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How Many Rape Reports Are False?

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By Megan McArdle
How many women falsely accuse men of rape?

A lot of statistics are floating around the Internet: Two 
percent, say many feminists, the same as other crimes. Twenty-
five percent, say other groups who quarrel with the feminists on 
many issues, or maybe 40 percent. Here's the real answer: We 
don't know. Anyone who insists that we do know should be 
corrected or ignored.

The number of false accusations is what statisticians call a 
"dark number" -- that is, there is a true number, but it is 
unknown, and perhaps unknowable. For a deep dive into the 
reasons it's so hard to know, I commend you to Cathy Young's new 
piece at Slate, in which she details all the problems that 
confound investigations into false rape accusations.

Here's what we do know: The 2 percent number is very bad and 
should never be cited. It apparently traces its lineage back to 
Susan Brownmiller's legendary "Against Our Will," and her 
citation for this figure is a single speech by an appellate 
judge before a small group of lawyers. His source for this 
statistic was a single area of New York that started having 
policewomen conduct all rape interviews. This is not data. It is 
an anecdote about an anecdote.

The 41 percent number beloved of men's-rights activists is 
better; it involves a peer-reviewed study by Eugene Kanin of a 
police department in some unknown small city. False reports 
could only be declared if the victim herself withdrew the 
charge. However. We're talking about one city, in which 109 
rapes were examined over a period of nine years. As feminists 
point out, victims might have withdrawn the charges simply 
because they found it too traumatic to engage with the police 
department, not because the accusation was false . And the study 
itself is now pretty elderly. A lot has changed in 20 years, 
including, possibly, the number of false rape accusations in 
this city and the rest of the nation. This number should be used 
only with grave caution.

But so should any other numbers, such as the 8 percent figure 
that is commonly attributed to the FBI. When you dig into the 
research itself, you find it is often heavily inflected with the 
authors' prior beliefs about what constitutes the "real 
problem": unreported cases of rape or false reports? So Kanin is 
frequently chided for accepting the results of a police 
department investigation that included offering the victims a 
polygraph, because this is intimidating for true victims as well 
as women making false reports, and it could raise the incidence 
of false negatives. On the other hand, if the rate of false rape 
reports is quite high -- much higher than that of other crimes --
 then this might be a reasonable precaution. It's possible that 
by encouraging police departments not to polygraph rape victims, 
we have fixed a cruel system in which innocent victims are 
bullied into recanting. It's also possible that we've increased 
the number of false accusations that proceed to investigation 
and conviction.

Shorter: You cannot treat "percentage of reports that were found 
to be false by investigators" as "percentage of reports that 
were actually false." Some women may simply have recanted to 
disengage from the system. Some police officers may decide a 
case was false when it wasn't. On the other hand, we also know 
that false accusations can make their way through the system 
pretty far -- witness the Duke lacrosse players and Brian Banks.

What we know is that we don't know. We should not presume that 
every rape victim is telling the truth because it would make it 
easier for victims to come forward. Nor should we presume that 
every rape accusation has a 50 percent chance of being false. We 
should look at the facts in each case and judge them with the 
knowledge that some women do lie about rape -- for revenge, to 
cover up some problem in their own lives, to get attention and 
sympathy from others. And also with the knowledge that men lie, 
too, violating their victims a second time in order to cover up 
their crimes. And that while men have gone to jail for rapes 
they did not commit, many other men have avoided the jail time 
they deserved for terrible crimes against women.

That's not a very satisfying answer, because rape is inherently 
a hard crime to prosecute. If someone comes into a police 
station with their face bashed in, you can be pretty much 
certain that unless they're a professional boxer, a crime has 
occurred. If a rape kit shows evidence of sexual intercourse, 
however, all that tells you is that ... something happened. 
Because this is something that a lot of people do to each other 
voluntarily, you cannot proceed immediately to the arrest. 
Usually there are only two witnesses, telling different stories. 
Often drugs or alcohol were involved, and intoxicated people 
make lousy witnesses.

We don't want that to be true. Rape is an especially heinous 
crime, and heinously unfair -- it is mostly something that 
stronger men do to weaker women. How can we pile on an extra 
dose of unfairness -- by failing to prosecute so many of the 
crimes?

Feminists would like to rectify that unfairness by treating rape 
accusations as presumptively true, making it easier for victims 
to come forward. That's understandable. But there's a risk that 
this makes it easier for false accusations to get through the 
system, resulting in destroyed lives for men such as Brian 
Banks. Men's-rights activists would like to make it harder for 
innocent men to get caught in a web of lies, so they want rape 
accusations to be interrogated with deep suspicion. But treating 
rape victims as possible or likely liars may make it harder for 
them to go forward, leaving rapists free to stalk their next 
victim.

No one wants to openly advocate for a hard choice that will end 
in injustice for someone. So instead we get the war of bad 
statistics, with each side claiming certainty when all we really 
have are dark crimes and dark numbers.

Though to be fair, Kalin, the author of the study, goes into 
some detail about the nature of the recantations, and they're 
both pretty specific and pretty plausible -- i.e., "my husband 
is overseas and I'm afraid I'm pregnant." They mostly occurred a 
couple of days after the report, not after extended contact with 
"the system."

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of 
Bloomberg View's editorial board or Bloomberg LP, its owners and 
investors.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-19/how-many-rape-
reports-are-false

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How Many Rape Reports Are False? "Bill Tucker" <btucker@outlook.com> - 2016-02-29 05:03 +0100
  Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? Jeanne Douglas <hlwdjsd2@NOSPAMgmail.com> - 2016-02-28 21:45 -0800
    Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? & <ampersand.the.great@gmail.com> - 2016-02-29 13:35 -0500
  Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? Malcolm McMahon <malcolm.mc74@googlemail.com> - 2016-03-01 08:28 -0800
    Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? "Alex W." <ingilt@yahoo.co.uk> - 2016-03-01 16:46 +0000
      Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? Jeanne Douglas <hlwdjsd2@NOSPAMgmail.com> - 2016-03-01 16:38 -0800
        Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? Malcolm McMahon <malcolm@theriomorph.me.uk> - 2016-03-02 13:52 +0000
          Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? "Let Cos. Be - No Justice For Sluts" <opuzayo@gmail.com> - 2016-03-02 12:43 -0800
            Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? Hope Simmers <Hope_Simmers@hotmail.com> - 2016-03-02 13:35 -0800
            Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? Olrik <olrik666@gmail.com> - 2016-03-03 00:05 -0500
              Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? Jeanne Douglas <hlwdjsd2@NOSPAMgmail.com> - 2016-03-02 21:53 -0800
          Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? Jeanne Douglas <hlwdjsd2@NOSPAMgmail.com> - 2016-03-02 16:32 -0800
            Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? "Alex W." <ingilt@yahoo.co.uk> - 2016-03-03 10:25 +0000
              Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? Malcolm McMahon <malcolm.mc74@googlemail.com> - 2016-03-03 02:41 -0800
                Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? "Alex W." <ingilt@yahoo.co.uk> - 2016-03-03 18:40 +0000
                Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? Malcolm McMahon <malcolm.mc74@googlemail.com> - 2016-03-04 03:14 -0800
              Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? Jeanne Douglas <hlwdjsd2@NOSPAMgmail.com> - 2016-03-03 14:05 -0800
                Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? "Alex W." <ingilt@yahoo.co.uk> - 2016-03-04 16:00 +0000
  Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? Jefferson Was A Slave Molester <kolwezzi@astromail.com> - 2016-03-01 08:39 -0800
    Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? Olrik <olrik666@gmail.com> - 2016-03-01 23:41 -0500
      Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? Jeanne Douglas <hlwdjsd2@NOSPAMgmail.com> - 2016-03-02 01:40 -0800
        Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? "james g. keegan jr." <jgkeegan@gmaîl.com> - 2016-03-02 10:20 -0800
        Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? "Let Cos. Be - No Justice For Sluts" <opuzayo@gmail.com> - 2016-03-02 12:38 -0800
          Re: How Many Rape Reports Are False? Hope Simmers <Hope_Simmers@hotmail.com> - 2016-03-02 13:32 -0800

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