I don't really have much interest in arguing about stuff on this sub, but I am interested in statistics. One sort of infamous area of misleading presentation of statistics is rape statistics, and as there's a lot of conflicting information about this, I thought I'd talk a bit about one major study on rape reporting and conviction rates, and how data can be presented in a very misleading way when great uncertainty exists.

For the record, /u/Interversity asked me to make this post.

The Making a Difference project was run by End Violence Against Women International, a major anti-rape and anti-women’s violence organization which is pretty widely respected by the anti-rape advocacy community.

Part of the project involved a study on how police reports of rape were handled and dealt with. They trained police in several cities to record data on the clearance of rape reports, categorizing them into several categories according to the eventual consequences of the rape report.

The data can be found in one of their powerpoint presentations, seen here: http://www.evawintl.org/images/uploads/BasicDataFindings_12-07-09.pdf

The data here is quite interesting, and has been used by numerous anti-rape organizations. Indeed, some groups have gone so far as to call it the ONLY such study. This is not true – there have been numerous other studies – but it is a very interesting and informative case.

It is frequently claimed that only 2-8% of rapes reported to police are false. This is both true and false, and the fact that I said that suggests that this is actually a deeply misleading statistic. And it really is. If you look at the Wikipedia article about false reports of rape, you find wildly varying statistics, ranging from as low as 1.5% to as high as 90% in various scientific studies on the matter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape

And indeed, if you look at the studies, they really are all over the place; there’s very little agreement.

So why are these so variable? And why is the 2-8% statistic so misleading?

The problem is that what is being described as a “false” report of rape varies immensely from study to study. In some studies, it is defined as cases where the police categorized the report as being maliciously false. In others, it is defined as cases where the police had reason to believe no crime had occurred. In still other studies, it is defined as cases where the victim later recanted and admitted their accusation of rape had been false. Obviously, conflating all of these things isn’t going to lead to the same number.

The Making a Difference study was interesting because it broke down rape reports by how the cases were closed by police – it looked at the end result of a police investigation which resulted from a victim reporting to police that they had been raped.

The categories were:

Unfounded/false reports (i.e. the police know that the person was lying): 7.1%

Unfounded/baseless (i.e. "those that do not meet the elements of the offense and those that were improperly coded as a sexual assault in the first place." including cases in which a "follow-up investigation reveals either that no crime occurred or that some other type of crime was actually committed (or attempted)."): 8.5%

"Closed as an informational report" (when someone reports something which did happen, but which doesn't fit the definition of a sexual assault - i.e. someone reporting something that wasn't actually a crime): 17.9%

So at this point, we've got 33.5% of reported rapes in the study. All three of these categories are, fundamentally, the categories where the reported rapes were likely untrue, though it is likely that at least some of the claims in these categories WERE true and the police simply misclassified them. However, as you can see, they’re actually split up across three different categorizations, and in one categorization – the closed as an information report category – the crime “victim” wasn’t lying at all, they were simply confused about what “rape” is.

So, if you are looking for "reported rapes which weren't true", you’re already looking at a baseline of roughly 33.5% - or a third of rapes which were reported which were untrue. Not all of those were necessarily "false" in the sense of being malicious lies, but they were most likely false in the sense of the accused being innocent of having committed rape or sexual assault (though, as noted, some of them probably were actually true and the police miscategorized them).

Moving on are a few major ambiguous categories:

Suspended/inactivated (I.e. when there isn't enough evidence to say if a rape occurred and the investigation stalls out as a result without charges being filed): 28.6%

Exceptionally cleared (i.e. when the police are unable to proceed in arresting someone either due to the death of the perpetrator or because the person who claimed to have been raped becomes uncooperative when the police proceed in their investigation): 17.9%

These two categories constitute nearly half of all rape reports, but as you can see, the guilt or innocence of the perpetrator is hard to determine. Rape is a notoriously difficult to prove crime, and frequently leaves little meaningful evidence behind – sex, after all, is not illegal, only non-consensual sex, and many rapes don’t use force.

Consequently, many of them don’t really leave much evidence.

However, not seeing any real evidence of rape is also evidence that no rape actually happened at all – surely, many of the cases where there is not even enough evidence to lead to an arrest are cases where the person was wrongfully accused, or where the victim accused the wrong person of having raped them (which in and of itself is a problem – this happens at times, and it can simultaneously result in someone being accused of a rape which actually happened, but which THEY were not guilty of, which is difficult to classify as being true or untrue).

Likewise, exceptionally cleared cases – where the investigation is dropped either because it is moot or because the victim refuses to cooperate further – are ambiguous. Did the victim stop helping because they realized that their story was coming apart? Were they intimidated into dropping the case by the person they accused? Were they simply upset by the whole thing and just wanted it to be over? It is hard to really know. Likewise, if someone is dead, there is little point in further investigation, as no prosecution can be brought.

Thus, at the end, we’re left with this:

Arrested: 20%

Note that already, we’re down to only 1 in 5 rape reports actually resulting in probable cause for an arrest. This does not mean that 20% are true or that 80% are untrue, though, as noted above. Indeed, as we’ll see, things get cut down considerably further.

Of people who are arrested:

Case rejected by the prosecution (i.e. the state feels that they don’t think they have enough of a case to warrant trying to bring them to trial): 33.2%.

Case dismissed with all charges dropped (i.e. the prosecution charges the defendant, but the charges are dropped before trial, either rejected by the judge or otherwise failing to meet the legal standards necessary to bring it to trial, or the prosecution abandoning the case because they feel that the evidence they are going to present is insufficient to result in a conviction): 20.9%

Case dismissed but the charges aren’t dropped (i.e. the state stops with the case, but thinks that the person still might have done it, so keeps the charges up even while they stop with prosecuting it): 2.3%

So in over 50% of cases where people actually get arrested, the government doesn’t end up prosecuting the person due to lack of evidence or failure to build an adequate case for conviction.

Defendant pleads guilty: 33.2%

Here is our first real category where a significant fraction of the people are almost certainly guilty. Here, people are pleading guilty to a very serious criminal offense. While people do occasionally plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit, the overwhelming majority of these folks probably did commit the crime.

Case brought to trial, defendant found not guilty: 2%

Case brought to trial, defendant found guilty: 5.9%

(The rest are categorized, totally helpfully, as “other”)

So when we finally get to the trial, only 8% of people who were actually arrested on suspicion of rape actually end up facing a judge and jury. And of those people, 1 in 4 of them are found not guilty!

If you do the math (20% * 5.9%), this works out to less than 2% of rapes reported to police result in someone being found guilty of rape in a court of law. Combined with those who plead guilty, we’re left with about 7.8% of rape reports which result in someone being found guilty of rape or pleading guilty to rape. These people are almost all guilty of rape, but as the Innocence Project and similar things have taught us, some of these people, too, aren’t guilty.

Thus, this study leaves us with:

It is unlikely anyone was raped: 33.5%

We have no idea if anyone was raped: 58.7%

Someone was almost certainly raped: 7.8%

As you can see, there is a massive amount of uncertainty in rape reports. You could – quite accurately – claim that this study found only 7% of rapes reported to police were “false”. But the problem is that implies that the other 93% of rapes reported to police were true, which is just not the case at all – false reports of rape, in this study, meant a specific thing, and that thing was not the same as “untrue reports of rape”. While almost all of the claims which were classified as false were likely to be untrue, as you can see from the many categories of police clearance of these cases, the likelihood of someone actually being guilty of rape if they are accused of rape varies wildly by the way in which it was dismissed. It is very unlikely that everyone whose rape case was dismissed due to lack of evidence was guilty, for instance, and likewise it is unlikely that everyone whose accuser withdrew their accusations was guilty.

But it is equally correct to note that many of these folks probably really did commit rapes, but got off because rape is a hard to prove crime, or their accuser got scared or upset or was intimidated into recanting.

Suggesting that only 7.1% of rapes are false would be like claiming that only 7.8% of people accused of rape are guilty. This is, of course, absolutely true according to this study as well, but it is also deeply misleading, as it implies that the other 92.2% of people were not guilty of rape – when in reality, it is almost certainly true that many of them in fact committed the crime, but there was simply not the evidence to convict (or, in some cases, that the victim accused the wrong person).

Complicated by all of this is the fact that studies indicate that a large percentage of people will report in crime victimization surveys that they were sexually assaulted or raped, but never reported it to the police – meaning that any conclusion we draw from reported rapes has to be taken with a heaping pile of salt, as these surveys often indicate that the majority of people who say that they were sexually assaulted did not report it to police. How would their cases be handled by the system? That’s simply something we don’t (and can’t) know.

A lot of people both misuse and misrepresent these statistics. As you can see from this study, in reality, we have absolutely no idea whatsoever what percentage of rapists are going free, and we have absolutely no idea how many people are accused of rapes that they did not commit. We have no realistic way of knowing, either, because of the massive uncertainty in all the cases which are dismissed for various entirely reasonable reasons which leave the question of what exactly happened open.

Anyone who claims with conviction that only 2% or 8% or whatever of rape claims are false is, at best, misleading people. We simply don’t know how many rape claims are false, though as you can see from the Making a Difference study, those numbers are likely about an order of magnitude on the low side.

However, on the other hand, it is also obvious from this study that in reality, we have little idea of how many rapes are actually happening in the first place – the fact that a third of rapes that end up being reported to the police are very unlikely to have happened draws the reliability of surveys into question, and the fact that a lot of the other cases which were dismissed for other reasons were probably equally untrue suggests that the “untrue” rate of rape reports could be very high indeed, and that the surveys may be wildly unreliable.

But we also can see from these numbers that it is very likely there are a lot of rapists who are walking free due to lack of evidence or failure of the victim to cooperate with law enforcement after making their initial report. And the fact of the matter is that many women with solid cases are likely intimidated into not reporting rapes at all.

The reality is that rape statistics are extremely unclear and uncertain, and making firm claims about them is very hard to do. The best we can do is say that it is hard to say whether or not most claims are true or false without investigating them, and that it is likely that there are many untrue claims of rape, and many claims of rape which are true and yet which cannot be proven in a court of law. There are many people who are wrongfully accused of rape, and there are many rapists who are walking free as a result of lack of evidence against them or intimidating their victims into not pursuing their cases.

The reality is that we don’t really know. And we should not pretend to do so in the face of so much uncertainty. We should always keep an open mind, and allow the evidence of a particular case to take us to the proper destination – statistics, in this case, are of little assistance.

One final note: almost all rape studies are done on the general population. Rape in prison is prevalent, but the degree of its prevalence is unknown; some have claimed that as many rapes happen every year in America’s prisons as happen in the rest of the country combined. Unfortunately, it is hard to know the truth of this, and very few studies have been done on it – most studies like the Making a Difference study are concerned with people in the general population, not prisoners. But given the general low rate of prison prosecutions, it is very likely that there are many serial rapists in prison who continue to victimize other inmates without receiving further punishment.