Good point.
Fortunately I am not in danger of being falsely accused of date rape – I am celibate.
Celibate people can be falsely accused.
Yeah, just look at all those poor priests. Everybody knows celibate people never have sex with others, forcefully or otherwise.
But the trial could be like in Miracle On 42nd Street, but instead of sacks of letters to Santa, they dump piles of used Kleenex on the Judge’s bench to exonerate you.
The chances are much much less. I did not vow celibacy – I am not Christian. I just chose not to risk a relationship. There are many escort service providers in my area but still I chose not to risk.
Remember how I said that the woman in the elevator was not reacting rationally? You either.
Perhaps. But I do not threaten anyone.
Neither did she.
So I think there’s a lot of talking past folks here.
Did she fit the legal definition of threat? Probably not.
Did she engage in body language intended to communicate possible violent action? Probably so.
Did she communicate possible violent action in response to innocuous actions on the man’s part? Here’s where it gets tricky. I seriously doubt she intended to communicate that. However, her actions weren’t reasonable (I think, from the description), so if I were the person in the elevator with her, I’d be taking away the message, “If I do the wrong thing–AND I’M NOT ENTIRELY SURE WHAT THAT IS–I could get maced.”
So I don’t think there’s a definitive answer to whether she communicated a threat.
I keep thinking about what I’d do in that situation, and I think I’d go all submissive-dog: lower my eyes, looking away at the floor, hands at my sides, say nothing, stay still. It seems vanishingly unlikely that, given her body language, she’d respond to that with a mace attack.
Well, several men in this thread have proclaimed that fears of rape are unfounded and unsupported by statistics and they’ve handily shamed the women in this thread for having unreasonable fears of strange men. Maybe the same guys will bring you some stats which show how rare false charges are and encourage you to date! Win-win!
Given that most cases are he said/ she said we will never know what percent of all accusations are true/false.
Let women have their fears and let us have ours.
Women are free to address feminist issues but no one can demand that men be silent on issues which affect us.
That’s a funny thing to say in a thread where posters have literally said that women who fear stranger rape need to get their mental issues in check, and that it’s so rare that we should take “minor precautions and then stop worrying”. Who’s trying to silence who?
Fear of assault by a stranger isn’t a “feminist” issue.
That’s a pretty fair summary of that incident, at this point its basically arguing over the definition of the word ‘threat’.
I read the original post of the incident you linked to earlier and I was previously working from the assumption that the man had got into the elevator with her and not the other way around, a course of events which just makes the incident stranger.
I don’t have any stats, and I rather suspect such stats would be impossible to come by. The amount of women who’ve been proven to have falsely accused a man of rape is tiny. The amount of men who’ve been accused of rape and either not charged, or found not guilty, is huge. Neither, I suspect, is representative of the actual rate of false accusations, for reasons I think are obvious, but I’ll explain if anyone wants.
I will say that living in fear of a false accusation, to the point that it prevents one from having any form of sexual relationship, is a ridiculous overreaction. The majority of men get through life without any sort of false accusation, and the vast majority without one that actual causes them lasting harm.
Frankly, living in fear of anything that is pretty damn unlikely is stupid.
I think the main point most men in this thread are making is that acting on a fear of stranger rape without sufficient evidence is unreasonable. Women certainly have a reason to fear rape, but threats, even non-verbal ones, are not warranted when directed at someone who has done nothing wrong.
In my line of work, I meet a lot of women, mostly at nightclubs, and honestly, hundreds (over a period of three decades) have confided in me that they’ve been raped … I’d say around 50% of the women who’ve addressed the subject. Online statistics suggest that one in six women have either been raped or have been the victim of attempted rape.
I guess the women I tend to meet fall in a group with a higher likelihood of sexual assault. Some of these women are my friends and some are my relatives. I hope no one thinks I’m insensitive to the issue because I don’t condone brandishing weapons at strangers in an elevator.
Also, if the women I’ve described were armed (a few were, guess what, they were part of the “attempted” sub-group) they would likely have been able to ward off the attack. And I mean armed with a gun.
That’s just political dogma, there’s no reason to believe women are super-honest.
Note your assumption that “not guilty” and “not charged” are synonyms for “guilty but unpunished”.
No, it’s an artefact of the legal system, where proving that someone is innocent, and therefore that the accusation is demonstrably false, is rarely even attempted. As in most situations, it’s unnecessary and irrelevant.
No again. Innocence is presumed until proven otherwise, and the point I’ve been making all through this thread is that the problems occur when people don’t do this, but assume guilt without evidence.
Most men aren’t going to rape you. Most women aren’t going to falsely accuse you of rape.