It’s horrible to hear what happened to you.
False accusations truly wreck lives.
I’m in favour of anonymity for both sides, at least 'til conviction.
cough cough
…the new idea, please?
Unfortunately, to a certain extent, justice often clashes with justice. That is to say, measures taken to prevent innocent people from being convicted often have the effect of making it easier for guilty people to get off scot-free.
This is why rape victims’ advocates and innocent-but-falsely-accused’ advocates will be perpetually clashing with each other. They’re both fighting for justice in a way that is, unfortunately, inadvertently conflicting at times.
No, they aren’t.
Rape is always going to be largely unconvictable in a court of law. It is, by nature, hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Most anti-rape organizations are not focusing much on legal aspects (the part that would come into conflict with the false-accusation activists.) They focus on awareness, prevention, services and stigma reduction-- none of which have any inherent conflict.
The reason why anti-rape organizations generally aren’t super interested in working with the false-accusation people are the same reason they aren’t working on animal rights or anti-tracking. They are different issues, with different stakeholders. It doesn’t help that a percent of the false-accusation people are MRA types with an agenda. But mostly, these are just different things with different solutions.
Am I the only one who caught the part where the OP was the woman’s Teaching Assistant? I don’t know what university this was, but if it had been my university, by the early 1990s, that would be considered a breach of ethics, and he would be fired even if the woman insisted the sex was consensual.
That may not have been the case at his school, because the early 90s was exactly when universities were adopting such policies in droves (albeit, a few had them long before). We don’t have the woman’s side of the story, but I can’t help wondering if in the interim between her “consent,” and accusation, someone clued her into what the school’s policy was.
Anyway, regarding that 8%: how many are outright made-up stories, where there either was no sex act, or it was entirely consensual, and how many are misidentifications? Many of the people in prison who have been freed by The Innocence Project are people who were falsely identified, because the victim or a witness simply made a mistake, and years later, DNA evidence exonerated the person who was convicted. In the few cases where the real rapist was arrested later, the two men (the falsely convicted man, and the real rapist) do resemble each other. Further, these are cases where the fact of the rape is not in question. There are photographs of bruises on the victim, and emergency room doctors who will testify that she was forced.
This is without asking how you even arrive at 8%. Is it DNA exonerations, plus recantations? Is it acquittals of all cases that are adjudicated some way (not just trials, but also plea bargains), or is it cases where the charges are dropped because there is not enough evidence?
I read a meta-analysis that tried to determine numbers of false claims, but it included women who told other people, but did not go to the authorities. The number 8% doesn’t sound like what I remember. I read a print and ink study, though, that I haven’t been able to locate again.
Exactly. They’re two organically dissimilar phenomena–the OP is setting them up with a false equivalency. The reasons behind false accusations are not simply the flip side of the reasons leading to rape.
My idea is pretty simple: treat rape like all other crimes.
A simple he-said-she-said, absent physical evidence or eyewitness testimony, is simply not sufficient to convict anyone of any crime.
And also, perhaps more importantly, our society needs to stop assuming you’re a rapist just because someone accused you of rape.
And, controversially perhaps, a known false accuser should serve time. That is, if law enforcement can prove you lied or if you admit to lying about accusations of rape, you should be harshly punished. A slap on the wrist does not a lost reputation make up for.