IMHO, the problem isn’t that people are questioning the statistics.
It’s that in questioning the statistics, many people have, knowingly or unknowingly, denigrated people for whom this subject has deep emotional impact. I’d say that people like Truth Seeker and avalongodhave managed to argue against the statistic without offending anyone (much). The problem is not those people who try to dispprove the statistic with facts; it’s those who used the thread as an excuse to get soem cracks in on rape victims.
And, catsix… You are a vile human being. Why in the WORLD are you picking on jarbaby? It really and truly seems to me just so you can be a confrontational bitch. She has made valid points, and all you see fit to do is to say things like “I’m sorry you constantly feel as if people are picking on you or calling you a liar, but it seems like it’s your personal issue.” and “It’s not their fault that you seem to want to feel persecuted…”
I rarely get so angry on the board, but this thread, and you, catsix, have done it to me. So fuck you, and stop being such a controversy whore. (Yes, I know, I’m giving her the attention she’s trying to get. I’m weak.)
The accusation itself can do alot of damage. Many people automatically assume that a person accused is guilty. As a law student, I know that I’ll have that problem when I’m defending clients and I’m not sure if any lawyer can consistently overcome the average person’s tendency to believe all accused persons “did it.”
Imagine the consequences of being falsely accused of rape. Word of the accusation will get around, and probably most women will believe the accuser, and so the guy can pretty much give up on any chance of having a relationship with any girl in the area. Any woman who starts dating the guy and then hears of the accusation might still either drop him entirely or withdraw emotionally and end the relationship quietly. Apart from those problems, both men and women will likely distrust him and detach from him. The victim of this woman’s false accusations may find himself quickly alone and isolated from his peers. Many people not familiar with the legal system believe that anyone who was accused and not convicted got off “on a technicality”, so even hearing of the fact that the accusations were never substantiated won’t clear the man. If you get falsely accused of rape, you might just have to move to a new state to get away from the consequences.
If I have sex with a woman, and she comes out and accuses me of rape, and there were no witnesses to the sexual encounter, then there is no way to exonerate me in the eyes of the public. It would be my word against hers on the consent issue. This might not be enough to wrongly convict me, but it won’t prove me innocent either. The justice system doesn’t require I be proven innocent (innocence is presumed, guilt must be proven), but the public tends to presume guilt until someone is clearly exonerated by substantive evidence. In that sense, any woman a man has sex with ends up having a ridiculous amount of power over that man and could greatly harm him with a single lie.
So I’d say the fear is somewhat justified in that the possibility of danger is real. Whether false accusations of rape are common or not, it’s hard to say since it’s as difficult to establish innocence in these cases as it is to establish guilt. Since we men can’t really know how likely it is, it’s only prudent to be wary of it.
Oh, for the love of Pete. The suggestion that people should be BANNED for being skeptical of a claim, from one of the select group of message boards with the STATED CLAIM of learning the truth about things, a board that practically demands skepticism…astonishing. Maybe 1 in 4 women gets raped, maybe 1 in 20 women gets raped, I don’t think anyone really knows. What I do see clearly in some of these reactions is that the prevalence (or lack thereof) of rape in this society has become such a vital part of some people’s worldviews that anything threatening that underlying statistical assertion is treated with hostility and emotionally-driven vitriol.
Some people here need to divorce the extended ideology from the incident. If rape is actually a rare occurance, this would indeed cast doubt upon variants of modern feminism that characterize most or all women as perpetual victims of a brutish and violent patriarchy. But that wouldn’t discredit that idea that rape is an immoral coercive invasion of personal liberties. It wouldn’t discredit the notion that both women and men should be free in their persons from coercive violence of any nature. And it definitely does nothing at all to discredit any individual’s experiences. So the claim that rape statistics are bloated, even if true, is not misogynistic nor does it constitute an attack on people on this board who were raped.
Murder is just as wrong if 1000 people are murdered each year, as it’s wrong if merely 10 people are murdered each year. This is obbviously true. However it seems that some feminist women’s groups have tied the immorality of rape in with claims of it’s frequency. Their motive in doing this is to validate their broad sociological claims. It is only those claims that are endangered by questioning the statistics. Women as a group, and the individual women who are rape victims, are not diminished by the refutation of statistical claims, because rape and gender inequality continue to be acknowledged wrongs regardless of whether they are packaged into a broad feminist ideology regarding patriarchal sexual exploitation.
Right on, RexDart. I saw some people acting assholeish on page 3, in regards to women not reporting rape, but I see nothing wrong with calling bullshit on statistics that are invalid or misleading. And yes, women DO make up claims of rape. This is a fact, and as noted in the other thread, there’s a significantly higher incidence of untrue rape allegations as any other crime. Does this somehow make a woman that actually gets raped any less of a victim, or the perpetrator any less of an asshole? Of course not. Does it mean that we should disbelieve women when they claim to be raped? Again, of course not. We should go about prosecuting rapes just like any other crime: help the victim as much as possible, and presume innocence on the part of the accused.
I think the possibility is very real. It happens…and it still doesn’t negate the fact that I do know many women who were victims of sexual assault. So we have only established that there may be a surge in the number of assholes in the world: not those who rape, but those who falsely report rape. I can’t make up my mind which is more mentally twisted.
I do not see an obvious tie between believing the number of rape victims is high and promoting an ideology. Perhaps the militant feminists have gained scorn for floating a correct number that people just don’t want to hear, or maybe they just hate men - I don’t know. But I would very much like to hear a sound reasoning of why we need to be skeptical of high numbers - because I think it’s a high number and I have no correllating political view to go with it. I wonder if all of those claiming the statistics are inflated can say the same.
RexDart and mhendo have it pretty much right, a lot of guys nowadays are made to feel like they have to apologize just for having a penis and a sex drive so a lot of gut level defensiveness is going to crop up.
Because jarbabyj has a wild tendency to think that people are picking on her personally and calling her a liar when they question a statistic. Because she flipped out to the degree she did at the people who have said it is true that there are women who falsely accuse men of rape. Because she had to get ten shades of huffy and pissed off that someone pointed out a fact and start acting like they hate all women or should apologize for having a penis.
She needs to get over herself.
And I don’t give a damn if you think I’m a ‘controversy whore’, LaurAnge, because you’re not going to get what you want. I’m not ‘just trying to get attention’. I’m expressing my opinion, which whether you like it or not and you want to jump in my shit about or not, I will continue to do.
I believe that jarbabyj has gone entirely overboard in the fact that she gets offended at something in just about every thread on this board that ever mentions rape, and I think she needs to keep her personal problems separate from the fact that people are questioning false statistics. So go ahead, call me names, but that’s how I see it.
IMHO, the point of this pit thread wasn’t an objection to people questioning the statistics, but due to the fact that the initial reaction to the reported statistics wasn’t:
“The statistics are obviously flawed.”
but rather:
“Women do lie about this, you know.”
This, while in a few cases maw be true, is an ignorant attitude to take, aside from it being insensitive. Certain posters prooved themselves to be insensitive later on in the thread.
Technically, 8% is the lowest figure. 72% is the highest figure i’ve seen (dont know if that includes accusations that didn’t turn out to count as rape such as sex while drunk) According to surveys, the average rate is probably arount 25-40%
I also read in that IPT website an article saying about 60% of accusations of child abuse are false, but they don’t get the skepticism that accusations of rape do. I don’t know why, maybe its biological or something as most of us men are cynical and most of the women are knee jerk supporters.
rape & child abuse are atom bombs, they can destroy a persons life w/o any evidence saying they actually happened (unlike other crimes, where you need evidence a crime was committed), and the presumption of innocence goes out the window when an accusation happens. In those instances, it is usually up to the accused to prove that they DIDN’T break the law, not that they did break a law as it is in many other crimes.
I still don’t know why child abuse accusations are always taken at face value, if they are just as likely, if not more likely, to be fabricated while rape accusations aren’t believed. I will try to look up the cooberating statistics on false allegations of child abuse.
If even two women have lied about being raped, then the latter statement is a true statement. Ergo, being a true statement, it cannot be ignorant. I think what put people off is that the people who posted that “women do lie about this” didn’t go on to make the obligatory “of course, rape is horrible and awful and I universally condemn it and think its perpetrators are the most vile human beings on the planet” caveat. Well, can’t we perhaps think that the caveat is just so common as to be presumed part of the discourse without needing to be mentioned? Don’t posters have the right to choose which particular issues they are going to discuss? For analogy, does a discussion about the statistics of Southerners who owned slaves require that everyone responding add a boilerplate tag line to the end of their posts saying “slavery is the most evil thing in the history of man”? If the first response to the OP included the fact that some slaveowners were black, would that be seen as an affront to black people everywhere who were victimized by slavery?
See, I think that certain conclusions are generally held by such an overwhelming portion of people that they really do not need to be mentioned, we can presume a person holds them until they state otherwise. So I think we can safely presume that anyone talking about rape, slavery, murder, etc., has the usual opinion of it. If failing to affirmatively declare one’s disgust for those things every time one discusses them is enough to get labelled “insensitive”, then we’ve gone way off the deep end on this sensitivity thing.
The people who asserted that women lie about rape were making a true statement. It was relevant to the statistics. It was then to be determined how it affected the statistics, and this was subsequently debated. I fail to see anything wrong with that, and nothing prima facie insensitive about it.
I am not defending anybody who attacked irishgirl personally about the reasons she didn’t report her rape, that can be seen as insensitive quite readily. But I don’t see how it’s insensitive to make a true factual assertion directed generally at the subject matter. It’s making it personal that crosses the line. We’re grownups here, I don’t think we need to attach boilerplate sensitivity statements to the end of our posts. After all, in GD it’s the facts that are debated, not the motivations of the people bringing the facts to our attention.
Then those men need to have more control over their emotions. Who has made them feel that way? Do you feel that you should apologize for having a penis and a sex drive? Has any woman told you that you should feel guilt (for having a penis and a sex drive)?
by Lamia
Also, these assholes don’t seem to be exactly the kind of person that a rape victim would confide in.
Some on this thread and the original thread have been victims or rape or sexual assault. I wonder if there are any men posting on these two threads that have been falsely accused of rape.
Reading this site’s homepage i find it incredibly biased. So the statistics presented should be viewed with that in mind, but i am assuming they are still valid statistics.
I feel that by taking the OP, which was “Will a quarter of all women really get raped?” and replying to it by saying that women lie about being raped is either one being deliberately obtuse, an attempt to spark an argument, or being ignorant of what the question raised was.
You are quite entitled to think that way. But that doesn’t mean that you actually do know what those respondents thought, or why they responded that way.
This thing did not start out as a pit thread, or even as a GD.
It was posted in GQ. People that respond to GQs are entitled (and in fact are instructed) to assume that the questions are posted in good faith seeking factual answers.
That is all I see in the initial answers to the question.
The form of response that we saw with this particular OP occurs frquently in GQ.
Someone says “I heard X. Is that right?” Someone else says “Nah, don’t think so because Y”. And quite often that is as far as it goes, because the OP responds “Oh, yeah, didn’t think of that.”
I really don’t think that the first few respondents to the OP had any agenda beyond trying to quickly answer the question, which was:
Now, I don’t really know why they gave the answers they did any better than you do, but I do believe that they are entitled to the benefit of the doubt given the initial context.