See this thread for further background: What Happens When You're Falsely Accused of Rape - In My Humble Opinion - Straight Dope Message Board
Poll to follow…
This is kind of like comparing apples to oranges isn’t it?
Yes, I’m not sure you can compare the two. Plus, it seems so subjective. Some might find rape worse, while others might find the accusation of rape more horrifying.
Is there any statistic on what percentage of false-rape accusations lead to convictions? That seems like it’d be very relevant.
I agree with this.
Not only that, but there’s vast variations in both too. Being accused of rape might cause a divorce, get you fired and basically destroy your life … or it might be cleared quickly and nothing much might happen. Same thing with rape - at the other end of the scale there’s whatever goes over the minimum threshold that can still be called rape, and at the other end some sort of horrible violent mass rape that ends up in murder.
It’s pretty impossible to say. However given the choice of the following scenarios happening in the next 24 hours: either being grabbed on the street and raped, or managing to get a consensual sexual encounter, which is afterwards staged to look like a rape I would take the rape. The chance of being labelled a rapist and going to prison as a “nonce” and having that against my name for the rest of my life is much more horrifying.
It’s hard to discuss this. Not because I’m a prior victim of a sexual assault - the “real” kind, with abduction, weapons and bodily harm - but because the OP sounds like pure bullshit. But if we’re going on the premise that any of what he says is true, then I’m still gonna have to go with rape being just a titch more unpleasant.
wow, you really can’t let this go, can you?
Wanted to see how far my own thoughts were from other people.
You have a funny way of disparaging people who may not agree with you. Are you this way in real life?
I see them as different forms of rape. Rape being the taking control of another person against their will. Now the physical aspect of being raped is without a doubt terrible, but there is also the physiological aspect that can hang around for years in both cases. Also, being wrongly accused and thrown into jail for it can get you physically raped.
If I get raped – yes, that’s horrifying, and it’d be hard to rebuild my life after that.
If I get falsely accused of rape – I may well spend years getting raped behind bars, followed by trying to rebuild my life while looking for work as a convicted felon of the “sex offender” variety, and I’ll be minus a lot of money, probably minus my marriage, plus my kid grew up without me being there – plus I probably got, what, beaten, cut up, and who-knows-what-else in prison in between getting repeatedly and horrifyingly raped?
Yeah, put me down for the one where I’m looking at being raped fewer times, I guess. (Plus, hey, if I later kill my rapist I’m a victim or a hero, right? But if I kill my accuser, then suddenly I’m the bad guy. And how is that fair?)
Being convicted of a rape you didn’t commit would be tons worse than being raped, being accused is just so variable that it is very hard to quantify. It could ruin your life, it could barely affect you. I guess you could say the same about rape, but i imagine the chance of that barely affecting you are much lower than a false accusation.
Both things could be the worst thing to ever happen to a person in their entire life, and utterly destroy them.
Should the fact that they both exist as horrible things invalidate the feelings of someone to which one happened and the other didn’t?
Which is worse - losing your mom to cancer or losing her to a car crash?
We are talking about two different things here, so really impossible to compare, and frankly, I don’t know why anyone would. I guess that someone could try to minimize someone’s experience of one, based on the other, but that would be a pretty stupid thing to do, so I don’t know if anyone would really do that.
LOL, quote from the other linked thread in the OP:
Being raped itself can vary in degrees to which it traumatizes. Is it a betrayal, was this someone I trusted? Do the circumstances lead me to feel abusively done unto without me internalizing a bucketload of shameful guilt about something I might have done, or should have done differently but didn’t, i.e., self-blame? To what extent am I driven to be terrified that I’ll be mutilated or killed?
Hmm, false accusation experience could be all over the map, too. Accused by one person pointing to me in the college cafeteria? Arrested and convinced and sentenced? Covered in the media and intermittently recognized and/or reported about for the rest of my life?
I hope everyone is keeping in mind that when a man is falsely accused of rape, he has to endure the wrath of Nancy Grace.
This is like asking which is worse, getting murdered, or falsely accused of murder. Obviously, the former is worse, but the latter is still pretty awful, too.
Nope, it shouldn’t. I’m more than a little surprised at the pile-on in the other thread. My only complaint with the OP was that it was way long and possibly misplaced as a message board post. More like a magazine article or blog entry, it seemed.