Women Tell The Truth: the evidence 4

[kateorman]

Although it's a common belief that women frequently falsely report rape, there is no evidence that this is the case, and some evidence that women do not often make false reports. In 2007 I made a series of postings in which I outlined some of the research. I'd like to follow those up now with some more facts and figures specifically about false

Comments

[jvowles]

With a number of high-profile cases in the last few years where accusers have recanted their accusations when faced with evidence, or when put to a lie detector test, clearly there *are* false accusations. But if I follow you, you're not saying they don't happen; you're just questioning their frequency, right?

The distinction between "false" and "unfounded or unsubstantiated" confuses me. They amount to the same thing to the accused, and basically amount to a ruined reputation.

Is it that "false" means that there is evidence the woman lied, versus "unfounded" means there is no evidence a rape occurred? It strikes me that either way, the accusation is invalid legally, but it still exists as a stain on the man's reputation -- hence the fear.

People *do* lie about serious things, and both men and women tend to lie pretty often about sex-related stuff for all sorts of reasons, not all of them nefarious.

[kateorman]

As Raphael points out, trying to get a clear picture of the actual proportion of false reports is very difficult, precisely because the terminology is inconsistent or confusing. Here "false" means a police investigation found that the rape did not take place; "unsubstantiated" means their investigation was unable to prove that it took place; "unfounded" means that either the report was false, or that the report was genuine, but what took place did not meet the legal definition of rape. People tend to use these terms interchangeably, which inflates the number of "false" reports. (In many cases, terms like "unfounded" or "no crime" are used as an administrative catch-all, further confusing the picture and inflating that number

[jvowles]

Okay, just hammering out these things

[kateorman]

Since there's no evidence that false reporting plays a significant role, so there's reason for police (or anyone else) to act as if it does.

Knowing that false reports are rare should be reassuring to men worried about their reputations. Further reassurance: although any false report is harmful and dangerous, not all false reports are malicious allegations against a specific man.

Men worried about false reports should insist that all rape reports be properly investigated by the police, so that liars will be caught!

Raphael's article touches on a lot of these points - it's well worth a read.

[jvowles]

I did give it a quick read through (once it finally downloaded -- for some reason I had trouble getting it to open the first time) but much of it seemed to be referring to other things that, sadly, I don't have the patience to look up right now.

I'm with you on insisting that all rape reports be properly investigated -- but we need to be careful that in our urge to be thorough, we don't inadvertently create a second tier of victims.

[kateorman]

Judging from the info at the Innocence Project, police bungling is a much greater danger to innocent men than the tiny chance of being wrongly charged with rape.