As far as I know, no one has good data on just how many rape accusations are false. I’ve heard claims of everything from 90% to zero over the years, not that I buy either extreme.
I will say though that I find the claim that only a crazy woman would make a false accusation to be rather bizarre, and contradictory to human nature.
I agree with this. I don’t think it’s super common, but I also think pretending that only horrible skeevy paranoid rapist men are the only guys who worry about false rape accusations is a silly extreme stance to take, that’s all I’m saying. Lots of perfectly normal guys have been in situations where they worry “shit, that girl I met last night and I were pretty drunk last night, and now she’s acting kind of distant, I hope we’re cool” to some extent.
Agreed on this too. It’s like the madonna/whore complex where guys say “only sluts like sex”. Perfectly normal women like sex. Perfectly normal women are capable of going through the psychological process that leads to buyer’s remorse and even legitimately don’t remember wanting sex in the moment because of the regret they feel the next morning.
Again it’s not all women, but it’s also not some tiny fucked up subsect of them.
Well, how many people do you think had sex last month (in a straightforward male-female coupling)?
It’s kind of hard to find good statistics, but wikipedia suggests that there were approximately 90,000 reported rapes in the United States in 2009. The FBI estimates that about 8% of these cases were “unfounded,” though this figure is not synonymous with “false.” Nonetheless, for kicks, let’s assume that all 8% represent false allegations of rape. That would mean that there were approximately 7,200 false allegations of rape in the United States in 2009.
So let’s see. There are about 300 million people in the US. Approximately 35% are either under 18 or over 65 years of age; while both of those groups contain a large number of sexually active people, I think the incidence of false rape accusations among the over 65 set is probably very small, and trying to figure out how many people under 18 are actually having sex is going to be difficult, so I am eliminating all of them (ie, roughly 105 million people). This leaves us with 195 million people between 18 and 35.
About 60% of these people are married, leaving us with 78 million singles. About 5-10% of them are gay, so let’s take the top end and cut out another 8 million. So 70 million heterosexual singles. Say 20 million of them are non-sexually active for one reason or another - priests, people in comas, people who just don’t enjoy sex, so on and so forth.
OK. So. about 50 million sexually active, heterosexual singles, which means roughly 25 million sexually active, heterosexual single men. If every one of those men has only one sexual partner in a given year, that’s still 25 million boinking sessions in that year. This is probably grossly underestimating the amount of man-on-woman sex happening each year, but go with it for the moment. This means that those 7200 false accusations of rape represent about three one hundreds of one percent of all sex.
So if you are a straight single man and you have a completely random hook-up with a woman, your chances of her making a false accusation of rape are about 1 in 3500.
Yup, I’m comfortable calling that “rare.” Particularly if you avoid dancing around the consent line and attempt to conduct the most basic screening for batshit crazy before getting horizontal. Those 7200 cases of false rape are terrible things, and despicable acts by the false accusers, but I think folks are over-stating the scope of the problem a bit.
Only if you do buy the idea that unfounded = false, and that none of that remaining 92% are false. This is one of the places where the numbers go all wonky; how, exactly, is the FBI defining “unfounded”? IIRC in the past they’ve used terms like that to mean “it was physically impossible for the accusation to have been correct”, which leads a lot of room for false accusations that weren’t physically impossible.
It also sounds like the numbers only include the cases that actually go to the police, but doesn’t account for the casual accusations to friends, strangers, the person themselves, that person’s friends/family, co-workers, etc. Like the general “not filing charges, but definately fucking with your reputation” cases.
Again this isn’t to imply that most rape charges are bullshit, I think the vast majority are real and I think a lot of them go unreported and that’s a terrible thing. I’m just pointing out that it’s not an unfound fear to have, especially when everyone has a different definition of rape and a lot of guys generally can’t tell what that particular girl is going to consider rape…a girl he thought he was getting signals from and kissed considers unwanted kissing rape and tells her girlfriend he tried to rape her but the girlfriend’s definition of rape involves knives and dark alleyways so she assumes that’s what the guy did and it can all spiral.
And then on the flipside, guys are encouraged by girls to “make the first move”. So there are conflicting messages in society. “Make the first move, but don’t ask permission to kiss her because when a girl likes you she likes a “real man” to take charge because it shows confidence. …oh but don’t make the first move unless SHE makes the first move by saying it’s okay for you to make the first move which you shouldn’t need because she wants you to know it’s okay to make the first move without her telling you to make the first move, but if you make the first move without her consent then you’re a rapist.”
…so ya, it can be confusing for guys these days.
If you’re confused about consent, you don’t have it. Stop what you’re doing and figure out what the hell is going on.
This is actually not nearly as complicated as you’d like to make it sound.
This is exactly correct. The fact that TWTTWN seems to think I’m saying you need to get a signed contract at every stage shows that he doesn’t know what consent is.
It certainly doesn’t jive with my life experience. I was in university - essentially the horniest, most sexually active place in the world - at the absolute height of the No Means No thing, and honestly cannot remember being troubled for one second about the possibility my endless efforts to get laid or my willingness to sleep with some women who were not onthe correct side of the not-right-in-the-head line would get me branded a rapist. I cannot remember any male friends who expressed fear they would be branded as rapists. Your claims simply do not match with anything I have ever observed in the real world.
I’m guessing you also didn’t think that “no” meant “not yet” and try to have sex with a woman after she said she didn’t want to do this, though.
I’m also not afraid I’m going to be eaten by alligators, but that’s because I don’t cover myself in barbecue sauce and go traipsing naked through the swamp. If you take really stupid risks, of course you’re going to be afraid of the danger those risks entail.
If CSI is to be believed rape scrapes the vagina in a way different from consensual sex. One of them is at 6 o’clock and the other at 12 o’clock.
I can’t have sex at 6 o’clock. I have to be at work by 6:30.
In Denmark 7% according to the police and a survey of 1,400 rapes in the period 2000-2.
I hope it’s clear that I’m not using “crazy” in the sense it’s used in the DSM-IV, but rather used to suggest someone lives in a mental/emotional world that I find loathsome and want to have nothing to do with.
I’ve tried to be quiet, but I can’t handle this nonsense anymore. You’re confusing yourself about what actually happend in that ‘‘have you ever been raped?’’ thread. People who had actually been raped said they are more cautious around strange men to avoid being raped again, and you and a handful of other guys crucified them for it on the basis that it wasn’t fair to men. A handful of guys whining about how unfair it is when strange women with PTSD avoid them to prevent being revictimized. Cry me a fucking river.
Then all this crap about how men’s lives are ruined by accusations of rape. I don’t even believe rape ruins a woman’s life, much less am I getting on board for the self-indulgent notion that being accused of rape ruins a man’s life. Last I knew, Mike Tyson, a convicted rapist, was still enjoying hilarious cameos in comedy films. Even his goddamn wikipedia page bends over backward to portray him in a positive light. My adopted father, who abused me for five years straight, is still running a successful business, remarried and most likely sticking it to her teenaged daughter, and oh - meanwhile, I was disowned by my whole goddamn family and haven’t been permitted to see my adopted brothers and sisters since. What I mean is, I had brothers and sisters, and then I just didn’t have them any more. They are gone forever. Or how about the fact that my molester was in attendance at my grandfather’s funeral last year, resulting in my decision not to go and be with the rest of my family? How about the fact that my other molester, who served prison time for his crime, still hangs out around my hometown and enjoys a healthy career and by-all-external-appearances a normal family life? Or my husband’s distant cousin, another convicted rapist, who paid his way out of jail time and now has a wife and two children.
I know so many women who have been raped I don’t even bother keeping track anymore. I wouldn’t even have been conceived if it weren’t for my stupid date-rapist drunk of a father. He hasn’t a goddamn clue what he did, either. But it really didn’t change the fact that my teenaged Mom was thrown out of her house for getting knocked up and had to scrap her way through college in a cockroach-infested apartment while feeding me government cheese and trying to give me the chance to make choices she did not have.
Nobody really gives a shit when women are sexually assaulted, or when children are abused. We scream outrage as vocally as possible, in the media and elsewhere, but nobody actually gives a shit. Sexual assault is the reason I exist, it has shaped every significant experience of my childhood, the awful decisions made by my loved ones, there is very little about my life that has not been touched by these issues in some way. But time and time again you presume to tell me the way things really are. I lived there. I was down there, where people like you don’t have to be. I ate, slept and breathed this shit for decades. Go on and tell me how the world really is.
The magnitude of the nation’s apathy to sexual assault is deafening to anyone who has been through it. If you think otherwise you’re so steeped in your own privilege I doubt anyone can get through to you.
Yes. That’s what’s called “presumpation of innocence”, the principle which guides most Western law systems. You don’t have to prove your innocence; the state has to prove your guilt.
(Der Trihs, that was more for me than it was for you. But if you get something out of it, all the better.)
It was a helpful reality check for me, also–while I tend to think that cries of “false accusations of rape” are overblown, it’s helpful to hear specific examples of how even accurate accusations get minimized. The problem, as you point out, is in the opposite direction. Thanks for not staying quiet.
But the onus is on the alligator to respect your right to cover yourself as you like and go where you please! There are alligators out there who are going to eat someone, barbecue sauce or no barbecue sauce. If they’re going to eat you, they won’t wait for you to traipse naked through the swamp - they’ll get you whether you’re clothed or not, whether you’re in the swamp or not. Alligators regularly eat people, even unappetising people, when they are not hungry, and even when food is readily available. That’s what alligators do in a world in which the “alligators will be alligators” mindset prevails and people-eating apologists perpetuate this “just-world” mindset in which you could have avoided being eaten by alligators if only you’d taken proper care of yourself. At the end of the day, taking the responsibility away from the alligator and putting it on the eaten person is just blaming the victim.
I can’t speak for America but here in the U.K., this is simply not true.
Alligators and men, Malacandra? Really, that’s OK with you?
It’s like you were so invested in bristling in outrage at his post that it doesn’t seem to have occurred to you to think that you were relying on a comparison – all men to amoral killing machines – that you’d almost certainly have bristled in outrage if anyone else but you had made. And which nobody but you had made.
That seems like an unfair way to approach a discussion, if you’re at all interested in having one, rather than just being indignant that there’s one going on at all.