Are British prisons decidedly not cricket hellholes, wot wot old chap?
Thanks! I often end up feeling like I never do anything on the SDMB but put my foot in my mouth, or have thoughts that come out splodrnglkh, so I appreciate the compliment.
All this comparing hypothetical traumas feels a little counterproductive to developing or evaluating good social policy. Without repeating most of the good explanations about why being accused of rape is not by definition a worse ordeal than being raped, I will say this:
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Imprisonment can have horrifying, life-altering consequences on a person, and that’s without even looking at the issue of crimes and abuses committed against prisoners by other prisoners or staff.
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Inflicting horrifying, life-altering consequences on a person should never be an objective of the justice system. We don’t imprison people in order to break them.
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The act of falsely accusing someone of a serious crime can have immediate
and enduring consequences for the accused. This is something to take seriously. -
There is no reasonable way to evaluate the severity of trauma inflicted by rape in relation to the severity of trauma inflicted by a rape accusation. Those who advocate “eye for an eye” justice only have an argument when they minimize the effects of rape and maximize the effects of a rape accusation.
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The idea that internal/emotional suffering is of less concern than public/visible suffering is a very, for lack of a better word, masculine way of looking at trauma. A lot of the discussion in this thread minimizes the consequences of rape because they’re not as obviously visual as something like loosing a job (though of course that can happen as a consequence of rape trauma, it’s just not as direct or apparent a connection).
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I am infinitely more concerned about the rapes that go unreported than I am about the false accusations, and am confident that the difference in quantity between the two is describable by multiple powers of 10. As has been said, until the issue of malicious false rape accusation can be shown to be more than a statistical blip, I question why anyone would want to make it more scary to accuse someone of rape than it already may be.
I approve of everything wot Eonwe just wrote.
Especially that.
Just a couple of the many links I can provide indicating that false rape accusations very, very rarely result in situations resembling what’s been discussed here.
I do find the provenance of that first link *deliciously *ironic.
It definitely requires a light touch.
To make it funny, I mean. Not the raping part.
Try fighting your own prejudice and realise that I am not a misogynist.
The problem with those links is that they reproduce the 2-10% (its actually about 8%) which comes from an FBI study… and that number was for deliberately false allegations, they did not embrace cases where the accusation was wrong for other reasons; misidentifications, bad forensics, or misunderstanding of what exactly is rape.
The deliberately false rate for all other crimes is less than 1%, only fraud has a rate higher than 1%.
MRA/Incels also give out technically accurate but misleading statements, like 50% of DNA tests on convicted rapists exclude them and that rape is the Innocence Projects most overturned crime.
Using statistics here to come to a conlcusion on any point is frankly a stupid idea.
In case this isn’t obvious, the reason this statistic is misleading is because it’s very likely that DNA tests aren’t run on convicted rapists where the case against them is not weak and/or there’s not other evidence of innocence. So 50% of weakest cases can’t be extrapolated to 50% of all rape cases.
'Xactly. DNA tests are typically done in those cases where there already are doubts with respect to the safety of the conviction, its not a random sampling of all convicted rapists.
Most false allegations fall apart pretty quickly. Police are not stupid, they know that its a possibility; so they will examine the accusers story and most of the time the truth will emerge.
Maybe stop starting all the rape whataboutism threads, and I’ll “realise” it.
It’s not “pre-” anything if I *judge *you on what you actually post, and especially the threads you choose to start. Which, yeah, lets say your record on this, as on other subjects, speaks for itself.
Did anyone read the first link?
Etc.
I’ve read the first link. IMO it’s an unusually stupid article.
The most fundamental problem with it is that it relies on a narrow definition of “false accusations” as being accusations which have been conclusively determined by the justice system to be false, and ignores what’s undoubtedly a much bigger number which are indeterminate (or which are otherwise not actionable by the justice system).
Firstly, the article makes a big deal about how few people have been exonerated of rape post-conviction. And how the vast majority of false convictions did not result in charges being brought, let alone convictions. But if you’re relying on the justice system determining that charges are false, then of course most will not result in charges being brought. The primary source of justice system determinations that accusations are false will be the police and/or prosecutors, and in such cases they obviously won’t bring charges. So asserting that false accusations don’t have negative consequences while also relying on a definition of “false accusations” is creating her result by her own definition.
The article compares the number of exonerated rape victims to exonerated murders. This could theoretically be a valid point, but some qualifiers. For one thing, you need to know the amount of resources devoted to proving the innocence of convicted rapists as compared to the amount devoted to convicted murderers. But there’s also the nature of the crime which lends itself to disproof in the case of murders more than rapes. Most notably, that murders lend themselves to DNA evidence more than (some) rapes where the issue is one of consent versus ID. (More below on this.)
Secondly, the article goes on to profile the false accusers, and finds a dearth of misunderstandings/miscommunication. Quote: “Neither are false accusations the result of miscommunications taking place in a murky world of casual hook-ups and heavy drinking. False accusers almost never tell stories that could, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as an innocent misunderstanding”. This too is a completely specious point.
The cases in which the police will definitively declare a rape accusation as “false” will of course be those in which the issue is whether what the accuser is describing physically happened. These are the cases which lend themselves to detective work, with evidence in one direction or the other. But if there are cases involving conlicting claims about consent, there’s no way the police can ever declare them to be “false”, having not been at the scene at the time. The most the police/prosecutors can do is decide that this is not a winnable case and not prosecute. But those cases don’t go down in the stats used by this author as a “false accusation”. So the entire claim about “false accusations” is based on a definition of “false accusations” which by their nature tend to exclude the cases that she purports to show don’t happen. So there’s nothing at all in her claim.
I’m sorry, but this is a bit strawman-ey. Yes, if the accusation was retracted before I was even arrested, I would prefer that to a beating. However, that’s not what happened here. He was arrested and intimately searched according to the article in the OP. I’m not sure about the UK, but in Canada, arrest records are public, so in the age of Google the accusation never goes away. In his shoes, I stand by taking the beating.
Ironically, I think that the light penalty for his accuser is the best thing that could have happened to him. Normally people read the headline but never read the correction the next day. In this case, the outrage over the light sentence has probably exonerated him in the court of public opinion better than anything else he could have done.
Yes. When I was beaten, I received a lot of sympathy, empathy, and support from my community. There was a lot of pain, but physical pain can be reduced a lot by drugs, and taking paid time off to get high and play video games wasn’t the worst experience of my life. There was a fair bit of lingering fear and terror, but I had people in my corner, and that makes all the difference in the world.
When I took the law into my own hands, I was alone. The social ostracizing was severe, and hurt more than any of the physical pain did. People called me all sorts of vile things and told me that I should kill myself for what I did. I was a monster now, unfit to live in polite society. All the doors in my life closed on me. Nobody cared that I served my time. Nobody cared that the other guy started it. I was a killer now, and nothing has ever changed that.
When I try to imaging living with that not because I actually made a terrible mistake, but because someone was out to get me with a bunch of lies, that makes it so, so much worse. I barely managed to live with what I did, I’m not sure I could have lived with it if it was all because of someone’s lies.
So while I agree completely with Eonwe’s sixth point about being “more concerned about the rapes that go unreported than I am about the false accusation,” I still have a strong emotional reaction when someone uses the authorities to victimize an innocent person, and feel that somehow society needs to protect against that. How can we do that without the chilling effect on unreported rapes? I wish I knew.
CrazyCK, thanks for responding to my questions.
That truly does sound like a horrible experience to go through.
I was interested to hear you describe being ostracized as being the worst part, rather than the sentencing and your experience in prison.
I can well imagine, as you say, that someone made to suffer such rejection and isolation due to a false charge would suffer horribly.
I would think, however, that the extent to which friends and family might cut them off would be dependent upon the actuality of the crime or, for better or worse, upon the credibility of the accusation.
I am also certain that there are many victims of sexual assault who are made to suffer that very same alienation when those around them refuse to believe what they report.
You know, you are allowed to be concerned about both. Its not like you have to pick one or the other. Acknowledging that one is bad does not actually mean that you support the other.
You know, I think he knows that.