This is in response to u/fledglingpiller's post on false rape accusations and I think it deserves its own post. FledglingPiller brought up some points about how studies show that false rape accusations are only 2-10% of all accusations, and how doesn't this mean that TRP is wrong on focusing on these false accusations when most accusations are true?

Ok, so let's remove some ambiguity by defining terms here:

A false rape accusation, in the context of this (and every) study is actually: a provably false rape accusation. This means that in 2-10% of cases, the accused can prove they were nowhere near the scene of the supposed rape, or the accused can produce communication with the accuser showing that the rape never occurred and that any sex had was consensual.

An true rape accusation is when: the girl says she was raped, and the man cannot produce evidence to contradict this. Depending on how good your lawyer and character witnesses are, rape accusations like this will count as true rape accusations in the court of law. But no matter what, these will not count as false rape accusations, because you cannot prove the woman was lying.

Let's make an analogy to another crime: theft. If you were sitting at home alone on Tuesday, May 26th at 11:00 PM, and a shopkeeper in your city randomly accuses you of stealing something from his store, and standards of rape applied, your only defense would be if you could somehow prove you weren't at the store, or you could produce communication that shows the shopkeeper gave you the item.

In summary, the fact that 2-10% of rape accusations are PROVABLY false is HUGE. Most women who falsely accuse a man of rape, accuse a man who they have had sex with. And most women don't text after sex, "OMG thank you so much for the consensual sex last night." Meaning that most women could accuse any man they had sex with of raping them, without the fear of this accusation being proven false.

So what this statistic is saying is that of all the women who claim they are raped, 2-10% are dumb enough to accuse a man who 1) was nowhere near the scene of the supposed rape and has an alibi, or 2) she texted afterwards about the sex and affirmed that she enjoyed it.

What do you think this reasonably means about the TRUE rate of false rape accusations? I can assure you it is much, much higher.

This is the context in which false rape accusation statistics ought to be viewed.