Interesting Links for 10-01-2013
- The Enliven Project's false rape accusations infographic: great intentions, but it isn't accurate.
(tags: rape statistics ) - Twitter Trend Reveals Transgender Discrimination from GPs
(tags: lgbt nhs uk ) - The Story of the PING Program
(tags: internet technology history ) - How to survive on 1.5kW.
(tags: energy electricity ) - Using the firefly ( Read more... )
So, they sent me down to talk to the sexual assault investigators for Rutgers Police and the New Brunswick Police (because there was a huge university there and because that creates a strong concentration of young women there was both the most actual rapes and the most false rape claims of any city reasonably nearby.)
It was interesting to see some of the guidelines they used.
One that they said was particularly effective was if the girl comes in pregnant with her dad to report the assault, which she claims happened several weeks before and the dad does most of the talking. This was a huge red flag for them. They'd find some excuse to get the dad out of the room and almost invariably as soon as dad was gone the girl would blurt out that it was bullshit.
Another was giving a very vague description of a black man. This was super common.
A third was checking their own records and seeing if the girl had a history of reporting vague crimes - muggings where she gave a bad ID of the mugger, purse snatching claims, etc... A lot of the women who came in with false accusations would build up to the rape one by reporting false minor crimes first.
Another interesting thing. At the time there was a girl on campus that the cops knew was raping other girls through the grapevine. But, it took them over a year to charge the girl because the victims absolutely didn't want to testify against a girl. They only eventually nabbed her because her fingernails put one girl in the hospital which gave them medical evidence to use against her.
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The report cites police estimates of incidence of false reporting as around 40%. It cites more methodologically rigorous estimates of the rate as varying from 2-8%. If these figures are correct then for every 40 rape accusations the police think are false, at least 32 of them are genuine rapes -- likely more.
I've no idea if the figures in the report are correct -- if they are that's pretty worrying. It gives a lot of pause for thought about what sort of things the police think are good ways to detect a false rape.
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When the police talk about false reporting at 40 percent they are talking about the types of examples I used above - where no specific person is implicated.
When they talk about the 2 to 8 percent of false accusations they are talking about situations where someone named an individual or gave enough of a description of an individual where the cops could identify the accused.
The cops I dealt with told me that in their experience 99 percent of the time if the woman could name an accuser it was an actual case of rape and that false accusations are very, very low.
But, false reporting of rape, in their experience was high.
It's apples and oranges.
One number represents "Oh, I got raped!" and the other represents "this guy raped me."
When a woman says "this guy raped me" the cops assume she's telling the truth and arrest the dude (at least that's what the cops I dealt with did.)
If it was just a random "Oh, I was raped" without any context, the cops would ask more questions and a fairly high amount of the time the story would make no sense and the woman would eventually admit she made it up (often after being pressured by dad to do so.)
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Both figures from the report cited are for accusations whether or not the victim names their attacker.
It's also worth noting that scepticism on the part of the police will often deter the accuser in such a situation but this doesn't imply a false accusation. To be honest, what you describe sounds pretty horrible to me.
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I don't think the cops I talked to ever gave me a solid number on the percentage of false reports they got (though, this was 15 years ago so I could just be misremebering.)
I should also note that I'm only representing two police agencies that I talked to - and that those agencies had a much higher incentive to catch rapists than most police departments (Rutgers is the main revenue source for New Brunswick and parents won't send their kids there if rapists are not caught and prosecuted quickly) so, I suspect they were much, much more vigilant than other communities may be. Because they know that rapists rarely only rape one victim, so they want to get them off the streets before they've done a dozen other women, because shit like that would ruin the university's reputation very, very quickly.
But, being in a student town also generates more false claims, because you have a higher number of young women per capita to begin with, and when you have more young women in general, you get both more real reports and more false reports. (Also, they told me that more often than not, they'd get 10 or more false reports from the same young woman in a given semester, which skews the number. Mental illness shit often manifests itself more obviously when someone is no longer living with mom and dad for the first time.)
False reports would often flood in after an actual rapist was arrested according to them. As well as in the week before midterms and finals.
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False reports would often flood in after an actual rapist was arrested according to them.
Isn't this classic confirmatory bias? This effect could be:
a) Rape is on people's mind and hence more false complaints happen.
b) Rape victims suddenly believe there is a change of an arrest after all hence more true complaints.
c) A mix of both.
If the police treat it as only a they will again get a false confirmation because people in b are those reluctant to bring a case in the first place. Those are the people more likely to withdraw their complaint if questioned sceptically.
In the UK I think the experience was that moving to questioning victims in a more sympathetic environment increased the conviction rate because the already traumatised victim wasn't further put off by police disbelief.
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What Rutgers and the New Brunswick cops did was move their sexual assault units out of the police department itself - because that was a really scary place - and set up their own comfortable unit that seemed more like a business office than a police station.
They also found that having the majority of investigators in the unit be younger, female officers helped a good deal as well. Because, in the real world, an 18 year old girl would rather talk about rape with a 25 year old woman than with a 50 year old dude.
They had a pretty high arrest and conviction count because when they got a decent description the person was generally on their radar already - because, in general, it would be someone who they got an annoymous tip about being a sketchy dude and, even more often, they'd busted the dude on minor shit before (jerking off in public/flashing/peeping tom type stuff.)
And, because stranger rape is incredibly rare, more often then not they were told who the dude was in the initial report and it was just a matter of getting him to confess before he asked for a lawyer and/or physical evidence. (The number of male student rapists too dumb to use a condom was astounding.)
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