Women tell the truth: the evidence 3

[kateorman]

• "The Portland Oregon police reported in 1990 that of the 431 rape and attempted rape complaints received, 1.6% were determined to be false compared with 2.6% of stolen vehicle reports that were false. A 1989 comparative analysis of data on false rape allegations reported a rate of 2%." (Schafran, Lynn Hecht. Writing and Reading About Rape: A

Comments

[vindaloo_vixen]

Does it say how small the small metropolitan community is? If it's small enough, then pretty much any statistic could be thrown out of whack.

While I don't doubt that such a thing as false rape reporting does happen, I doubt it happens nearly so much as its reputed to. (I don't know of any concrete examples of it happening, but with over six billion people on the planet, I doubt that no-one's ever done it.) I've also heard, just in casual experience, people express all kinds of beliefs about it, as well as all kinds of origins for those beliefs.

I think part of that goes back to what you said about people not knowing what constitutes sexual assault (which is its own two-edged sword, of course), which enables all kinds of myths to spring up about something that while clearly terrible, does not get talked about, or at least not in the way it should.

[kateorman]

70,000, which I should have mentioned! *editing noises*

Kanin was interested in the liar's *motives*, rather than the incidence, and he warns that the 41% figure can't be generalised to the whole country. (For a study of *why* women are making false reports, a very high false reporting rate is obviously helpful, giving the researcher more material to work with.)

[neotoma]

Instead, I think the community had either an exceptionally low rape rate, or - more likely - an exceptionally low *reporting* rate.

Or a corrupt law enforcement system, which is my first guess. Maybe not criminally corrupt, but one of the local counties here was revealed to be dicking around with rape reports last year, in the belief that "most of these are substantiated, so why bother". It was a community scandal, and the police got their hands slapped *hard* over it.

[jblum]

...Which county was that?

[neotoma]

Montgomery County... and as it turns out it was longer ago that I thought -- three years ago. I do remember being pissed as heck about it, because this is generally a good place to live; to find out that the local police would be that unhelpful should I ever need to report a rape was quite a shock.

Basically, the police were pressuring women who came in with rape complaints to sign releases that basically allowed the police to stop investigating.

“A Question of Rape,” by Agnes Blum, February 11, 2004 The Gazette, February 11, 2004

[kateorman]

According to Kanin's article, the police were very careful about handling rape reports - for example, they labelled all reports as "rape" (rather than some other category) and only counted them as false if the alleged victim recanted. It's not impossible, however, that that's just what the police told Kanin!

[jenavira]

The question I always have about those stats is -- what's a false report? Is it one where it could be proved the woman was lying, or just one without a conviction, or even an arrest? Given the motivations people have for skewing the rape-reporting rate, I would not be surprised to find that reported rapes without arrests got marked down as "false reports," which is obviously not the case.

(I know you said you were going to touch on this later, and yay, but statistics always make me ask annoying questions. :D )

[kateorman]

You're absolutely right, as those examples from Oklahoma and Philadelphia show - police categorising rapes as lies or non-crimes to make their own statistics look better.

*friends*

[big_n_happy]

I'm a nos-friend who rather liked Return of the Living Dad and found these posts interesting, don't mind if you don't friend back (I never post.)

Re: *friends*

[kateorman]

Howdy!

I'm coming to look at your YouTube goodies. :-)

Re: *friends*

[big_n_happy]

Thoughts?

Re: *friends*

[kateorman]

I confess I'm not the biggest watcher of fanvids. But I'm fascinated by how people *make* them. How do you *do* it?

[strangedave]

A lot of these stats seem very dubious.

For example, 1.6% seems very low if it implies a 98.4% conviction rate -- so what is the percentage of cases in which the courts/police neither found the rape allegation to be true or false, but did not find it convincing enough for conviction beyond reasonable doubt? It seems to me that there must be quite a few cases in this category - defendant found not guilty, but no explicit judgement about the case made.

I'm very uncomfortable with the idea that the court/system is ruling on the truth of accusation, rather than the ability to prove guilt of the defendent - its just not what the courts do, so any stat will be an interpretation, and probably a dubious one.

[kateorman]

if it implies a 98.4% conviction rate

It doesn't; the statistic is about reports to the police, not court cases.

[strangedave]

Sure, but the essential point is how do you get a 'false accusation' rate out of a system that is not designed to discover the truth or falseness of accusations directly. You only discover a rate of 'accusations known to be false', which is only a rough lower bound on total number of false accusations (there is no way to tell if a rape accusation that was taken to court, and then the defendent was found not guilty, represents a false accusation or a true accusation that could not be proven to be true beyond reasonable doubt).

Of course, the same could be said of any criminal act - but that doesn't mean you simply assume stats from other crimes will apply.

In short, I think the likelihood of reliable stats is low, and conclusions drawn from them unlikely to prove much either way.

[kateorman]

I take your point, but here the context becomes important - police and court assumptions that alleged rape victims are likely to be lying; the high attrition rate of rape cases as they pass through the legal system, with the resultingly low rate of convictions; the resulting reluctance of genuine victims to come forward.

The point is not to establish a cast-iron figure for how many reports are false, but to point out that the police and legal system have no evidence on which to base the assumption that women lie about rape.

That said, it's possible that false allegations are picked up further along in the legal process - I should try to find out if there's any research on this.