It almost certainly is. But that should not be any sort of excuse for false claims - it’s clearly wrong to balance under-reporting by prosecuting some who are innocent.
Yet I have heard that argument: we need a climate that encourages women to report anything they feel is wrong without fear of stigma, even if that results in meaningful numbers of false prosecutions and convictions.
Part of the problem is precisely - what is rape? Anyone can harken back to their teen years and that silly game where his hand moves up or down and she removes it, over and over until it stays… etc.
Where does that technically fall in this? If she moves it away once, it’s no consent to try further? She’s always free to leave…
Not being privy to female though processes, I assume many women are conflicted about what they should or should not do, impulses get the better of them that they regret later.
The trouble with many accusations is they take on a life of their own. Many people say things they regret later. What happens between two people is more often than not a he-said-she-said situation with a minimum of impartial definitive evidence.
Another thing is that the traditional image of a rapist as some weirdo lurkig in the shadows is still taught, perhaps more than ever, with the street-proofing education of children; so women are still surprised and conflicted when faced with reality, which is that it is likely an acquaintance or even a family member.
So when some friendly figure suddenly does something they did not expect, I suspect the reporting rate is still quite low even with all the modern teaching about “it’s not your fault”. Reporting someone of your social group for a felony crime has ineveitable repercussions and will make people choose sides. The victim is going to wonder “how much did I invite this?” and indulge in self-guilt, despite all the education about “it’s not your fault”.
People can be nasty. When someone wants to get even and has not experienced the trauma, I suppose with the modern education about “it’s not your fault” some women have no inhibitions about making false claims.
So what we also should ask statistically is…
-how much is falsely reported as sexual assault when absolutely nothing close to such an encounter happened? (As seems to be the case in the Duke episode?)
-how often is a consensual encounter later reported as rape?
I guess you can classify those according to the accused’s response. Then it boils down to believability and consistency of stories, I suppose. And as I said, nobody will ever really know except those two.
It’s even more complicated than that.
I have no idea what the percentages would be, but some number of false rape claims do not involve accusing a specific person of the crime. The phony victim either wants attention or wants to cover something up, and so claims to have been raped by an unknown assailant. A few years ago there was a well-covered case in IIRC Ireland where a teen girl claimed she had been gang raped to explain why she’d lost her cellphone. (!)
There must also be at least some cases where the accuser genuinely but incorrectly believes that she has been raped. This would include cases where the complainant is suffering from some kind of delusion, cases where the complainant does not remember what really happened and jumps to the conclusion of rape, and cases where the complainant has been (to use an old-fashioned term) “taken advantage of” or pressured into sex in a way that did not meet the legal standard for rape.
Sometimes the false accuser is actually punished. This woman should have received a much longer sentence.
The lesson here? Video tape the action. So sad.
I don’t want to turn this into another of “those” debates, but we should also remember that in a “he said / she said” situation, BOTH parties may believe they are telling the truth - the girl may believe she said no, the guy may believe he had permission (I don’t want to start a debate on standards of permission) just point out that it is a possible outcome of claims of rape)
So there’s another interesting statistic to compile: how often do signals get crossed, does a guy believe he has permission when she thinks she told him he doesn’t? I would suggest in that case, if she didn’t tell him explicitly enough, then she didn’t tell him. Most women I know who don’t want whatever are quite expressive about saying so.
Annother interesting debate. If she say “Stop” halfway through and he doesn’t - would you as a jury member convict the guy? Send someone to jail for possibly 10 to 20 for not stopping what started as consensual sex? I suppose a good lawyer would argue rape is forcible penetration, and if the penetration had already happened, with consent… keeping it in does not meet the legal definition of penetration and thus rape?
Your whole post seems to be anecdotes and “probably.” Is there any basis for what you are saying?
Also, definitely is still there–not as bad, as you point out, but still pretty bad. Every time we have a thread about rape, even in cases where it’s pretty clear what happened, we always have people jumping in to point out how “vindictive” women are and how they get to “cry rape” with no effect. Kobe Bryant’s accuser was painted as a golddigging liar and I remember that thread that called the Duke University accuser a lying whore before we even knew she had made up the accusation.
There have been studies of convicted rapists indicating that these men often believe (or at least claim) that their victim was consenting. This is true not merely in “date rape” situations, but in cases where the rapist did not know his victim and used a weapon to subdue her.
In Diana Scully and Joseph Marolla’s “Convicted Rapists’ Vocabulary of Motive: Excuses and Justifications” (Social Problems, Vol. 31, No. 5, Jun., 1984, pp. 530-544), 32 out of 114 convicted rapists who were interviewed in the study said that they had engaged in sexual acts with the victim but denied that it had been rape. (Another 35 denied having anything to do with the victim, and 47 admitted that they had committed rape.) But these men’s descriptions of the situation were inconsistent with both victim statements and the police reports – they often left out the fact that they’d pulled a weapon on the victim, that they had seriously injured the victim, or claimed that they knew the victim when they did not – and even in their own words many of these men would sound like rapists to any reasonable person.
Several admitted that their victims had either said “no” or resisted physically, but said they knew the victim had “really” wanted it. One man told a fanciful story about how his victim had stripped off her clothes and enthusiastically invited him to have sex with her – while he was (by his own admission) robbing her home! Of the 32 who said that what they had done wasn’t rape, 22 claimed that “once the rape began, the victim relaxed and enjoyed it”. Even with the convicted rapists who admitted to the researchers that what they had done was rape, 9 of 47 claimed that the victim had enjoyed the experience.
So for some significant number of rapists, it seems that there’s no way for a victim to be “explicit enough”. The rapist chooses to believe that the victim is consenting and having a good time, and the fact that she struggled, said “no”, and/or had to be subdued with a weapon is, in the rapists mind, irrelevant. One “denier” said “All women say ‘no’ when they mean ‘yes’”. This was a man who kidnapped and raped a 15 year old girl at knifepoint. One of the “admitters” said it had taken him years to realize that what he had done really was rape, saying “I just asked her nicely and she didn’t resist.” This may technically have been true, but it was also true that he didn’t merely ask her nicely, he “used a bayonet to threaten his victim, an employee of the store he had been robbing.”
This might not be a good case with which to illustrate your point.
In the Duke case, there never was any evidence of sexual assault - or indeed of any crime - and ample evidence that the accusation was fake (including the 911 call and the statements of the police who first investigated). That “Lying whore” thread was started several weeks after the incident, which should have been enough time to establish some valid basis for accusations.
The initial DNA test results (which basically proved that she was lying) were reported shortly after that thread started. They should have put an end to the case - and the thread.
But calling her a lying whore before we knew that she was lying–was that really necessary?
I know quite a few of my friends have mentioned that their kids have actually threatened to say they were being abused to try to get out of punishment. (Physically, not sexually). Somewhere between about 8 and 12, kids learn enough of the world to know what buttons to push, then most grow up some more and realize when it’s good to shut up. I only heard of that one case where the girl did use the threat. So they know it can be used, and also are smart enough to know that actually doing it is not a good idea. So I’m basing my views on a localized but very typical North American sample.
I do recall one incident where i was in a coffee shop with the son of a friend and his girlfriend. This was quite a while ago, i was in my mid-20’s (a while ago). They were about 16, IIRC. We were seriously laughing at her for something stupid she did and she was getting seriously angry. First she asked me something like “Why don’t you have a girlfriend?” and then when we kept laughing, something along the lines of “I’ll tell everybody you tried to rape me and then you won’t laugh!” we kept laughing and then she shut up.
I was flattered that she though I was young enough that the first tactic to piss me off was for insecure teen boys - “why don’t you have a girlfriend”? then only when that button didn’t work, she switched to the button she thought worked on older guys, the male parents of her friends “I’ll tell everyone you tried to rape me.”
I have heard that sort of comment many times over the years. Girls ARE very aware that it is a useful threat, much more so than in the days when it was reputation suicide for a rape victim to get on the stand. Even if the charges don’t stick, the crap they can raise for the accused is pretty serious.
So the question is - do women use it often? In my unprofessional opinion, I doubt it. Most people learn discretion and self-control fairly quickly.
As for the “she wanted it” excuse -
My point would be that at the time that thread started the evidence suggested she probably was lying, and before the end of the first page it was essentially certain.
It should be noted that a whole bunch of people (including most of the mainstream media, the NY Times very conspicuously among them) seemed to want badly to believe her, and worked hard to make the case that she might have been right long after the opposite was evident. So a casual observer exposed to these sources could perhaps have been excused for excessive credulity.
Calling a whore is warranted, though? We can split hairs and say she was a stripper but the whole thing made me really uncomfortable. Rape victims being yelled at for being lying whores who really wanted it has a long history. The whole thing just felt really gross. And we still see that attitude–why would Kobe or whoever rape someone, he can have anyone he wanted–she must be lying and out for money.
Calling names doesn’t prove a point, but it does make one.
Forgot about the Kobe case… but again, another he-said-she-said case. Whether she led him on or not - who knows? Is there enough evidence that you would send someone to jail for 10 years on her say-so? I don’t know, I never saw serious details of the case.
OTOH, with Tyson, they did convict him. So sometimes the girl’s story counts for something.
I have no way of knowing what rapists seriously believe, but as my above cite (and I can provide others if you need them) shows, quite a few convicted rapists do indeed claim that the victim “wanted it”. This does not happen only when “she didn’t tell him [no] explicitly enough”, as you suggested above, but in cases of violent stranger rape. Rapists simply are not reliable when it comes to whether or not their victims consented, and are good at lying (to others and possibly even to themselves) about what actually happened.
This is not to say that there are not men who have been falsely accused of rape, because there are, but there are also plenty of rapists who say that what they did wasn’t rape.
Subsequent DNA evidence showed it was, even by the strictest standard.
I tend to agree. But note that this was a pit thread, where over-the-top is SOP.
A trait they share with many (most?) who commit violent crimes.
Yes, and yet somehow there are those (including a number of posters on this board) who seem to believe that the only people who ever lie about rape are phony victims. While some of those men who say “she changed her mind the next morning!” are telling the truth, some are lying rapists. Some in the latter group may have convinced themselves that the woman was consenting, but that doesn’t mean it’s true or even that a reasonable man would have been confused about the woman’s intentions.
This part is not exactly true. Duke Hospital had performed a physical examination (“rape kit”) and reported the finding was that it was consistent with sexual assault. Now, it later turned out that the medical professional performing the exam was not fully certified, and there were other factors that explained the findings on the exam.
Although this case turned out to be highly unusual in many ways, in general I do want cases where the physical exam by medical professionals is found to be consistent with sexual assault to be investigated by law enforcement.
It’s a reasonable point. The real meaning turned out to be “we found no actual evidence of any assault, but also couldn’t completely eliminate the possibility of it.” But the misleading report could have been taken as evidence “something happened” and indeed was by those who seemed to want to believe.
Yet it remains true that when the DNA results were announced, all reasonable possibility that any lacrosse player had committed an assault was gone. The DA (the infamous Nifong) at that point knew for certain that his “victim” was lying.