Talking is different from assault. Making accusations is also different from talking. I didn’t know that needed to be explained.
Do you believe people should be punished for doing something if there is no evidence of their having done it?
Regards,
Shodan
Yes, but only if the rape occured on Campus, and of course the Univ can ALSO report it to the Police.
The OP stated* “There are no state/federal laws that mandate that you take a particular course of action …”.* Thus, thereby, under the Ops rules, the assault must have taken place off campus.
If you read my prior posts, I never asked for any cites. I only asked for the methodology which you very helpfully provided.
Taking your second link, for example, the threshold for a “false allegation” was the subjective belief of a CPS worker. That’s all. No science. Just a subjective belief. And when you see what those subjective beliefs are based upon, you see things like almost total impossibility such as when a detail (like an older sibling was present) is testified to by the older sibling to be false.
What if the accuser doesn’t make the mistake of inserting that fake detail? What if a different worker had a different gut feeling?
In any event, a random CPS worker (who are notoriously underpaid and are not using anything but gut feeling to make a determination) having a subjective belief is not an accepted method of any sort of scientific calculus. These studies are absolute junk science on their own terms and are politically motivated.
I very seldom “shout.” It’s a measure of how frustrating it got that I had to repeat myself. Your continued posts that had apparently ignored what I’d already said made it difficult for me.
Expulsion is certainly a form of discipline. But if you look at the bigger picture, you’ll see expulsion only occurs when there’s enough evidence for the university to conclude that the accused is, in fact, a threat to students. one more time: the purpose of Title IX is to provide equal access to education. If the only way to ensure that is to expel the accused, that’s what will happen. Yes, that’s hard for the accused, which is why universities generally don’t expel unless there’s evidence the accused is a threat to the student population.
You keep referring to a Code of Conduct. This is a separate matter. That is, a university MUST meet Title IX regulations regardless of whether or not there is a Code of Conduct that a student may have violated. If you want to debate whether Codes of Conduct are unfair, start a thread. It’d be interesting. For instance, BYU has expelled women who were raped. The reasoning is that the woman must have violated the Code of Conduct by going to a male student’s room or apartment. The male student is not expelled unless there’s sufficient evidence of rape.
Changing a class schedule is not discipline. The university may well change the class schedule of the victim. Is she then being disciplined? Of course not. She’s being protected.
The point of bringing in the accused is to give him a chance to tell his side of the story. It would be a violation of his Fourth Amendment right to due process to not give him that chance.
The university may indeed offer counseling to the victim upon her complaint, before the process proceeds further. Did you think it was only offered after the investigation was complete???
You really think people would false report in order to get free counseling??! Wow, that is one warped perspective. “Gee, I need help for my depression but can’t afford it. I’ll lie and say I was raped!” :dubious: News flash: most universities offer free counseling to students. Sexual assault counseling usually entails meeting a counselor specially trained in helping sexual assault victims. Therefore, the only people who would want or need sexual assault counseling are people who were…wait for it…sexually assaulted.
No, they aren’t- especially as several are compilations. Dude, if every fucking study says you are wrong, and you have not one cite that agrees with you, you have pretty much crossed the line into misogyny with these posts.
You answer my questions first. No evasions.
Here’s a helpful list: Is it your claim that physical assault is EQUAL to talking? “Different” is a weasel word.
“I didn’t know that needed to be explained.” Is physical----potentially internal----assault equal to talking?
Do you believe that people should be punished for doing something when there’s no evidence they did it?
Maybe I should become republican so I could ask questions like this with a straight face. Your “no evidence” demonstrations in the past have indicated you have very different standards of “no evidence”. Please specify which standard you are applying here: the one you apply to liberals accusing conservatives, or the one you apply to conservatives accusing liberals.
I hope you’ll excuse me for reducing your post in this manner. I have isolated what I believe to be your central point, which is that the school administrator must act so as to safeguard both the accuser and accused’s rights to due process and equal access to education.
I presume the right to equal access to education includes freedom from violence such as rape. In the hypothetical given by Velocity, a student comes to me (or you) and accuses another student of raping her. As part of the hypothetical, she demands disciplinary action*.
Unfortunately for the accuser, the accused’s rights include a presumption of innocence. I consider the presumption of innocence to be an important part of due process. So I run an investigation.
I do not go to the municipal police, at the accuser’s specific request.
I do not have the power to compel production of evidence or testimony, especially not from unaffiliated third-parties. At the end of the investigation, both the accuser and accused have clean backgrounds. Neither are known to lie. The testimony of the accuser contradicts the testimony of the accused, but otherwise both are unimpeachable.
The investigation yields insufficient evidence to satisfy the school’s standard of proof**. This is part of Velocity’s hypothetical, see post #10. As a result, I cannot punish* the accused.
I can still provide other remedies, such as access to counseling or classroom handicaps, so long as these are available to anyone who presents a similarly credible accusation.
Would you recommend a different policy?
~Max
No.
No.
I hope that is clear enough. So, now your turn.
Pick whatever standard you like. I was using the one in the OP - go back and read it. Then apply that standard.
There is no evidence that the accusation is false. Should the woman be punished for making a false accusation? There is no evidence that the accusation is true. Should the man be punished for assault?
Regards,
Shodan
Asking for the methodology of studies is misogyny? Really??? That’s insane.
We are supposed to fight ignorance, not perpetuate it. Asking for methodology furthers knowledge.
Statistics don’t apply to individuals. The principle “better to punish one innocent man than nine guilty go free”. is less like Blackstone and Ben Franklin, and more like Otto von Bismarck and Dick Cheney.
Regards,
Shodan
Agreed. I’m sure that most people arrested are guilty and that most civil defendants have done something wrong. I’m further sure that most accusations (>50%) about pretty much anything are true.
That doesn’t mean that for any adjudicatory process we have an initial presumption of guilt/liability. That makes the process unfair.
You see this too much in this sort of thing. When rules are proposed, people say “Well, we shouldn’t have X because that would be too traumatic for a sexual assault victim to be put through.”
Ok, but we are attempting to formulate rules to determine if she is indeed a sexual assault victim and/or if the person she accused is the perpetrator. Those concerns are mere question begging, tend to guide the answer, and are not conducive to a fair process.
No, getting four cites, some from published peer reviewed footnoted papers, and then just dismissing them- without any cites of your own- based upon what I have to feel is a misconception on your part- would be looked upon by some as getting close to that.
Those are published in a Journal. Once someone gives a cite like that, just saying “*I dont accept it” *doesnt cut it. You have to come up with a counter cite. That’s how debates work.
Do you have a **cite **from a published journal that shows false accusations of rape are more common that what we have shown?
I do not. However, I am not the one making the claim. I have contended that there is no way possible to have any sort of scientific backing for these claims as it is admitted that most of them are one person’s word against another.
That’s why I was asking about the methodology in the oft-quoted cites. You would agree that a subjective judgment of an unnamed CPS worker for whom we have no idea of his/her training (as in your second cite) is not scientific methodology, no? And that further we cannot, from those studies, make the statement that because CPS workers believe that an affirmative falsity has occurred in between 2 and 10 percent of reports that “only 2 to 10 percent of accusations of sexual assault are false.” It doesn’t follow. I KNOW CPS workers. They put their wet finger to the wind and make judgments just like you or me. That is nothing at all like science. Especially when they are indoctrinated with the “believe the victim” mentality and only find falsity when it is based upon impossibility.
Not to bring up Kavanaugh again, but if we took a poll and it was found that 51% of people believed Ford, would you say that you had a good cite that there was a 51% chance that he assaulted her? Of course not.
These opinions of CPS workers do not show veracity or falsity of anything and surely on a site devoted to fighting ignorance we would all demand more of such studies, would we not?
I’ve got a young daughter. I don’t want anything to happen to her. But in the interest of looking at this thing the right way, shouldn’t we have the right data?
I dont know where you are getting the idea that my cite #2 is getting all their methodology from “CPS workers”. They give footnoted cites from no less than SIXTEEN *published *studies, and quote their numbers in their conclusions of “The five studies mentioned above and this study are consistent in suggesting a false allegation rate of between 2 and
8% among child and adolescent reports of sexual abuse” So, what they are saying is that their study confirms what other studies say.
And if you think CPS workers opinions are invalid, then you have to come up with studies from people who you agree are valid. Note that that study is a peer reviewed published study. I dont think you have the qualifications to doubt it. Come up with a opposing study which is also peer reviewed.
The other cite is again a compilation study. They cite no less than FIFTEEN studies which back their conclusions. Again, it’s a peer reviewed published study.
Your feeling that these 31 studies may be wrong is frankly worthless, and IMHO these posts seems simply based upon misogyny . Saying “methodology” aint gonna cut it.
where is your cite that the numbers are higher? I gave 31 cites, where is your ONE cite?
I like to think UltraVires is above just-asking-questions, so I’ll go to the trouble of checking this cite out for myself.
The Minnesota Law Review gives 0.002%-0.008% as the ratio of false reports compared to actual assaults. The statistic we are actually looking for in this debate is the ratio between false reports and accurate reports.
True, Little Nemo’s claim was that “the odds that somebody is a victim of a sexual assault are much higher than the odds that somebody is the victim of a false accusation of sexual assault”. But in order to apply this to the thread we need to equivocate on the word “somebody”. To be relevant, the claim would need to be that the odds of the accuser telling the truth are greater than the odds of the accused telling the truth. I think the fact that an accusation was made is quite germane here. As such it would be inappropriate to use a statistic that includes unreported sexual assault as if they were all accurate reports of sexual assault.
This is recognized by the article cited by the Minnesota Law Review, a piece on The Cut by Katie Heaney. Ms. Heaney writes,
“One commonly cited figure holds that 5 percent of rape allegations are found to be false, but that figure paints a very incomplete picture, says Belknap. Typically, this figure comes from studies done on college students, an estimated 95 percent of whom do not report their assaults to police. Overall, an estimated 8 to 10 percent of women are thought to report their rapes to the police, which means that — at the very highest — we can infer that 90 percent of rapes go unreported, says Belknap. Obviously, only those rapes that are reported in the first place can be considered falsely reported, so that 5 percent figure only applies to 10 percent (at most) of rapes that occur. This puts the actual false allegation figure closer to 0.5 percent.”
As you can read for yourself, the number we are looking for is this “5 percent”. A commonly cited figure holds that 5 percent of rape allegations are found to be false. That’s a lot more than the fraction of a percent cited before. Ms. Heaney writes a great article and distinguishes between false allegations and lying. She also points out that some rape allegations may be recanted (and thus reported as false) just because the victim doesn’t want to go through the police anymore.
So where does the 5% come from? It is implied that the police report this number. I followed the inline link to Ms. Belknap’s paper, but unfortunately can only view the first page. There, Ms. Belknap writes, “Although false allegations are 5% of all rapes reported to the police,[…]”.
Unfortunately that’s a dead end for now. The language used suggests that police themselves come up with the 5%, but I cannot be sure without further research. (I haven’t yet looked at the other three cites given).
Belknap, J. (2010, Dec 16). “Rape: Too Hard to Report and Too Easy to Discredit Victims.” Violence Against Women, vol. 16, no. 12, pp. 1335-44. doi:10.1177/1077801210387749
Heaney, K. (2018, Oct 5). “Almost No One Is Falsely Accused of Rape.” The Cut. Retrieved January 8, 2020 from https://www.thecut.com/article/false-rape-accusations.html
~Max
I really don’t appreciate the name calling. It’s bullshit and its only purpose is to stifle any debate on this topic that it seems everyone should shut up and accept.
For about the fifth time, I agree that there are these studies, many of them, out there which claim that “false allegations” of rape are vanishingly small. I’ve read almost all of them. I don’t doubt their existence.
What I take issue with is how they determine whether a particular allegation is “false.” And before you yet again ask for one of my cites, I continue to ask how it is even possible to make a determination of true, undetermined, or false with any sort of real science. As we have seen in the political arena, these are usually not quantifiable facts, but subjective opinions. IOW, not science, nor anything that we can reasonably use to make such a bald declaration that X% of allegations are false.
You would agree that before we can make such an statement that any certain or range of percentages of sexual assault allegations are “false” we must have an objective definition of what it means for an allegation to be “false” right? If we are just asking for subjective beliefs, we might as well take an opinion poll.
Further, shouldn’t we determine what is considered “not false”? If false means only those cases that are verifiably proven to be false, shouldn’t we recognize that other allegations may be false, yet the evidence was not 100% exculpatory? These studies imply that what is not false is true (“only X% are false”) which is not at all supported by the data and is a complete non-sequitur.
All the literature complains that the difficulty in enforcement is due to the overwhelming majority of cases being “he said, she said.” How do you determine falsity in that case? By how good of a liar either he or she was in that case?
I’m not “just asking questions” and it is unfortunate that any discussion about this is tinged with such ridiculous defensiveness that you feel the need to give me the benefit of the doubt. I appreciate it, but the benefit of the doubt of what? That I am secretly hoping that men get away with rape? Does that include my daughter or sisters or does my evil mind exempt them? I’m not sure what underhanded motivation some are suggesting I have here.
Anyways, as I said above, I have read these cites, and after you read one, you come to the same conclusion. They do not disclose how they determine an allegation’s falsity except to say that is what the cops told them. How the cops determine it is left up in the air. Is it convictions or arrests (which is simply another way of saying that the cops subjectively believe the allegation)?
Further, “the ratio between false reports and accurate reports” is not what is being gathered here. There must be an “undetermined” category in the middle here and if it is scientific, there should be a published margin of error.
If you find a real methodology in any of this, I would be glad to hear it.
I also find such a tinge disappointing, but for your own edification the standard motivation behind “just asking questions” would be to derive pleasure by wasting other people’s time. I like to think most everybody on the Straight Dope is above that.
I am slightly confused if the police are behind the 5%-of-rape-accusations-are-false statistic. Certainly the police aren’t using conviction to determine whether a rape accusation is true; if that were the case, 95% of rape accusations would result in conviction (civil or criminal) and we wouldn’t have cause for this discussion. If the police are making their own determination based on evidence, and use the standard of at least clear and convincing evidence, I would conclude that there is a critical problem somewhere between police and the courtroom: either corruption or problems admitting evidence or plain and actionable incompetence.
If the police are using some lesser standard, or a subjective or one-sided process, then that really isn’t useful for the purposes of this discussion. The whole pyramid of research based on the 5% number would be inapplicable unless we deny the accused of his rights.
~Max
You and UV might have uncovered a tremendous conspiracy here. I’d be interested to get updates on your sleuthing.