Link?
I think people are interpreting the question in different ways. Or maybe not, it clearly states there is no context, but I think a lot of the responses are based on whether you were told by a woman directly that she was raped and what your inclination would be in that circumstance. Unfortunately to answer the literal question with “I believe the woman’s claim” sounds too much like “Women never falsely accuse men of rape” to me.
The problem I see is that some people still think that false accusations of rape are common place. I suppose that’s because they’re likely to be the ones to make the news, and the holdover of old stupid ideas like ‘They were asking for it’.
I’d believe the woman. People generally do not make up stories about being victimized unless there are large Insurance payouts involved.
That does not mean I’d believe it without qualifier. For a debate at another board, we looked at the literature, and it seems an average of 8 % of claims that get prosecuted are false. So about 1 in 12. Looking at it dispassionately, a 11 to 1 chance she is telling the truth is certainly enough to believe. However, a false rape conviction can ruin a life too, so its worth keeping the 1 in 12 in mind to and not forming that lynch mob straight away.
So believe, but not with a closed mind.
As an aside, in 2012, the DA in Oslo instructed the police to prosecute accusations that were obviously false. Previously the police had had a practice of not prosecuting these regardless, for fear of discouraging victims from reporting real incidents. The DA found that this breached the accused’s rights.
This led to 6 of the 216 reported cases in 2013 resulting in the accuser being investigated. I don not know how the conviction rate compares, but since the police presumably still has a very high threshold, I expect a higher rate for the false reports.
This thread seems to be showing that victim advocates who state that women who claim to have been raped aren’t taken seriously are simultaneously correct and incorrect.
If, as **dracoi **says, this SDMB poll is fairly representative of the general population, then not only are women who claim to have been raped, believed; they are believed by an *overwhelming *margin (over 90%). This would be the case with the casual TV viewer or newspaper reader, who has no personal ties to the case. But when it comes to an actual criminal case, when the accuser and accused are known, and context and personal relationships come into play, then that rate plummets dramatically and the accuser is much less believed.
I would believe the victim about 95% of the time, but in my own personal experience, I was not believed and gaslighted for it. It is for that reason I tend to believe victims when they make such claims, and it is also for that reason, if I were ever raped again, I would not bother reporting it. I am not putting myself through that shit again. I’d just go back to therapy and drink a lot. And yes, I’d be sorry about my rapist’s other future victims (after me), but I hit a brick wall on that one too. I once mentioned to a family member of my rapist (who was also a family member) that I was concerned for his teenaged daughter as well as any other family member who was anywhere near his orbit. I was told that what’s done is done and I should leave well enough alone and to just forget about it.
So I don’t believe the results of this poll. I bet if I started a new thread where I explained what happened to me in great detail, at least 75% of you would pick apart the story, disbelieve me, and discredit me for “trying to get attention.” Nevermind that nobody wants that sort of attention. I don’t believe that very many of you would support me if I made a claim, despite this 95% result at the top of this thread. Bullshit. When the rubber hits the road, people twist themselves in knots to disprove rape claims.
There is no accurate data, so just as we cannot say that false accusations are common, so we also cannot say that false accusations are rare.
Well, at least we both agree that most women are not going to make up a rape charge. For most of them, not even if you owe them money or cheat on them. There are outliers, of course, but I haven’t seen any studies that show they make up a sizable percentage of rape accusations.
As for extraordinary motive to commit rape… the statistics seem to show that a very low percentage of men actually commit rape, but they commit a pretty large number of rapes. Number vary between studies, but if we accept that 20-30% of women have been sexually assaulted, it’s likely that this was caused by only 1-5% of men.
So the odds are reasonably high that a woman will be raped/assaulted at least once in her life time. The odds of any particular man committing the offense are low, but the guilty ones need to be dealt with because they will probably not stop at a single offense.
Those are plenty of reasons for me to give the woman the benefit of the doubt while I look for more evidence to confirm or contradict my initial assumption.
This made me very sad to read. I just had to pipe up lamely to say “I would believe you.” 
But I do understand that a good number of people on these boards would pick apart every detail of your story, and find ways to “prove” that your perception of the event was inaccurate.
It’s also true that many women don’t want to go to court for a number of reasons, among which is that the defense lawyer asks tons and tons of questions about your sexual history, what you were wearing, we you concurrently involved with other men at the time, did you give him a reason to misconstrue your intentions, why did you go to the bedroom, were you drunk, do you drink often, how much do you drink typically…again and again. Specifically, it seems like the lawyer is trying to prove that you’re a slut who actually wanted this and you’re trying to get attention, plus you’re a total drunk as well.
It always pays to suspend judgement.
Read this.
Seems pretty clear-cut, right?
Possibly wrong. I heard tonight that the man had a legal gun license (a big thing over here), did in fact have authorisation to shoot on the course from the groundskeeper, the accusations of inappropriate comments come from someone with whom he has a personal conflict, and moves are in progress to reinstate him.
I don’t see that dracoi did say that respondents to this SDMB poll are fairly representative of the general population, and if s/he did then that seems very unlikely to be true. Even if the composition of the SDMB reflected the general population (and I’m pretty sure it does not), responses came from a self-selecting subgroup of the SDMB and the public nature of the poll may have influenced both participation and choice of answers.
If a woman claims she was raped, my inclination is to believe her. In regard to DNA exonerating men, those were cases of stranger rape where the wrong person was identified, but the woman was still raped. 5 teenagers went to prison for raping and beating nearly to death a woman in Central Park (the “Central Park Jogger” case; Google it). It turned out to be another person entirely, and the teens had had their confessions coerced (actually, one never did confess). That did not change the fact that a woman was raped and nearly killed, and in fact, if she had been found even ten minutes later, probably would be dead.
However, I am not dogmatic about “believing the victim.” My mind can be changed from my initial inclination. In fact, it has been a few times. But my initial inclination is to believe a woman who says she was raped.
This really needs to be stressed.
[QUOTE=Turpentine]
It’s also true that many women don’t want to go to court for a number of reasons, among which is that the defense lawyer asks tons and tons of questions about your sexual history, what you were wearing, we you concurrently involved with other men at the time, did you give him a reason to misconstrue your intentions, why did you go to the bedroom, were you drunk, do you drink often, how much do you drink typically…again and again. Specifically, it seems like the lawyer is trying to prove that you’re a slut who actually wanted this and you’re trying to get attention, plus you’re a total drunk as well.
[/QUOTE]
Err, which jurisdiction is this? Because asking most of those questions without good reason (in which in most case, frankly the complainant has bigger problems) is not permitted. Even when they are, asking questions like that is a very good way as a defense lawyer to get the jury or bench to dislike you, and it can easily bolster the prosecution story.
How much experience do you have in prosecuting or defending sex crime cases?
[QUOTE=RivkahChaya]
. In regard to DNA exonerating men, those were cases of stranger rape where the wrong person was identified, but the woman was still raped. 5 teenagers went to prison for raping and beating nearly to death a woman in Central Park (the “Central Park Jogger” case; Google it). It turned out to be another person entirely, and the teens had had their confessions coerced (actually, one never did confess). That did not change the fact that a woman was raped and nearly killed, and in fact, if she had been found even ten minutes later, probably would be dead.
[/QUOTE]
Well, “believe the victim” by necessity include “accused the right guy”. Which is not necessarily something that happens, even when the victim is being as forthright as possible.
In theRonald Cotton case the victim made specific efforts to remember the assailant. She picked him out of a lineup. She identified him in Court. In a second trial, when presented with the actual rapist, she said that no, the second man was not it, it was Cotton. It took 11 years from the second trial and conviction before DNA evidence showed that, no actually, it was the second guy all along. There is nothing to suggest that the Complainant was lying or that she did anything but honestly believe what she said.
In the case of the AussieDonald M Thompson
Or the fact that memories of sexual abuse have been shown to be false. Memories which implicated relatives and friends.
Criminal Justice has come a long way since the 1980’s. We now know a lot more about the pitfalls of traditional methods, of unflinching reliance on witness testimony and more recently about the dangers of forensics sans proper context. Knowledge which has come usually as a result of some horrendous miscarriage of justice.
Only in sex crimes cases does there seem to be a pushback. A determination to go forward to the past, out of some misguided sense of righting perceived wrongs. That is extremely dangerous for the accused and not good for victims either. In the cases I mentioned above, in many instances, the victim had in fact been the target of a heinous crime and slightly better policework might have led to justice being servd and policework would have been better (especially in the Ronald Cotton case) if the police had perhaps believed the victim less.
That. For a woman to admit that she was taken advantage of/put herself in a situation where this could happen is like going into the middle of a crowded city street in only her underwear. She opens herself up to all sorts of uncomfortable questions.
Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk
Wait, noone’s addressed this?
It’s rape. It’s not like she’s convinced she saw a unicorn and only needs to be shown that it was, in fact, a goat with a missing horn. It’s her body. She knows whether or not she wanted any sexual contact. I find this a bit horrific that you’d actually imply a woman just doesn’t understand what rape really is. Do we go up to victims of attempted murder and say "Hey, I know YOU think they tried to kill you but, let’s take a look and make sure. They might have just been trying to give you an extreme neck massage.’
Also…
Statistics show that three-quarters of women who are victims of sexual assault knew their attacker. Just because they’re in a relationship with someone does not mean that person is incapable of raping them.
I wonder if the poll deliberately avoids the answer ‘neither’ to force a choice, or the questioner thinks that people really either believe something or not and are seldom actually undecided. Not criticizing the question, more just wondering why the obvious answer to many people is not allowed (including me, if I don’t know any further facts or context then I can’t decide* in that particular case).
Also to me there’s some subtle difference between ‘more likely to be true/false’ and ‘I believe/disbelieve this particular person’. The race/crime issue and sex/crime issue have so many interesting contrasts played up, in my mind, by the slew of recent threads about the latter here. A young black male is statistically more likely to present a criminal threat to me than a member of most if not all other major groups, but there’s a justified concern about how to apply that fact to individuals, if nothing else for society’s own self interest in harmony rather than division. Likewise rape accusations across all contexts statistically speaking tend to be justified, but how does one apply that to believing particular individuals in an individual case with no evidence?
*and I’m not talking just about convicting somebody in a court of law, but even deciding which claim (did/didn’t) is more likely to be true in that specific case.
Per what others said the tendency is to believe (generally) what other people say but context is everything.
If it’s - I was attacked" stranger rape and the accuser was assaulted out of the blue my tendency to take at face value is about 100%.
If it’s - "My ex came over, we drank for a while and made out then he pulled off my clothes and raped me - My tendency to take the claim at face value is not 100% but it would be fairly high.
If it’s - “I was really drunk and woke up the next morning and realized we had had sex and I don’t really remember saying ‘yes’ so I was raped” - I’d need to hear the other side of the story before going all in on taking that at face value.
If it’s - "He was very intimidating. I was scared he would get crazy and violent if I said “no” so I quietly went along with it, but I didn’t want to. He should not have taken my silence for consent. I was raped. " - Regrettable but not really “rape” IMO if you are both adults -
If it’s - “We got naked and did a lot of self non-penetrative pleasuring, but then he got aggressive and put it in me without explicit permission and raped me” - I don’t know, it’s possible you were raped, but you’re kind of riding the tiger there .
All of those scenarios are rape.
Yeah…I didn’t put an “either/neither” option in the poll because people will typically overwhelmingly select “neither/it’s the same” when offered that as a poll option in any scenario involving binary choices. Because otherwise it would probably be something like, “10% Yes, 3% No, 87% Undecided/Neither.”
Why?