I agree there should be severe consequences against the accuser when the rape allegations are false. But you must also admit there may be a negative consequence to doing this: a woman who is actually raped may be afraid to file a police report for fear she might be accused of lying if her story doesn’t perfectly add up. To alleviate these fears, it should be understood that severe consequences against the accuser should only occur when it is *proven *the accuser is lying.
Or when the cops just decide that it’s a false allegation, without investigating the claim at all. Some people think that if a victim doesn’t physically resist, then it wasn’t really rape, for instance. Or she brought it on herself somehow, or she really wanted it, or that it was regret sex. And some of the people who have these beliefs are cops.
I agree. I guess I just never thought to include the “proven” part in making my case. The miscreant should be tried and found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt just like anyone else accused of a crime.
And sometimes in the course of questioning it becomes apparent that the alleged victim of rape is making the whole thing up out of thin air.
Still, cops do make assumptions in evaluating a case, and sometimes those assumptions are incorrect or unfair. But that doesn’t mean women should be given a free pass simply by crying rape.
Look, women are human beings just like men, and just like men some of them are capable of extraordinary feats of chicanery. If you think there aren’t women out there who wouldn’t think twice about using accusations of rape in order to get custody of children, get back at a domestic partner, or cover up theft or other illegal act, then you’ve either lead an awfully sheltered life or you’re simply blinded by bias favoring your own sex.
A lot of the people talking about punishment for “false accusations” of rape seem to be jumping to conclusions in this case.
Even if one accepts the fact that there may be “reasonable doubt” as to whether or not DSK was guilty of rape, that’s a far cry from conclusively proving that the woman falsely accused him of rape.
As it is, this case seems to be more evidence that if you’re a woman who accuses a man of rape, expect your past to dredged up and if it’s not spotless, you’re going to have problems.
True, true, it is possible both of them are in the wrong.
Yep, now would be a good time to not jump to the conclusion that is opposite to the conclusion that many people jumped to at first. Lying, money laundering women with druggie friends can still be raped too, ya know.
But it is OK to rape some women, because they lied on paperwork. 
This study published 1994 (first cited in this thread by another member using
another link- does anyone besides me ever read these things?) established that
rape accusations were false by the accuser’s own admission in 45/109 (41%)
cases during a 9-year period in an unnamed Midwestern city of 70,000;
False Rape Allegations : Eugene J. Kanin : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive (Original article, open via pdf)
(from link, my emphasis):
Other data from the article relates false acccusation estimates from
elswhere ranging from 0.25% to 100% of the total (!).
I had until today assumed that over 90% of all rape accusations were likely
to be true because I simply did not think there could be so many accusers
demented or venal enough to make something like that up.
In short, I was guilty of bias in favor of the accuser.
Well, my days of bias are over and done with as far as this issue goes:
I will henceforth assume that a rape charge may as easily be false as true.
I am aware of the fact that one small Midwestern city is nowhere near a
suitable sample from which to draw national inference. However, I think
it is enough to justify taking a fresh and completely unbiased view of the
matter, and that means giving the accused equal standing with the accuser,
as I think everyone should do to begin with.
I have checked this thread high and low and I can’t find a single instance of anyone saying that raping women was okay under any circumstance. Perhaps you can point me to where they did, 'cause I’m just not seeing it.
I totally disagree. Ignoring the case of DSK who was about to leave the country, why would a mere statement by the alleged victim be enough to detain someone? Investigate, certainly. Protect the victim, certainly too (restraining order, etc…) But what would make necessary to arrest and detain the alleged rapist, as long as there aren’t strong evidences against him? Arresting and detaining someone has severe consequence (losing your job, for instance), and of course is in itself harsh.
I understand that’s the problem with rape. It’s as easy to accuse someone of rape (I didn’t want to have sex with him) as it is to deny it (she did want to have sex with me), so it might be difficult to find evidences one way or another. Doesn’t justify arrest and detention barring peculiar circumstances (multiple rape accusations, reasons to believe the intercourse is unlikely to have been consensual, etc…), though.
I understand arresting someone who has been accused of rape. It is a serious and violent crime. But he was also denied the right to move about on the basis that ‘he was rich’ and a flight risk. I’m not sure exactly how that would’ve went over if he had scurried (somehow passing customs) to France to go run in an election. I honestly didn’t think him to be a flight risk at all.
So for all of the ‘well, rich men can just buy their defense!’ crud, I’d say there’s just as much judgment being flung at him for being rich. Also not sure if the DA would’ve cared so much if he weren’t loaded and (somewhat) famous.
SK has incurred quite a bit in defense charges already, not to mention the loss of future earnings. Cash he won’t get back due to some woman’s (if she is lying, that is) folly.
Good god, his career has been stalled, if not ended.
When will they ever learn that she just may keep the dress? :smack:
Colonial, I don’t think that study is really fair as it takes what the officer thinks as fact. It’s been attacked a few times. Plus it doesn’t fit with other studies.
Unless of course you were joking, as that link also says
I do not see how how an officer can “think” that a complaintant has
admitted to making false charges when in fact she is sticking with
those charges.
Cite with details please. Also, an attack in itself means nothing
unless its weapons are a persuasive combination of evidence and logic.
It doesn’t? How do you know? How many have you read, what was
the sampling procedure, how many cases of accusation were studied,
and what was criteria for judging the truth of the accusations?
As I said before the document I cite mentions mentions a 99.75%
range in variation in other estimates of the frequency of false rape
allegation. And if that variation is that great then we would do best
to start from scratch, and do so with none of the bias that must have
infected many of the earlier studies.
(1) I do not joke about serious subjects such as this.
(2) You did not open my link, which, as I clearly stated, contains
the original publication in its entirety.
Here it is again, please avail yourself before continuing to address me:
I think he was implying that females who are poor witnesses can be raped with impunity if the perpetrator is psycho and the strength of the evidence turns upon the credibility of the witness , alas. 
[QUOTE=colonial]
(2) You did not open my link, which, as I clearly stated, contains
the original publication in its entirety.
[/QUOTE]
Pardon the mistake by me, you did refer to my link.
However, the poor choice of keywords does not change
the fact that the citation author was a PhD Purdue University
faculty member and the citation publisher was and still is
an academic peer-review journal.
Alas indeed. We should teach our children “Don’t tell lies, because the day may come when great wrong will occur if you are not believed.” Perhaps some illustrative pastoral story would help?
I think the lesson from this is much simpler and should not deter any woman from reporting a rape. That lesson is: don’t tell a string of fucking lies to the police. If this maid was raped she has nobody to blame but herself if her rapist walks away scot free.
I’ll do it myself. Kanin’s study consists of enumerating what he was told by an anonymous police force. The rape victims themselves were not involved in the study; Kanin never spoke to them. The findings can obviously not be independently researched or investigated, because nobody else knows who he was talking to. So already there’s two possible points of concern - 1. for all we know Kanin could have simply counted wrong, or made some other mistake, since we can’t verify anything he says he was told; and 2. we have no reason to believe that this particular police force’s determination of a false allegation is infallible, and we can’t verify what they reportedly said, even if they said it.
On that second point, in fact, note that the police department “offered” a polygraph as part of every investigation:
That link also says that polygraph policy is
Now, contrast the above, a single study performed behind a curtain, with the however many dozen sets of statistics released by entities like the FBI, the British government, the police departments of various municipalities in the United States who are not anonymous, and a bunch of other independent researchers like Kanin, which as you (sort of) noted generally end up providing a number way down in the single digits.
That Kanin’s 41% is just as likely the “true” number as all the much lower numbers from other studies is a conclusion you could draw, if you wanted. I think it’s fair to wonder whether anybody who says this study ought to wipe out all other data that’s ever been collected so that we now should assume that every accusation is just as likely false as true (even though not even this god-damned study supports that) wasn’t predisposed to coming to that conclusion no matter how compelling the evidence was.
If you want to read an actual expert talking about it, you can read this.
Shouldn’t “Don’t tell lies to the police” apply to Strauss-Kahn, too? It seems that the rapist has some blame for walking free as well.
I’ll acknowledge that he may not be a rapist. He may just be someone who had a completely anonymous sexual encounter with a chambermaid that resulted in her having a torn ligament in her shoulder. So maybe the lesson is: don’t have anonymous, dangerously rough sex with chambermaids. If you like sex that rough, make sure your partner is someone you can trust, or face the consequences.
Ahem! He’s an alleged rapist.
Is there evidence that DSK caused this injury?