Links: False rape accusations, misogynist Men’s Rightsers, and internet pervs

Small correction: I was imprecise. If there were actually 4 times as many false rape reports, as there were reports for any other crime, it’d actually be a specific and major problem.

But Rape is one of the least reported major crimes, and even with a false report rape that is generously 4 times that of the other crimes, the odds are *still* higher that a false charge of something else would be placed on you (And for a number of other crimes, that false charge is *MUCH EASIER* to stick on you, and get not just to trial but to conviction). Combine that with Rape’s underreporting, and it’s just.. not as big a deal. The only reason the false report statistics are whoamg out of balance looks like, unsurprisingly, the low reporting rape of actual rape.

qwert: You are making a leap, which is to say that false rape is easier to charge, ergo it’s more likely.

Murder is, in some ways, easier to make a false charge of, because, unlike rape, the victim is dead. Unless someone saw the act committed, all that it takes to be accused is to not have an explanation the police like when the ask you about the crime.

I comment the book, “Mean Justice” for examples of just how this happens to people.

Rape requires, for a false accusation; of the sort the FRA and accuse women of committing, that someone have cause to identify someone as their rapist.

I’m not worried about being accused of raping someone, I’m saying that it is more likely that I will be accused of raping someone than I’ll be accused of murdering someone. I don’t see how this is an absurd thing to think.

Well, it’s true that rape is a more common crime than murder, and if we say that 6 percent of rape reports are knowingly false (thus putting at several hundred times the rate of false accusations of murder) the absolute likelihood of you being accused is higher, but it’s very rare for false accusations of crimes to be of random people, so unless you are in the habit of doing things which make enemies of people willing to frame others as form of revenge, I’d not worry much.

Also, for other crimes innocent people are convicted of… rape has a 50 percent conviction rate, more or less.

Drug charges have a 90 percent conviction rate. Barring Violent Rape, the sentences are lot worse for drug cases,and the DA routinely overcharges, so as to be able to plea-bargain down to something the accused will take, as a better deal than the risk of conviction.

It’s not that hard to plead a non-violent rape case down to something much less severe; if one isn’t willing to take a 50:50 gamble. In non-violent rape, I’ll wager(though I don’t know) the odds are actually better than 50:50, because of what the defense is allowed to do.

Not so in a drug/assault/murder case. The police, who are well regarded by juries; to start with, are trained in how to testify, and they are good at it. They know how to tell shaded truths, even if they don’t decide to pad the testimony to see the “dirtbag” gets convicted. An appalling number of jurors think the defendant has to prove innocence, in a run of the mill crime, but that the accuser has to prove rape.

So the risks, even if one is falsely accused, are much higher for non-rapes.

@ cynickal

“If I’ve had sex with 100 different women, then there are, at least, 100 different women who could falsely claim that I had raped them.”

This statement is completely true and I don’t understand your problem with it. This whole aspect of the discussion came about because you said that “MRA’s and their allies focus on “False Rape Reports”, which statically aren’t any more frequent than false murder reports or false theft reports.” Which I don’t believe is a correct or accurate statement. If you’d care to provide some reasonable evidence to support this claim then I’ll have no problem in agreeing with you. But, as you haven’t done so, I can only assume that you haven’t the evidence. So I’ll stick with my belief that you made it up.

“Because you spend large amounts of time and energy defending accused rapists rather than acknowledging that 40 to 50% of rapes aren’t ever reported.”

Firstly I completely accept that the vast majority of rapes are unreported (I thought the figure was more like 90% and am pleased to hear that this is not the case). Secondly I’m not defending all accused rapists. I’m saying that we shouldn’t say all the accusations are true any more than we should say that they are all false. Because we all know that false accusations are made just as we all know that people are raped.

@ Rutee

“But yo’ure even more likely to not only be accused of false Possession, Assault, or Robbery charges, but to have those charges send you to jail DESPITE BEING FALSE (Particularly for Possession, because engineering it to make you guilty is almost trivial, due to the exceptionally low standards for that)”

I don’t have a problem in believing this either. If you read what I have written the issue I have is in believing that I’m equally likely to be falsely accused of murder as I am of rape, I think that this is a ludicrous idea, and without evidence to support it then I don’t see why I should be expected to change my mind. I’m probably far more likely to be killed in a road traffic accident than be falsely accused of rape and yet I still drive, so I don’t believe I’m speaking out of fear of being accused.

“What you just said has the net effect of making it easier for rapists to not be reported or convicted. That is apologia.”

Rutee I really do take exception to this. I fucking hate rapists: fucking hate them. But I also fucking hate people who falsely accuse people of raping them. If you want to blame people for the underreporting of rape, then blame the people who are making the false accusations, not people like me who are merely pointing out that these people are making such accusations. The more false accusations that are made then the less rape convictions there will be (as false accusations are difficult to prove) and this will be reflected in statistics. Lower conviction rates mean less victims coming forward. If we all act as Holly suggests and support all accusations false or otherwise, regardless of circumstances, then the more likely false accusations are to be made. Therefore, in my view, worsening the situation for the real victims of rape as well as the innocent people who have false accusations made against them.

@ mythago

Do you have anything of worth or interest to say?

@ Pecunium

“ which is to say that false rape is easier to charge, ergo it’s more likely.”

I wasn’t trying to suggest that false rape is easier to charge, merely to make an accusation about. I’ll try to explain.

I can’t as easily say “You killed my best friend” as I can say “You raped my best friend”. To make the first accusation my best friend would have to be either dead or missing. To make the second they would only need to be alive. This is what I was getting at, although, I’ll admit, I didn’t make it very clear before. I was talking about being able to make a false, yet seemingly credible, accusation and that is far easier to do in the second example. I could, hypothetically, make a new false rape accusation every single day of my life, and they all would have to be investigated, suspects interviewed etc etc. But if I tried this with accusations of murder, then not one single suspect would be interviewed because there would be no dead bodies or missing persons. This is why I find cynickal’s claim farfetched; it makes no sense that it would be the case.

@ Jenn93

I agree also that “Character is not an accurate indication of guilt.”. But were not talking about judicial proceedings here, were talking about if we trust and believe in our best friends and family or not. Once a case gets to court then the whole process obviously becomes more complex and other things are taken into account. But I can’t honestly believe that anyone here, when given no genuine reason to doubt the word of their friend or family member is going to say to them “Sorry mate. Even though I’ve known you all my life and you’re a kind, gentle and caring husband, father, brother and friend. And you’ve never shown anything but the highest level of character a man could display. I’m afraid that the odds of you being innocent are X% so sadly I must suspect you to be guilty. You’re on your own. Tough shit!”

@ Pecunium

I don’t think that we can discuss the false murder accusations versus false rape accusations any further because neither of us have any real numbers that we can talk about. So, I fear, it is a waste of time. I’m still waiting on cynickal’s statistics, but I doubt that they are going to be forthcoming.

“Let me get this straight: The majority (vast, overwhelming, absolute: choose your modifying adjective of choice) are true. Right? I mean we are accepting that, even if there is a treble rate of false rape vs. false anything else, more than 90 percent of the people who say they were raped, were raped. So what makes you say we need to treat rape as some special case, where we don’t assume the complaint is valid? Really. If 90:10 is the ratio, the default assumption is that this claim (whatever the claim is) is true.”

I don’t think that your conclusion, or grasp of statistics, is correct. If only 10% of actual rapes are reported then this means nothing with regard to the percentage of false rape accusations. It only means that 10% of genuine rapes are reported. The 90% who don’t report their rapes are, sadly, not included in the statistics, because they don’t exist within the figures. We don’t know how many of the reported rapes are genuine form this figure alone.

For instance, if only 10% of genuine rapes were reported then even if it was ten times more likely that a rape occur than a false accusation there would still be a 50% rate of false accusations being made.

To put this in numbers: 100 genuine rapes. 10 genuine rapes reported. 20 rapes reported (10 genuine and 10 false). = 50% of rape reports are false. If it were the case that it were 100 times more likely that a rape occurred than a false accusation be made, we would have: 100 genuine rapes. 10 genuine rapes reported. 10.5 rapes reported (10 genuine 0.5 false) = 5% false reports.

Again, none of us have the exact figures here, because the figures themselves, as far as I am aware, do not exist.

“I’d say, from your arguments, you hate one group more than the other, and the way you are defending the other group, is providing cover for the one most likely to be guilty.”

I’d agree with you, if the statistical evidence was there to support it, but it isn’t. The fact is that neither of us knows how many false accusations are made or how many people are genuinely being raped. This is the whole crux of my argument here: that we can’t say, to any degree of certainty, how likely it is that someone is raped than a false accusation being made.

“I admitted that one needs a body. What I also said is that, with the existence of a dead body, the odds of an non-guilty person being charged are much higher than with rape.”

I agree with this statement completely.

“Define, “on your own, tough shit!”. Because I did explain just how it is that I have persistent doubts that someone I love did something that, were it to be shown that he was guilty, I think he ought to go to prison for. If the charges I don’t believe (they are possible, but fall outside the realm of believable; not so much for the charge, but for the evidence) were to prove true, I’d want him to go to prison for decades.”

Pecunium I’m sorry if you thought that I was referring to you personally and to what you said earlier about your friend. I wasn’t aiming this at you, personally. I didn’t mean any disrespect here. I was just trying to put into words something that would, though logical, be an almost impossible thing to say to a friend in the circumstances.

@ Rutee

“I don’t give a fuck about that.”

Fair enough, though, you brought it up.

“And yet, you choose to whine to feminists about false rape accusations first and foremost. If you gave a fuck about reality your first response would have been telling the idiots in the OP that, as a matter of fact, false accusations of drug crimes are more likely in an absolute sense, and more damaging by the sheer ease of sticking a conviction.”

I’m not whining to anybody. Seriously Rutee, I’m trying to have a discussion about the issue, because, I’m not wholly convinced that the information I’ve been receiving on the subject is entirely correct. I don’t claim to be a fucking expert on the matter so cut me some slack, eh?

“the idiots in the OP that, as a matter of fact, false accusations of drug crimes are more likely in an absolute sense “ You mean Holly Pervocracy and Ozymandias, right?

“Roughly 40% of rapes are reported; potentially drastically less. If we accept that 8% of the current reported rapes are false, and only 40% are actually reported, than the actual false report rate is only about 3.33%. “

But this is the point. It’s all fucking pie in the sky figures we’re talking about. And I’m honestly and sincerely sorry if these figures you quote are correct. I’d appreciate it if you could point me in the direction of some accredited statistics concerning false rape accusations.

“And yet, you spend far more time whining about the people who exist in substantially smaller numbers. And I’m supposed to believe you. “

Again, Rutee, a concern for my fellow men and women is not, in my view, to be considered as whining. If you’ve read what I’ve written earlier than you might get to understand that I’m more concerned with the notion of justice than simply going with the majority view.

“The more false accusations that are made then the less rape convictions there will be (as false accusations are difficult to prove) and this will be reflected in statistics “

Do you honestly think the above statement to be false?

“On what basis do you make this claim? “
It’s the very same logic that Holly used in her piece. That victims are less likely to come forward if they are less likely to be believed. And the more false accusations are made, the lesser the percentage of successful convictions there will be, ergo, the less likely an accuser is to be believed. Pretty straightforward stuff, I think.

“You do realize that eyewitness testimony is still one of the most ‘trustworthy’ sources of information to a juror, right? “

I’m not sure that “eyewitness testimony” is really relevant in cases of rape, wherein, there are only two “witnesses” involved i.e. the accused and the accuser.

You know, Qwert, I was down with your whole “I am just figuring out how to think about stuff” thing a while back. But the more you noodle around inside your own opinions while ignoring what knowledgeable people say about this stuff, the less I think you’re completely sincere.

@ VoiP

I understand yours, and others, concerns about me. But try to understand from my view point, you are all just strangers on the ManBoobz blog to me. I’m not going to take anyone’s word for anything without sufficient evidence to support their claims. I might sometimes come across as a floundering idiot, but this is because a lot of these subjects are very new to me, and a lot of what I am presenting in arguments is information that I want to test out against people with conflicting opinions to mine. However, if what I’m saying is nonsense, then it would be easy for more “knowledgeable people” to convince me that I’m incorrect in my assumptions. Yet, they haven’t been able to do so in this instance, so I conclude that I must be on to something.

qwert: I understand yours, and others, concerns about me. But try to understand from my view point, you are all just strangers on the ManBoobz blog to me. I’m not going to take anyone’s word for anything without sufficient evidence to support their claims.

I wanted to go back to this.

What support, other than some vague (and not very well supported) philosophical musings on the questions of loyalty, and doubt/proof, have you offered?

For example, what support for your contention that giving more doubt/less credence to the victim who reports rape will lead to a lesser rate of false accusation?

Eyewitness identification (which is the largely problematic area) is not really an issue where the parties know each other, like most rape cases. Misidentification of the perp (the most common issue with false convictions) is most common in cases of interracial stranger rape. Which, frankly, is not an incredibly common type of rape, especially not up the racial heirarchy (by this I mean that white people raping people of color is far more frequent by all accounts, incredibly frequent in some situations, but the reverse is extremely rare).

But even those cases, the issue is not that the victim wasn’t raped, the victim generally was raped, they just mistook a person with some similarities in features with the actual rapist.

qwert: You dislike my numbers. Fine. But those numbers were illustrative of your assumptions.

You haven’t been saying, “we can’t know the numbers of false rape reports”. You have been saying false rape reports are greater problem than any other falsely reported crime.

If you are willing to retract that, fine. But so long as you maintain it, you are responsible to defend it.

What do I think the conviction rate is for rape?

Per the FBI, in 2008 the arrest rate for rape complainets was 25 percent.

That means the highest possible rate of conviction for actual rape complaints, in the US is 25 percent.

Now, explain to me, in simple words, because the idea seems strange, what my comment (based on a generous rounding up, to make the hypothetical numbers easier to manipulate; so as to address the issues you raised) what my opinion of the conviction rate, has to do with the rate of malicious/false complaint.

@ Pecunium

It’s not that “I dislike” your numbers. It’s that I don’t know where you have gotten them from. The figures that I was using I’d read somewhere that I now can’t remember where. I don’t believe them to be accurate. But, for all I know, you’ve just made yours up off the top of your head.

“You have been saying false rape reports are greater problem than any other falsely reported crime.”

No, I haven’t been saying this at all. What I’ve been saying is that I think more false rape accusations are made than false MURDER accusations. I haven’t said any more than that, as far as I can recall. If you’d care to point out where I’ve said such things, I’d much appreciate it.

“Per the FBI, in 2008 the arrest rate for rape complainets was 25 percent.

That means the highest possible rate of conviction for actual rape complaints, in the US is 25 percent.”

I’m not used to dealing with these terms, but, from the above I would say that the arrest rate for rape accusations is 25%. I don’t get how this then becomes a maximum of 25% rape convictions. You can’t convict someone who hasn’t been charged. I’d say the maximum conviction rate possible is 100% (of those charged). That’s how you would determine the conviction rate, by comparing the number of guilty verdicts with the number of cases where charges (not arrests) were made. Don’t you agree?

“That means the highest possible rate of conviction for actual rape complaints, in the US is 25 percent”

I think that this is a meaningless statement when considering the conviction rates for rape.

What happened to the missing 75%, the complaints that don’t result in arrests? These must surely include a significant number of false accusations that the police determine as such. If we use your figures then 90% of these 75% of accusations are genuine rapes that do not result in arrests. Is this what you believe?

The reason I asked you what the conviction rate was, was to compare it to your figure of 10% false accusations being made. To see how many genuine rapists you believe are getting away with rapes that they have committed.

When we go all the way back to the origins of the discussion (Holly’s blog post) we can see that we are talking about rape allegations / accusations. We are not talking about arrests, convictions, charges etc etc etc. An accusation doesn’t have to result in an arrest or conviction for it to be an accusation. It doesn’t even have to be made to the police. From personal experience I know of four women who have made, and later admitted to making, false rape accusations (one woman made, at least that I know of, two separate accusations). Four of these accusations were made to the police, all charges were dropped by the women who made them. Three were made as cover for adultery, one was made post divorce as revenge against her husband. One was made against a very close friend of mine, not to the police but to friends and acquaintances, in order to cover up a violent assault that she had perpetrated against my friend. As you can see, not all false rape accusations result in arrests and not all of them will appear in your statistics. But this doesn’t mean that they don’t exist, it merely means that we don’t know how many of them are being made. And that’s why I think your 10% figure is wholly inaccurate.

@ Simon

“qwert, just because the rate of allegations, that are classified as ‘unfounded’, is four times higher for rape than for other crimes, it doesn’t mean that false rape reports are a greater problem!”

You are right, it doesn’t mean that this IS the case. But it STRONGLY suggests to me that it might well be the case. How can you determine that these ‘unfounded’ accusations are not, in fact, false?

You are right, it doesn’t mean that this IS the case. But it STRONGLY suggests to me that it might well be the case. How can you determine that these ‘unfounded’ accusations are not, in fact, false?

Well, one thing I’d look at is the attitude about rape that police, judges, and juries have in the U.S. Having sat in on a number of police interviews, and read a lot of civil and criminal trial transcripts from rape cases, I can tell you: It stinks. It’s not like all police officers and judges are awful and skeptical toward victims (but a lot of them are), and it’s not like rapists never get convicted, but there’s a really long way to go before the legal system (and society in general) will be able to grasp the idea that just because someone is homeless, a sex worker, an addict, disabled, sexually active, LGBTQ, a little bit “wild,” or drunk, doesn’t mean that it’s OK they were raped. (And: that just because someone is successful, good-looking, and has access to consensual sex, doesn’t mean they didn’t rape this person who says they did.)

The bottom line is, people are very undereducated about rape, and it shows in how rape in handled by our legal system. Juries want to see bruising, tearing, and other injuries. They want to see a clearly “good girl” who was raped by a clearly “bad man.” Anything else is difficult to try.