sex, and she reported it as rape. One aspect in particular (his putting his hands over her neck) was interpreted by him as just a sexy/loving gesture and by her as a threat (thus she cooperated). When I read stuff like that I sort of see why a guy might be afraid that women are out to accuse him of things he’d never do, because in his mind, it’s just not rape.
It’s wholly legal for a woman to get drunk and go home with a man she’s just met, but if he rapes her there are plenty of people who will be happy to blame her for making a bad decision. Yet when a bunch of drunken young men invite a woman they know nothing about to come into their dwelling and take off her clothes (IIRC in violation of some school policy about the behavior of athletes), that’s somehow a perfectly reasonable idea. If they’d gone to a strip club instead, with bouncers and plenty of witnesses, they’d have been much less likely to run into trouble.
Perhaps, from the perspective of a rapist, all rape victims “change their minds after sex.” During a sociology class on deviant behavior, I recall reading a study which found that most convicted rapists believed (or said they believed) the woman was willing when they had sex. Had I not actually physically attacked the man who assaulted me, I’m sure he would have believed this on some level. As it is, he still called me at home later that night and tried to play the “what’s wrong? I’m worried about you” card.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all to find out he told people that I changed my mind.
I would need to know a lot more about what counted as a “false” allegation in order to judge this work. Everything else I have seen suggest that the false reporting rate of rape is no different to other serious felonies.
Anyway, for example, Denver police statistics counted as “unfounded” situations where a woman engaged in some sexual contact with a man, then did not want full sex. (Sedelle Katz and Mary Ann Mazur, Understanding the Rape Victim: A Synthesis of Research findings at 13 (1979)) Other police have listed rapes as “unfounded” where they felt the woman had placed herself in a dangerous position - such as hitchhiking at 2 a.m. or going home with a man with whom she got drunk in a bar. (Jeanne C. Marsh, Rape and the Limits of Law Reform at 93 (1982)).
What exactly makes an allegation of rape false? Obviously it is, at the bottom line, one where the crime of rape did not occur. But it is important to separate out those allegations where the victim genuinely believes or suspects the crime has happened from those where the intention is malicious. And moreoever, I am not comfortable using situations where the local police, or even the FBI, determine a rape allegation was “unfounded.”
What are you arguing here? That since some people question when a woman makes a bad decision and gets raped it is only fair that men get falsely accused of rape when they make a bad decision?
Rape is wrong. Period.
False accusations, particularly of rape (and a few other WMD types) are wrong. Period.
There is no equivocating on this nor should there be.
You realize, of course, that the woman in this scenario is doing exactly the same thing as they guy. Way aren’t you castigating the woman as well?
This is blaming the victim and is completely akin to saying rape of women could be reduced if more women were willing to take reasonable precautions and not dress provocatively.
I think we can both agree on that. But as a woman, I’d try not to hang out in a strange guy’s room late at night if I knew I had absolutely no intention of sex. If I did that and he raped me, it’s still his fault, but I try not to put myself in those situations. By the same token, it’s not a guy’s fault if he is falsely accused, but it’s probably better to try to avoid situations where you might be, no?
uh? What’s wrong with going home with a woman you just met? That’s how I met my wife. Alright so that was pretty horrible, but in general there is nothing inherently wrong with having sex with somebody you just met or don’t know the name of, that you should wish for them to worry that something horrible should befall them.