Thats a good point. Lets legalize rape to prevent this from occuring.
Y’all both realize that in disagreeing (and ridiculing) catsix you’re also weakening your own arguments? If the potential abuse of lawsuits against those who falsely accuse others of rape is a good reason not to allow lawsuits, then the ability of women to use the threat of a rape accusation is also a good reason not allow rape accusations to go forth.
Unless it was the burden of proof in false accusation lawsuits was very low, it simply wouldn’t be a common threat–just like the threat of a false rape accusation isn’t common.
You’re talking about the difference between of threat of a criminal prosecution and a civil lawsuit. It’s easy to sue somebody. It’s much more difficult to get prosecutor to pursue rape charges with no evidence at all. The threats are not equally plausible. Also, there is rather a hugfe difference in the psychological intimidation factor between a rapist threatnening to sue his victim if she cannot convict him and a woman who would threaten a rape accusation against a guy who won’t call her. The scenarios are not comparable.
Indeed, whenever you make something illegal you run the risk of abuse. That must be weighed against the necessity and benefit from making things illegal. My response to catsix was an attempt to show the absurdity of the objection.
It doesn’t matter how low or high the burden of proof is. The woman still has to hire a lawyer and is still put through the ordeal of a civil trial. Its still a threat that a rapist can use against the person they raped. Now, you tell me what good will come out of this and why it outweighs the abuses.
I just want to add that I don’t believe for a second that women make false accusations of rape with any frequency at all.
Not really.
I don’t think there’d be lawyers lineing up to sue Joan Blow rape victim. Unless she was wealthy or famous, I imagine the one she falsely accused would have to have a fairly compelling case to get anywhere.
I disagree.
Frankly, given the choice between being raped and being falsely accused of rape in a case that the media picked up, I’m not sure which I’d choose. I’m inclined to say I’d rather be raped, but both threats really, really, suck.
Yes really. Anyone can file suit for anything. That doesn’t mean they’ll win but there is no minimum standard simply to file a suit and force somebody to have to defend herself.
- You don’t need a lawyer to file a lawsuit.
- If you’re paying the lawyer a upfront fee rather than on a contingency, then lawyer will do what you pay him to do.
-
Being raped is not a “threat.”
-
Pursuing criminal rape charges is not anywhere as easy as filing a nuisance lawsuit. They are not equally pluasable threats.
I think the prospect of your average rapist representing himself in a civil suit and posing a credible threat to his victims in a false accusation threat is pretty remote.
I ment (and should have said) “being raped (and having my attacker try and coerce me to to press charges with the threat of a lawsuit)”.
I think that’s a fairly complicated issue to boil down to such a simple statement, and I’d need to hear a comparison of the two from someone who actually knows what their talking about before I believed it.
I Googled:
“false rape accusations” fbi
and found an amazing range of statistics. Two per cent was the low end, up to 60% at the high range. I personally feel that 60% is way out there, but there were far too many in the 9% - 20% range to surmise that a false rape accusation is exceedingly rare.
9-20% of what? Are they saying that 20% of rape charges are false? How could they possibly know that? I call bullshit.
9-20% of the cases where the accuser admitted to lying. Google it yourself. The 2% factor was based on an estimate that rape is falsely reported just as often as all other crimes.
I’d almost be willing to bet that those cites won’t really influence the debate.
I found This
I also found some agenda driven websites that claim numbers like 40% “turn out to be false.” “False” does not have to be deliberately so and the statistics cited do not seem to reflect how many of those cases represent deliberately false accusations.
I do not find a cite that 20% of accusers admit to lying and I don’t believe it for a second.
No kidding, thats becuase this thread is about those that mistakenly identify rapists not those that make up false accusations.
I’d just like to point out for the record that furt’s second cite was edited, apparently pretty heavily, by a site with a clear agenda.
No evidence does not equal deliberately false.
This whole angle is a total hijack anyway and does not refute my point that false rape allegations are much more difficult to prosecute than a nuisance lawsuit.
I believe that 2% sounds like a believable number for deliberately false accusations. I also believe those accusations don’t get prosecuted, and like treis said, false allegations of rape don’t really belong in the same conversation as mistaken identifications by REAL rape victims.
“More shocking figures come from a study by now-retired Purdue University sociologist Eugene Kanin published in Archives of Sexual Behavior in 1994. After reviewing the police records of an Indiana town, Kanin found that of 109 reports of rape filed in 1978-87, 45 – or 41 percent – turned out to be false, as the women themselves admitted after the investigation.”
Ranging from 27 - 50% in this one:
“Equally revealing were addenda following Kanin’s basic report. They reported studies in two large Midwestern state universities which covered a three-year period ending in 1988. The finding of the combined studies was that among a total of 64 reported rapes exactly 50% were false. Kanin found these results significant because the women in the main report tended to gather in the lower socioeconomic levels, thus raising questions about correlations of false allegation with income and educational status. After checking figures gathered from university police departments, he therefore reported that “quite unexpectedly then, we find that these university women, when filing a rape complaint, were as likely to file a false as a valid charge.” In addition, Kanin cited still another source (Jay, 1991) which supported findings of high frequency false allegations in the universities. On the basis of these studies, Kanin felt it reasonable to conclude that “false rape accusations are not uncommon” (p.90).”
I freely admit that many of the cites you can find with the search I listed are agenda-driven and should be taken with a whole handful of salt. There does seem, though, that there might be some additional motivation for someone to make a false accusation of rape as opposed to other types of crimes.
In any event, I don’t have a dog in this fight, other than, if it can be proven, beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury that, in the OP, the woman knowingly (therefore, recklessly) made a false accusation of rape, then, by definition, she is liable for tort.
Which brings up an interesting thought…what if Roe v. Wade is overturned, and the various states are able to limit abortion to instances of incest or rape? I wonder what would happen to false accusations then?
Those last two studies contain sample sizes too small to render significant results.
Two major errors here. First off, in tort law, the standard isn’t beyond a reasonable doubt: it’s “preponderance of evidence,” I believe. So, by definition, the standard is much lower than the one you suggested.
Second, if she knowingly made a false accusation, then she behaved maliciously. That’s bigger than “recklessly.” If she made the accusation without really knowing whether it was accurate, then it might be reckless.
The chances of a rape victim recklessly accusing someone but not maliciously accusing someone remain vanishingly rare, as near as I can tell. The chances that a rape victim will hold off from reporting a rape out of fear that she’ll be sued for reporting it seem much larger to me: the rapist, if he knows his victim, has got a positive motive for threatening her with a lawsuit if she reports the rape, and if, as Bricker suggested before, her attacker is not a creep (or she’s not a good victim), she may have cause to believe that he can carry through on the lawsuit threat.
That’s just a whole pile of ugliness for an extraordinarily unlikely gain.
A point was raised earlier, that the benefit of allowing the lawsuit is that the falsely-accused can be compensated for their hellish experience. Let’s assume for a moment that John was falsely accused by someone acting recklessly; Frank was falsely accused by someone who really thought he was the attacker.
Does John deserve compensation for his hellish experience? Does Frank?
I don’t see a relevant difference between the experience that the two of them had. If one of them deserves compensation, then they both do. If we want to set up a taxpayer fund to remunerate people who are falsely accused of a crime, that’s something we can discuss. But this blaming the victim thing is for the birds.
Daniel